Feature Faraway, So Close Natalie Fobes will do anything for a photo— so long as it tells a story that needs to be told. By Maria Dolan Photographs by Natalie Fobes Photojournalist Natalie Fobes has worked on a fishing trawler in the Bering Sea, in a reindeer camp in Siberia, and out of a tent in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. She’s just never worked in her own studio. Until now. With two daughters—ages four and six, both adopted from China—and a burgeoning side career as a portrait and wedding photographer, the 52-year-old is sticking close to home at the moment, and her studio is the first she’s had in 20-odd years of freelancing. “I don’t usually have expensive rugs lying around,” she half-apologizes, slipping off her shoes to enter the luminous, wood-and-windows space off of the Seattle house she shares with her daughters and husband, Scott Sunde, an editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Two sumptuous Persian rugs take up the wood floors. A wedding client has offered her one of them in trade for photographs, and she’s still choosing which she prefers. As she kneels to fold back the corner of a red and blue rug to show me its fine weave, the indirect light of a Seattle September trickles down from the big windows and burnishes her auburn hair. She’d make a great subject for one of her photographs. Except for one problem. She seems far too warm and comfortable. A classic Fobes picture—at least until recently—never captured someone looking warm and comfortable. This photographer’s most memorable shots were taken under strenuous conditions, and they’re lit with an urgent sense of purpose: endangered salmon swimming upstream, Siberian Yup’ik Eskimos hunting a whale. So reset this scene: Exchange her lightweight Patagonia fleece for a down parka the thickness of a Swedish duvet, its hood trimmed with wolf ruff to shield her face from bitter winds. Replace this beautiful room and its cathedral ceiling with a tent stitched of reindeer skins. Instead of oak file cabinets, surround our subject with people speaking a foreign language or perhaps too worn out and busy to communicate at all. And, of course, include a lean woman with a couple of cameras strapped over her broad shoulders, surveying the scene with sharp eyes. There. Now we’re in a Natalie Fobes story. As photographer Adam Weintraub, who has worked with her, puts it, “There’s a chortle that kind of grabs you and makes you turn your head. She’s an outsized personality.” Nanook Natalie is not just a carefree adventure seeker, however. Her photojournalistic stories have nearly always been led by a social conscience, “stories that need to be told,” she says. The photographer and Pulitzer Prize finalist spent much of the late 1980s and 1990s on the road for such magazines as National Geographic, Geo, Smithsonian, and Audubon. Though her breakout work documented the salmon cultures of the Pacific Rim, this and other projects were for a while eclipsed by the images in her saddest, biggest story: a 40-page spread (with writer Bryan Hodgson) in National Geographic on the Exxon Valdez oil spill—the largest oil tanker spill in U.S. history. “It absolutely changed me,” she says. “You can’t not be changed by witnessing horrific events. I knew the pain these birds and animals had gone through.” The stress of documenting the story caused her to start smoking again (temporarily), years after quitting, which led to one of the moving opening shots, a close-up of Alaskan Sonya Knight crying, grief-stricken over the catastrophe. “She bummed a cigarette off me, and we started talking,” says Natalie. As they spoke of the destruction, tears ran down Sonya’s face, and Natalie asked gently if she could photograph her to show others how horrible the disaster had been. Natalie’s freelance career as a photojournalist was just a few years old at the time—she’d struck out at age 32, after a decade of working for newspapers. Aiming as high as she could go, she made her first freelance pitch on the Pacific salmon story to National Geographic while wrapping up a more local story on the topic for her employer, the Seattle Times. “I was so naive,” she says. “I believed that when I went freelance I had such great ideas that the world would come knockin’ on my door.” Not quite. The Washington, D.C., editor she pitched told her, in essence, that Pacific salmon were not an important enough story for the magazine. Undeterred, Natalie applied for an Alicia Patterson fellowship, given to full-time photographers and print journalists to pursue projects like Natalie’s. This time she was accepted and granted $25,000 to spend a year traveling and photographing salmon cultures of the Pacific Rim—from Japan to Alaska to Washington State. It launched her freelance photojournalism career. “I was ecstatic,” she recalls of hearing the news. “I remember I was just aglow with my own secret.” She crosses her arms over her chest like she’s holding something very tightly. “I knew immediately it was going to change my life from there on out.” But even with the award, National Geographic turned down a second salmon proposal she sent them, advising that she should change the subject. At this point most journalists would probably have conceded, but as prominent photographer and former National Geographic cohort Roger Ressmeyer explains of Natalie, “She grabs onto something and she won’t let go. She throws herself into her stories about as deeply as is humanly possible.” After revising and pitching the story a third time, it turned into Long Journey of the Pacific Salmon, a 36-page National Geographic article in July 1990, photographed by Natalie and written by Jere Van Dyk. The story highlighted environmental threats to the seven species of wild Pacific salmon as well as the Pacific Coast people sustained by the fish. The story came out about three years after Natalie gave up a full-time job. “Not taking no for an answer is probably the best business advice I can give to someone,” she says now of her determination. Of course, she isn’t immune to doubt. “When I got the Alicia Patterson and also when I heard I’d gotten the National Geographic job, I was panic-stricken. I realized I didn’t know the first thing about doing a long-term project.” The Iowa-raised photographer had also never traveled overseas. She quickly learned. Her first task was to pace herself. “What you have to do is start taking small steps,” she explains. She wrote topics on 3-by-5 cards and spread them on the floor of her apartment, where she had taken a roommate to save money. She looked for patterns and stories, grouped them together, and came up with several major topics. For the next year (plus a few weeks—“I’m known as a stretcher,” she says, alluding to her tendency to get extra time for her projects), she pursued them, finding a guide to take her to Ainu salmon ceremonies in Japan and documenting workers in a Russian fish cannery. She worked so hard that she hardly saw her friends, recalling that once, back home in Seattle, she went to the grocery store after being holed up with her work just so she could talk to someone face to face. “I hadn’t seen anyone for five or six days. It was kind of a lonely endeavor,” she says. “I spent more time underwater with salmon than I did on dates for about six years.” Natalie attributes her intense drive in part to fear—what she calls the “F-word.” “It’s the fear factor—fear of failure.” Despite having lived most of her adult life out West, she ascribes this tendency to the Scandinavian-American culture she grew up with in Iowa, where people worried about crops failing from a change in the weather. The lesson is, she says, “You can never count on anything, no matter how good it looks. This has always been a part of me too.” Tunneling into her work may have isolated her at times, but Natalie’s drive also led her out into the world. For more than a decade she traveled on assignment to Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, and other far-flung places, gathering enough stories to collect into a thick memoir. (She’s not writing one, though she is at work on a series of murder mysteries in which the main character, named after her grandmother, is a National Geographic photographer.) Her tales are hilarious, harrowing, or both. Once, when she was on a small walrus-skin boat with several Yup’ik Eskimo men, she had to pee “long and loud” in a 5-gallon bucket in their midst, covered only by a tarp, because the only nearby “land” was an unstable iceberg. Another time she was briefly knocked out while traveling across the Siberian tundra at night in temperatures of 30 below zero after the vehicle she was riding in upended into a hole, the driver tipsy on home brew. Fortunately, she got to see the starriest sky of her lifetime, “not a single bit of black in the sky, it seemed,” before she herself blacked out. On a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, she shot photographs of fishermen in 80-mile-per-hour winds, waves spraying over her in such volume that she had to take her pictures blindly, one arm wrapped around a vertical support to keep her from being wrenched into the turbulent seas, the other hand busy cranking her Nikon. After that episode she retreated to the boat’s wheelhouse, “tears flying from my eyes,” unsettled that she’d risked her life. Though she acknowledges the physical challenges of her job, Natalie doesn’t feel she faced extra danger traveling as often the only woman on shoots in remote places, sometimes for weeks at a time. “I try to be smart,” she says, adding that in her career she’s faced only one real threatening situation with a man, which she defused with sharp words. Did she mind the lack of privacy involved in some of these trips? “I kind of lost my modesty about body stuff,” she explains, adding that she bought what she calls an “equalizer” for peeing standing up, which she rarely used but brought out as a conversation piece on fishing boats, teasing the men that they were envious of it. Though she doesn’t think her gender affected her safety, she does question whether it’s an issue for women in the photography field more generally. There are far more women photographers now than when she started, she says, but there are still far fewer high-profile women than men. “I suspect there’s a difference in paychecks too,” says Natalie. “We’re making the incredible photographs. So why aren’t more women making the incredible bucks?” She doesn’t point to her own career as an example, but Jane Perovich, senior editor at the stock photography agency Getty Images and Natalie’s editor there for the past decade, says that Natalie has probably worked harder because of her gender. “I’m sure Natalie’s faced a lot of challenges as a woman in this industry,” she says, “especially as her career was largely built around topics (and locations) traditionally perceived as pretty much the domain of men.” Fellow photographer Weintraub seconds her: “Phenomenal work done by women in our industry is often underrecognized.” Natalie prefers not to dwell on this issue, however. More important to her is the impact that photography by either gender can have on environmental and social issues like those documented in her work. In an effort to assist other photographers working to get projects off the ground, Natalie co-founded the nonprofit Blue Earth Alliance with photographers Malcolm Edwards and Phil Borges to offer support for the marketing, grant writing, and public relations needed for such work. “There are a number of very important documentary projects that never would have seen the light of day without the Blue Earth Alliance,” says Malcolm. “Natalie helped immeasurably.” The lengthy list of new and emerging documentary photographers supported by the organization includes Subhankar Banerjee, whose stunning Arctic National Wildlife Refuge pictures were displayed in Congress to bolster arguments against proposed oil drilling in the refuge. “She has always been there when I had a question or needed help,” Subhankar says of Natalie, who, he adds, has advised him on everything from negotiating a magazine assignment to outfitting himself for winter in the Arctic. “She’s a mentor and a dear friend.” Natalie’s recently developed career in wedding photography seems like a potentially painful shift away from such serious documentary work, but she says she also welcomes documenting these “joyful times.” “I call these my mini-stories,” she says. “My photojournalism career is on a simmer, not boiling, because it has to be. It’s just where I am right now.” She still keeps documentary projects on the back burner and is particularly engaged in a story on the one-child policy of China and how it affects people in the United States and China—a personal issue for her since she has adopted Chinese daughters. She’s laying the groundwork for it by researching, shooting pictures of American families with adopted children, and applying for funding for a trip to China. She also talks about one day getting to Antarctica with her cameras and possibly returning to Russia. “I like getting out of my comfort zone,” she says. And the world of photojournalism is a better place because of it. Natalie’s Work Natalie’s photographs have appeared in more than 50 books, including the following: I Dream Alaska by Natalie Fobes (Alaska Northwest Books; $7) Reaching Home: Pacific Salmon, Pacific People by Natalie Fobes, Tom Jay, and Bradford Matsen (Graphic Arts Center; $27) Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound by John Keeble and Natalie Fobes (Eastern Washington University Press; $87)
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