Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge
Over the last 30 years, I’ve done over 60 books, most with a strong environmental message. I realized that if this work translated in a compelling way to television, I could reach, in one episode, a hundred times the collective audience of all those well-intentioned books.
While Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge (now live on Getty Images) is first and foremost a show about photography, there is a strong environmental component to it as well, but we don’t beat people over the head with it. One week we might be photographing and endangered species:
IND0701300168: © Art Wolf/Edge of the Earth Productions
the next an extraordinary culture:
ETH0608300229: © Art Wolf/Edge of the Earth Productions
…and the week after that a threatened landscape.
ANTO611251055: © Art Wolf/Edge of the Earth Productions
We are a streamlined production by choice: with a low-impact four man crew (including me), we’re hopefully leaving nothing behind but shared good memories.
JLG0701190903: © Art Wolf/Edge of the Earth Productions: Travels to the Edge crew, (L-R) Karel Bauer, Sean White, Art Wolfe, John Greengo
We usually have ten days to shoot each episode so equipment, guides, translators and other local resources are all put in place before we go. Sometimes our numbers burgeon alarmingly mostly due to safety issues.
JLG0711100011: © John Greengo/Edge of the Earth Productions: Travels to the Edge production in the Sahara Desert, Mali
Photography has always been an important way for large numbers of people to see and experience nature and places they might never visit. It’s going to become even more important now, at this critical juncture in history, as photographers build a visual record of what’s being threatened. We witness, we record…