Rangefinder Magazine
March 2006

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Natalie Fobes Gene Martin
Audacious Versatility

Pete Blackwell kisses the first salmon brought on board before releasing it. The tradition is to ensure good luck. Taken on Natalie’s first Alaska trip as part of her salmon project, she could only shoot one frame before he threw the fish overboard. This ran in National Geographic and has been published in many magazines and in an ad.

When I first met Natalie Fobes in Seattle, she held our small luncheon group spellbound describing her adventures aboard a fishing vessel on the Bering Sea, where cameras can freeze, as she worked against wind and weather. Despite the conditions, she forged ahead on her National Geographic assignment (for the October, 1992 issue). I admired her story, but lost track of Natalie until I later saw a lovely picture of a walrus in a magazine from one of Natalie’s books. I contacted her and she referred me to her website, where I found this:

“Natalie specializes in people, places and wildlife. In the past few years she has photographed the construction of the Seattle Mariners’ new stadium, komodo dragons in Indonesia, Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, salmon underwater, Microsoft execs, humpback whales and the people who live on ‘the loneliest road in America’—Route 50 in Nevada.”

Intrigued, I asked Natalie for a copy of I Dream Alaska, a charming small book of painterly photographs (which I’ll get back to), and I arranged to do this profile about the evolution of an adventurous, driven, sensible photographer.

Natalie Fobes grew up in Iowa and studied architecture at Iowa State University for three years before taking a photography course. “I fell in love with photography,” she says, “and soon after, I quit college and worked two jobs to earn money for cameras, future tuition and film. I always did well in creative writing classes, but I was visually oriented. Iowa State Professor Bill Gillette encouraged me to study photography at Ohio University, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism with an emphasis in photojournalism. My first photo story was published in the Ames Tribune when I was a college junior.”

Vietnam, Mui Ne Bay: Colorful fishing boats anchored in the bay, taken for Passage to Vietnam, a book by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt in 1994; shot with a 300mm lens and a 2X converter on a tripod.

When the leaves turn autumn gold in September at this Yukon River fish camp, people know that winter is not far behind. Originally part of Natalie’s National Geographic story on salmon, the image was shot on Kodachrome 64 with a Nikon and converted to a Polaroid transfer for I Dream Alaska.

Over 100 workers using high-pressure hoses attempted to clean the beach at Green Island, AK, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Natalie spent three months covering all aspects of the story for the National Geographic. That was 1989, and she has returned twice since to document the Sound’s process of recovery.

From 1977 to 1988 Natalie worked first at the Cincinnati Enquirer and then the Seattle Times, where she honed her instincts to capture decisive moments. “I felt the most important job in photography was telling stories about real people living real lives,” she explains. “My goal is to be as inconspicuous as possible. I try not to influence the events I’m photographing. People continually surprise and delight me with their actions. If I were directing their scenes, the spontaneity would be lost.”

Natalie continues, “Newspapers are a great training ground, and they remain one of the best venues for storytelling photography, but it was natural for me to move on to magazines. My first goal as a freelancer was National Geographic. I proposed a story on the life cycle of salmon and its importance to the cultures around the Pacific Rim, but three top editors rejected the idea. So I started the salmon project with my own savings. Later I applied for and received the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, which is given to writers and photographers. The $25,000 grant allowed me to travel around the Pacific Rim for a year to photograph salmon and the cultures the fish helped support. My pictures were first published by the Seattle Times in 1987 in a special section I also wrote. It resulted in my being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Specialized Reporting, a writing category.

“After the section was published, Tom Kennedy at National Geographic gave me eight weeks to prove I could shoot more high-quality photographs for their story. I did, and he extended my contract to finish the story. I worked another 10 weeks over two years. It appeared in National Geographic in July 1990. My coverage resulted in a number of other magazine articles plus a book, Reaching Home: Pacific Salmon, Pacific People (1994). I later shot two more stories for National Geographic: ‘Can the Wilderness Heal,’ about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and ‘Hard Harvest on the Bering Sea’, about the cultures, wildlife and land in Russia and Alaska. In 2000 I shot a story on Seattle for National Geographic Traveler magazine.”

Not surprisingly Natalie says, “I love photographing projects, and always have one in progress. I’m currently working on stories that document ordinary people and their extraordinary lives. But I’m also a realist in that I like to eat and pay the mortgage. Before I begin my projects, first I research the idea. Then I decide if it is marketable. Sometimes I write a proposal or talk to an editor, but most of the time my decision to shoot the story is more intuitive than that. Is the story in the news or will it be? Is anyone else doing it? The biggest problem facing people like me is that there are very few magazines willing to spend the bucks on a long-term story. The trend now is to let the photographer carry the costs, and then license the rights to publish the story after it is completed.

“On that basis, if I can’t find a magazine to hire me to shoot my idea, I decide whether I can afford to carry the costs myself. I consider whether I will be able to license the images for stock after the story is finished. For example, my project on old-growth cedar and the traditions of loggers and Native Americans has never been published in its entirety. But some of those photographs have appeared in my books, magazine articles and exhibits. Often individual stock photographs from a story help support the cost of the overall project. I have images at two large stock agencies and three smaller ones, and my office manager handles stock requests that come to us. She also does the negotiations so the creative path between photo editors and me remains clear.”

Intermingled in Natalie’s career have been assignments for most major magazines in the U.S. including Audubon, Smithsonian, Travel Holiday, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Newsweek and Orion. She’s also shot for Geo Germany, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, and does some corporate work as well. As other components of her versatility, Natalie teaches photography workshops and has had four books of her work published. Reaching Home: Pacific Salmon, Pacific People (Alaska Northwest Books, 1994) featured Natalie’s photographs and essays with additional text by Tom Jay and Brad Matsen. I Dream Alaska, with photographs and essays by Natalie, was printed in 1998. Diamond in the Emerald City: The Making of Safeco Field (1999) documents the construction of the Seattle Mariners’ new ballpark. Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound (1999) features Natalaie’s photographs and chronicles the 1989 disaster. Natalie was also one of the main photographers for Inside Out: Microsoft—In Our Own Words (2000).

In a further activity close to her heart, Natalie and her friend Phil Borges founded the Blue Earth Alliance in 1996. Blue Earth (www. blueearth.org) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to helping photographers pursue stories about endangered environments, animals and threatened cultures. Twice a year Blue Earth accepts documentary propos-als for consideration. When one is accepted their non-profit corporation extends its 501(c)(3) umbrella to the photographer. The photographer is then able to accept tax-deductible donations from foundations, companies and individuals. Natalie observes, “Many of the projects we helped fund have been published, such as a Gary Braasch story on global warming in Discover magazine, and Art Wolfe’s book project about endangered animals around the world,” (The Living Wild, Wildlands Press). There’s more about the Alliance and Natalie’s activities on her website: www.fobes photo.com.

Top left: A Chukchi reindeer herder dressed in skins near his herd on the Chukotka peninsula off eastern Siberia. Natalie spent a week with the Chukchi herders in freezing weather, with the wind at a steady 30 knots and occasional 60-knot gusts. “I ate a lot of snow when I was knocked over,” she says.Top right: A woman laughs while holding lilies and other flowers, which can be used as “living fences” to anchor the soil. Taken in Guatemala on an assignment for Geo Magazine, it was part of a story about the quetzal bird and indigenous cultures. Bottom: Sockeye develop hooked jaws and humped backs when they are close to spawning. Taken in Alaska for a National Geographic story, Natalie’s camera was in an Aquatica housing with a Sub Sea strobe to augment available light. Shot with a 15mm lens; the fish was about two inches away from the housing and about 2.5 feet long.

A traveling exhibit of photographs from Reaching Home has been shown at 24 venues to date. “Exhibits reach people that books and magazine do not,” Natalie observes. “It’s satisfying to know that over three million people have attended the museums where my works was displayed, and if even a fraction of them take the time to get the message of conserving the land and its creatures, it will have been worth it.

Natalie adds, “Books don’t pay well, but I have received a number of assignments from them. They’re like catalogs because clients can order specific images from them. However, the satisfaction payback is very high. There’s nothing like seeing your work in your book.” Natalie’s agent shopped Reaching Home around for two years, but patience paid off because it earned its advance in three months, and she’s been receiving royalties for many years.

Referred to earlier, I Dream Alaska, is a small-format, 96-page delight composed of Polaroid-transfer prints of Natalie’s favorite photographs in 15 years of Alaskan adventures. The images cover land and mountains, seas and their creatures, animals and glimpses of native people’s lives. She created dreamy impressions from slides, and her informal writing is sometimes poetic. About the book’s soft and grainy pictures she says, “While I lose the sharp edges of a glossy print or slide, the transfer process gives the book a timeless quality, like a family album.” To achieve the pictures, Natalie copied slides with a Daylab or a Vivitar print maker, and before the Polaroid print had time to fully develop, the negative was pulled from the film pack and laid on a sheet of paper where the dyes transfer. The copy and transfer process can be repeated to achieve the desired tonality and color.

Natalie uses a Canon EOS system above water. Her lenses range from 20–300mm f/2.8. Her underwater system includes Aquatica housing, a Nikon camera, Nikkor lenses and a Sub Sea strobe. For slides she shoots Kodak Ektachrome 100SW and 100VS and Fujichrome Velvia. In low-light situations she turns to Fujicolor Press 800.

Natalie manages to undertake large projects, often without assignments to help pay expenses, first by having strong convictions about subjects that inspire her urge to shoot. She also realizes that the freedom to photograph self-assigned projects receives a strong boost from having money in the bank. “Too many people forget the basics of the photography business,” she says. When image sales are booming, Natalie saves as much as possible in order to finance her passion for photography and her business during lean times.

With so much of her time spent on or under the water, I asked Natalie if she has a boat. She laughs, “No, I like to let others bear the expenses of maintaining a boat. But I take every opportunity to go for a sail on the Zodiac, an old wooden schooner listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In fact my husband and I got married on the Zodiac in 1996. I set up a remote camera to record the event and triggered it during our vows. The photographs are with one of my agencies.”

Join Natalie Fobes for her Platform presentation at WPPI 2006 titled “Photojounalism and the Wedding Story” in BALLY’s Skyview 2, Tuesday, April 11, 8:30–10:30 a.m.