National Geographic photographer Keith Ladzinski on a green mission

To the uninitiated, the life of a National Geographic photographer sounds truly romantic: you might imagine an existence that revolves around travelling to exotic locations, tracking down cute animals, and revelling in the world’s most beautiful landscapes.

But as veteran Nat Geo snapper and filmmaker Keith Ladzinski can tell you, it’s not all glamour and gorgeous sunsets. He has worked on all seven continents, documenting the beauty, reality and fragility of the natural world – and not one of those shots was easy. In some cases, they can even be challenging for the audience.

“These photos are important to share but can also be quite hard to look at,” Ladzinski says. In March, Ladzinski curated an exhibition of his own works in Hong Kong. Titled “A Fragile Planet”, it was Ladzinski’s first exhibition in the city, and was aimed at raising awareness of environmental issues, and as a call to action for people to do more to help protect the oceans.

Ladzinski presented the exhibition in person, discussing the challenges of his work, the context of his pictures, and his stance on sustainability.

“Selecting the photos for this show was very difficult for me,” he says. “Finding the most meaningful photos is hard because for an exhibit: they also have to be easy to look at.” This, however, cannot be the case when you encounter the realities of nature. “Working in the world of conservation brings you face to face with some hard subjects,” Ladzinski says. Such subjects include dying animals and polluted environments, and Ladzinski says he often feels powerless to help. 

As campaigners in many humanitarian and environmental fields have long known, painful images can jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, but they also perform a literal, documentary function: it’s a way of recording what is happening to the world for posterity. “My hope is that this selection of images may serve as a time capsule of the way things currently are, in hopes of promoting the idea that we need to work collectively to keep our planet clean and protected,” he says. “It’s sincerely a group effort for us all globally to make a change.”