Enduring Voices – All Roads Photography

Conversations at the Herbst: Chris Rainier In Conversation With Mary Ellen Hannibal

As a National Geographic explorer and one of the leading documentary photographers working today, Rainier's mission is to record the remaining natural wilderness and the indigenous cultures around the globe by putting these wonders to film and using the visual stories to create social change. Rainier is the photographer for National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, a multi-year effort that strives to research and revitalize the world's most endangered languages. Every fourteen days... a language goes extinct on Earth and with it humanity loses all of the oral knowledge of the local people and their environmental history to include ethnobotany, biodiversity and their relationships to the land which sprang from centuries old indigenous traditions. Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems-many of which are still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts. Rainier has won many awards for his photography, including the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award given by the Explorers Club for adventure stories. His photography has been shown and collected by museums around the world, including the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, the George Eastman House International Museum in Rochester, New York, and the United Nations.

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