- That's how I actually get my work.
It's not because I know how to take pictures.
It's because I only wear gold shoes
when I come into the National Geographic offices.
(classical music)
My name's Aaron Huey.
I'm a National Geographic photographer.
A lot of what I came into the magazine with was
really deep dives into communities.
I think that kind of intimate imagery
was what I was known for.
Over the course of a National Geographic career
we end up with assignments that are kind of curveballs
where we also may end up in the Himalayas or tracking wolves
and so the style has had to adjust sometimes
based on assignment.
(classical music)
This was eight years of going and visiting people
and multiple families adopted me as a member
of their own families and I had a home with many people.
In stories about Pine Ridge or reservations
there's so much darkness,
but this is one of those images of the light.
You could throw a rock from this spot
and almost hit the mass grave where they buried
all of the bodies from the massacre of Wounded Knee
and there's still a community of people
growing up literally in the shadow of Wounded Knee
and everything that it stands for.
I saw the weather changing and I was 10, 15 miles away
and I was racing trying to get to the marker
to photograph that mass grave
in this moment of this huge storm kind of circling overhead.
As I was racing down the road to get to the massacre site,
I saw these young couples.
I had known them long enough
that I could just start photographing.
This image has the light and the dark all wrapped into one.
Something glows through.
There is life, there is love
in the shadow of a massacre site
and there's still a community of people
living and loving and fighting and surviving in that place.
I feel that I think when I look of this photo
of this storm of this kind of glow
that comes from this incredible force
and comes from these people
despite the darkness of that history.
(classical music)
(singing foreign language)
That's like a song about friends having your back,
like a good old fashioned friends country song.
This is Svanetia, this is a really isolated valley
on the border of the Georgian Republic
and the southern border of Russia.
This photograph takes me back
really to my own origin story as a photographer.
I was in Damascus as a backpacker
and a German linguist told me the story
about a place where people spoke a language
that had never been written
and they were surrounded by 18,000 foot peaks
that were gods turned to stone.
And there was no guidebook for this place
and he drew on the back of a napkin
just this simple little map of the Republic of Georgia
and he drew a little line of how to get
from Syria through Turkey and into the mountains of Georgia
and I left I think two days later.
When I finally arrived in the mountains,
someone turned around to me on the bus
and asked where are you going because there were no hotels.
There was no place to go
and I just said I'm gonna go camping
at the end of the bus route and they just shook their heads
and they said we're going to a wedding, come with us
and I ended up at the wedding of the eldest daughter
of a family and I drank and I danced
and I woke up in the morning part of a family.
And I went to visit that family
three years in a row after that.
I fell in love with that family,
I fell in love with the song and the dance
and the spirit of this place
and I returned year after year for three years in a row
and at the end of that I had made my first body of work
and it was all black and white.
It was some of my first rolls of film really
and 15 years later National Geographic sent me back
to revisit the same families.
In this image I returned to a place
that I had already photographed and nothing had changed.
It felt like it was the same kids on the same horses
in a time machine.
There is something still important.
I think about these timeless journeys into other worlds
to just illuminate part of the human spirit.
That's what this story was for me.
This is a story that's really, it's just poetry.
(classical music)
The Denali assignment was part of our national park series.
A lot of this assignment was about buffer areas
and about how humans and animals interact.
I spent a lot of time with a really infamous hunter
named Coke Wallace.
We had read stories that he had set traps
just outside of the boundaries of the national park
which is not unusual for a trapper,
but he had taken an old horse in
and shot it on the edge of the park
and surround it with traps and ended up killing I believe
one of the alpha females and several other wolves
and that's kind of the goal of a trapper
is to be clever enough to set traps
and get as many wolves as you can get.
This is a difficult part of the assignment.
Spending time with someone
with a really different set of beliefs.
It's a challenge that's I think important to keep taking on,
to go into the worlds of people
that believe something different
and try to understand where they're coming from.
I had to go into a part of myself
and transcend my own biases and see him as a person
because underneath all of that there were insights
to the national park and to ways of life
that I had not thought about.
I still don't like the idea of setting up traps
on the edge of the national park,
but I understand a little bit more
about some of these communities, about trappers.
At the end of a year and a half of work I was there
and had gained the trust of this man
who called me and said we got a wolf.
I'm gonna skin it if you wanna get down here.
I think pictures like these images of Coke with this wolf
are the result of National Geographic storytelling.
It's a year in the field getting to know a person
or a community and going deep enough
that you're the person they call.
That really is what's special about what we do here.
(classical music)
This was the quintessential National Geographic assignment.
I got a telephone call from my editor Sadie
that essentially said can you go to Everest base camp
and can you do it in the next couple days
and can you be gone for a month and a half.
I had to quickly look at my calendar and tell my wife
that I was going to the Himalayas
and then buy all the gear that I would need to do that
and then got on a plane four days later.
This story was really important because we so often
see the stories of the western heroes
on mountains like Everest or these other Himalayan peaks,
but behind them and behind kind of this churning machine
of tourists going up these mountains
are the real heroes, the unsung heroes of these mountains
and it's the Sherpa people who are carrying the loads.
Saving people's lives, setting up the rope lines
that make any of that climbing possible.
A Sherpa is an ethnic group.
It's not a job.
I think that was another really important part of this piece
was opening up the world of the Sherpa people
and going deep into that community.
This is a photograph I made
really pretty much on arrival at base camp.
It was the beginning of the assignment
and it really summarized
a lot of what we were there to look at.
This was a Sherpa carrying down loads from the summit,
loads from the camps of westerners.
Some of the Sherpa were carrying
almost their body weight in equipment.
This story really dug a lot into the compensation,
inequalities and the lack of insurance
and the kind of suffering that happens behind the scenes.
One of the whole points of being able to do work
that goes to hundreds of millions of people
is that we can change the rules with it.
We can change the laws.
This photograph is one of my close Sherpa friends
and we're at the camp one somewhere 19,000 to 20,000 feet.
He's surrounded by the ravens, the crows
that were circling around up at that camp.
Kind of one of those quiet moments before the next big push
up to camp two and then beyond to the summit.
This is a really special photograph for me
because I plan an entire trip hoping to get this photograph.
I didn't wanna climb Everest.
I didn't think it was worth risking my life,
but I thought I could probably get to this spot.
This is Ama Dablam, that's camp two.
The tents there, you can only fit I think four to six tents
and they're all tilted kinda sideways
and strapped into the rock into the snow there
and this is done Nuru Sherpa coiling ropes at camp two
as his brother and I are going up
towards the beginning of the summit climb.
A lot of my focus right now is trying to
understand new ways of storytelling.
20 years ago I was shooting on a Leica M6 with slide film
and now I'm doing AR and VR work that can be 3D printed
or may not have any print form ever.
There is no one way to make or share pictures.
It's infinitely flexible and it's going to change
beyond anything we can even imagine right now.
(classical music)
Oh no, I don't know.
I can't believe I did singing.
(laughing)