Rangefinder Magazine
February 2006

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Tom Mangelsen Lou Jacobs Jr.
Artist and Naturalist

Tom Mangelsen’s is a remarkable history of a man who grew into his profession through love of nature and wildlife, which he learned to photograph with abiding skill. His father used to take his sons hunting along the Platte River in Nebraska; as they waited patiently in blinds, Tom observed huge flocks of ducks, geese and cranes, and trained his instincts to stay on edge for hunting opportunities. This preparation underlies Tom’s ability to capture fine photographs of polar bears, shore birds, moose, tigers, waterfowl and more at decisive moments on film, and Tom now points his cameras instead of a gun.

Many photographers develop patience waiting for the right landscape lighting; Tom’s patience has certainly paid off . He now owns 17 successful galleries selling his work in popular tourist destinations such as Las Vegas, NV; Park City, UT; and Jackson Hole, WY, where Tom lives. As an adjunct to his photography, he is the CEO of a large, successful photography business with 110 employees, and he does it all with pride in photographic and aesthetic quality.

“I will never run out of new places to shoot, but I’ll always have my favorites.”

Tom Mangelsen’s father owned a five-and-dime store in Omaha and expected his four sons to join him. Three of them did. Tom worked in the store from grade school through summers in college. In 1965 he began studying business administration at the University of Nebraska, and two years later transferred to Doane College in Crete, NE, where he graduated with a BS in biology, his first love. As a post-grad he studied zoology at the University of Nebraska, and wildlife biology at Colorado State University, where he started taking pictures at 21. “Thinking about a career in wildlife,” he says, “I realized that photography would keep me outdoors and be useful in understanding animal behavior. Long before taking a single shot I’d been composing pictures in my head, isolating scenes. One can be taught techniques, but part of seeing well is probably innate.”

By 1974 he was working as a cinematographer, and he had an opportunity to film whooping cranes for National Geographic. The result was an Emmy-nominated television special, “Flight of the Whooping Crane,” which chronicled the plight of these endangered birds, and efforts to save them from extinction.

Tom recalls, “I was hired and trained by Bert Kempers to do cinematography for educational films for the University of Colorado. In 1990 I photographed and produced “Cranes of the Grey Wind,” a PBS Nature and BBC Natural World film. It was a documentary on the life cycle of the sandhill crane, and it’s available on video. Currently I only do cinema occasionally.”

Tom’s expertise in still photography evolved through trial and error, not formal studies. “When you make mistakes you learn,” he says. “I did have a mentor in grad school at Nebraska, Paul Johnsgard, a world authority on waterfowl. I was his assistant for a few months, and it was then that I started taking pictures while helping Paul with a book he was doing on waterfowl and other wildlife of North America.”

That experience launched Tom into photographing birds in flight. “I sat in a duck blind for four months during spring migration, and Paul and his colleagues encouraged me to continue my photography. I was later hired as a cinematographer, but I always went back to stills. I wanted to make prints, not for stock or magazines, but as pieces of art, although wildlife at that time was not considered fine art. Waiting in blinds as a kid had accustomed me to be a keen observer. You have to almost hypnotize yourself to be ready.”

Tom decided that stock photography was a fairly limited market, and when he met Owen Gromme, a famous painter of wildlife who sold fine art limited editions of his paintings, he was intrigued. “I decided to make my own limited edition photographic prints. However, after trying to sell them to galleries in several northeastern states, and at art fairs in Park City, Jackson Hole and Boulder, I knew how difficult it was. My brother David suggested putting up a freestanding display at the Denver airport, and created a black-andwhite brochure with a toll-free number. All photographs were framed in the family garage in Omaha—a tedious business, but we were happy to see some success. We made type-C prints from internegs, then Cibachromes or Ilfochromes, and now digital prints from my color transparencies and a few from digital captures.”

Tom Mangelsen uses a variety of cameras to make his striking images. He works with Nikon film cameras, and is experimenting with a Nikon D2X digital SLR. At times he uses a Pentax 6x7 and 645, and fairly often, the panoramic Fujifilm 617. “I am finding a niche for the D2X in my work, especially in low light. At the few workshops I teach, I see many people get overly consumed with technicalities and the latest gadgets. They are spending more time at their computers trying to fix less stellar images in Photoshop rather than making a great picture initially. It’s more important to have strong composition, subject, light and texture than whether one captures the image on film or digitally.”

Following the successful Denver airport display, Tom’s business expanded to airports in St. Louis and Chicago. But he disliked working with airport bureaucracy and says, “People often came to my office in Jackson Hole, looking for prints to buy, so I rented an empty room across the hall and hung 60 to 80 photographs. That worked well, and the $10,000 we invested paid off. So we opened a gallery on the main street of Park City, UT. Then we expanded to La Jolla, CA. After several years of trying to figure it all out, I hired a framer, rented more space, and did everything in house. Running one’s own business requires a lot of energy, patience and business sense. You can’t take shortcuts. It took almost 10 years to break even, and I worked all the while doing cinematography and some stock sales.”

As his business grew, Tom relied on knowing where and how to make the beautiful images he sells. He explains, “Faith and passion drove me to take off on expeditions to Africa and Alaska. After visiting the Arctic and Denali National Park, I began concentrating my photography in the Far North which led me to photographing and filming polar bears. Eventually Hugh Levin at McMillan asked me to do my first book of photographs in 1989, which became Images of Nature: The Photographs of Thomas D. Mangelsen.” The book contains more than 200 photographs of the earth’s most elusive animals in their private habitats and was acclaimed for its vision and sensitivity. It has sold more than 150,000 copies.

Tom’s love of polar bears was celebrated in a 1997 book, Polar Dance: Born of the North Wind, which culminated 10 years of following and photographing bears and their offspring. He self-published it because, he says, “I wanted to do a special book without the restraints of a publisher who probably wouldn’t have spent as much as I did on paper, design and printing. I could accept a smaller profit to achieve this goal. Now a distributor supplies bookstores and we sell books in all our galleries and by mail online at www.man gelsen.com.”

Other Mangelsen books include Winter Wings: Birds of the Northern Rockies (2003), with 120 different bird species, and Spirit of the Rockies: The Mountain Lions of Jackson Hole (1999), a documentary of wild and free mountain lions, plus numerous books for children.

Tom has a small staff in Jackson Hole to manage the office. They handle editing and scanning, printing, and stock sales. His brother David is still in the business as an advisor. A custom printer manages all the images, working closely with Tom to create master prints. Framing and shipping are done in the Omaha office. In addition to limited edition prints, the company sells calendars, fine art posters and greeting cards. Tom spends six to nine months shooting, traveling to galleries for receptions, and managing the business. In 2005 he traveled to Antarctica, Iceland and Alaska, plus northern Minnesota for the great gray owl migration, and to the Southwest desert for the flower bloom. In 2006 he will return to Africa. He says, “I will never run out of new places to shoot, but I’ll always have my favorites.” He usually travels with an assistant because of his amount of gear and complications of travel, especially overseas.

For 42 days in the winter of 1999 Tom observed and photographed a mother cougar and her kittens in a den on the National Elk Refuge near Jackson Hole.

He was so compelled with the plight of the cougar that he co-founded a nonprofit, The Cougar Fund, with Cara Blessley Lowe. In early 2005 American Photo magazine named Tom Mangelsen one of the 100 most important people in photography. Looking at the beauty and variety of his images, it’s easy to understand why his work is both honored and admired.