/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/83/76/837646bc-4431-4d99-843a-4df325ee157f/08_-_koalas_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_11481509.jpg)
This Amazing Archive of Animal Photography Reveals 18,000 Species and Counting. Here’s How Joel Sartore Built His ‘Photo Ark’
For 20 years, the National Geographic photographer has showcased Earth’s animals in a series of striking images that make even the tiniest creatures look immense
:focal(2560x1707:2561x1708)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/83/76/837646bc-4431-4d99-843a-4df325ee157f/08_-_koalas_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_11481509.jpg)
The naked mole-rat was first. On August 9, 2006, at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Nebraska, Joel Sartore focused his camera on the little rodent with big front teeth and snapped pictures.
As a longtime field photographer for National Geographic magazine, Sartore had always been interested in the natural world and cared about its creatures, big and small. But those photographs of the mole-rat sent him in a new direction: It was the inaugural species of Sartore’s Photo Ark project documenting the variety and charisma of the planet’s animal species. For the Ark, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, Sartore and his team travel the globe making stunning portraits of animals as a testament to their existence in the face of biodiversity loss.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c5/ef/c5ef42a1-2233-4e23-9890-7719fe7fa6df/12_-_ocotopus_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2359348.jpg)
In late 2005, Sartore’s wife, Kathy, was diagnosed with breast cancer. He stayed home to care for her and their three children while she was sick and being treated. “That year at home gave me a new perspective on the shortness and fragility of life,” he wrote. The idea for the portrait collection, in which the beauty and vulnerability of animal life is displayed, came to him then.
Kathy made a full recovery. “She’s just fine to this day,” Sartore tells me during a video call on a Monday in July, as coffee brews in the background. “She was the one making the coffee just now.”
Twenty years after those first images, Sartore is still taking pictures, his digital Ark filling with fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals and insects. When we spoke, he had just spent the previous night and the morning photographing insects in the Minnesota Northwoods. He typically takes pictures of multiple species per day. On August 3, the National Geographic Society announced that Sartore has photographed his 18,000th species for the Photo Ark—the critically endangered red handfish, a thumb-size animal that walks on its fins along the seafloor. Sartore visited a red handfish breeding lab and set up a photo tank on a tabletop. “We put one in our little fish tank, and it kind of walks around,” he says. After getting photos with two or three fish, “we were probably done in under an hour.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a9/51/a9518e38-1b67-4fb2-978f-0843460ea7fc/01_female_red_handfish_white_bg_cr_joel_sartore_national_geographic_photo_ark_ng-3002033.jpg)
Through his pictures, Sartore’s goal is to show “all animals that you can see with the naked eye,” he says, from tree dwellers to soil burrowers to ocean swimmers. He wants to “get people to care while there’s still time to save habitats and all these other species.” But if the threatened creatures he photographs aren’t saved, his images at least document that they were here and won’t be entirely forgotten.
Sartore has taken pictures of various extinct-in-the-wild species, including the Guam kingfisher and the Monterrey platyfish, which survive only through efforts to care for them in captivity. He even photographed a preserved young thylacine, a long-extinct carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
The animals he photographs are usually in human care at zoos, aquariums, wildlife sanctuaries and science laboratories. This ensures that Sartore will have better access to the animals and that they’ll be accustomed to being around people.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/af/c9/afc9af18-acab-41ad-93a2-93e9d71bb20d/05_-_springbok_mantis_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2325314.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c1/c3/c1c3551b-7dd6-4eff-9078-b316c1ee5bf0/17_-_african_leopard_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1559049.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ce/9d/ce9d549d-c792-410e-99ae-63aef02c5ba5/20_-_west_african_slender-snouted_crocodile_cr_joel_sartore-na-71ed16824288682ac2631c36f8eef7fd.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/75/98/7598cf17-fb45-4f2b-8f26-d555fb0ac375/07_-_ribboned_pipefish_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2359350.jpg)
His portraits are usually set against both black and white backdrops so that he can take close-ups in good lighting and depict true color with no distractions: “Just the animal, nothing else,” he says. “You can look them in the eye, really see that there’s great intelligence there, and a basic right to exist, in my opinion.”
The project now includes so many different types of animal life that he even photographs creatures without eyes, such as corals, anemones and sponges. By taking photos of individual animals, he allows each one to shine on its own, without a size comparison. Even a tiny creature, spotlighted as the subject of one of Sartore’s photos, looks significant.
“We photograph a lot of animals that the world would never see without this project,” Sartore says. Plenty of them, he adds, “can fit in the palm of your hand.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/8c/41/8c4127b1-edab-497e-b2ff-2afc7e3f6e70/06_-_sierra_nevada_ensatina_salamander_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1406375.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e0/e4/e0e4b249-1d28-4708-b843-06984a8864bf/10_-_female_snowy_owl_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1456290.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9d/21/9d21208e-df1d-42a8-9d78-25cf239cbb12/14_-_coquerel_s_safika_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1582509.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9e/29/9e294462-689e-45be-b484-9f1710d399e1/04_-_orange_spotted_filefish_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1933227.jpg)
Each image is a snapshot of what biodiversity looks like during our time.
For instance, Sartore has worked in the Pine Rocklands, a “hyper-fragmented, hyper-rare, hyper-degraded ecosystem in southeastern Florida,” says ecological restoration expert George Gann, a founder of the Institute for Regional Conservation. Despite these challenges, the rocklands have incredible biodiversity and serve as a home for various threatened species, such as the Miami tiger beetle, Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly and the Florida bonneted bat—three animals that Sartore has photographed.
Sartore and the Photo Ark team identified that the tiger beetle and scrub-hairstreak butterfly needed attention. So, in 2023, they awarded the inaugural Photo Ark Species Impact Initiative grant, an effort to fund on-the-ground conservation projects, to Gann, who has been working on restoring the area for decades.
By featuring these two rockland insects, Gann says, the Photo Ark helps “draw attention to these overlooked species.”
That focus helps define for the public “the habitat needs of these two species to drive an ecological restoration process,” Gann notes.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d3/1d/d31d5fb0-ca2f-4d62-95b5-20d345bee5b2/24_-_joel_sartore_2694257_cr_cole_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark.jpeg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/48/c0/48c09166-3ee9-43ea-9185-57e1f1b8ba27/23_-_joel_sartore_with_serval_cr_cole_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_ona001-00013_hr.jpg)
In Ecuador, the Photo Ark has highlighted amphibians, many of which may be extinct in the country due to disease and habitat loss. “We didn’t see them anymore since the ’80s, despite searching for them,” says amphibian biologist Luis A. Coloma, director of Ecuador’s Jambatu Center for Amphibian Research and Conservation. The center, a 2025 Photo Ark Species Impact Initiative grantee, helps protect some of those creatures, breeding them under laboratory conditions and raising them so they can later be reintroduced to nature.
Did you know? Amphibians in danger
In 2023, a global assessment found that nearly 41 percent of amphibian species on the planet are threatened by habitat loss, climate change and disease.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/86/4b/864b890e-3096-462e-980f-4f176ab1f353/02_longnose_harlequin_frog_black_background_cr_joel_sartore_spi-2760596.jpg)
One of those species is the longnose harlequin frog, rediscovered by Coloma and his team in 2016 after it was thought to be extinct. “We were so happy to find them again,” Coloma says. “These are iconic animals in Ecuador. And we are trying to do our best to save these animals.” Harlequin frogs come in many colors, and “they are marvelous,” the biologist says. Their skin is also full of molecules that could have “potential biomedical uses.”
Sartore captured images of the longnose harlequin frog in January 2019, when there were only four known individuals in Ecuador, at the Jambatu Center. His pictures showcase the species’ brown body and yellow spots. “He has been photographing our frogs that we keep here and trying to communicate through his photos to the world about this crisis,” Coloma says, “which is huge.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a6/2b/a62b7e08-e4bd-419c-87de-0e5da543b275/16_-_male_arctic_fox_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2321014.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/93/bd/93bdd1d9-4933-42a9-a44c-34345557b22d/13_-_saint_vincent_parrot_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2331484.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/29/99/2999b76a-4ef5-4243-a850-e666df30640f/15_-_brazilian_rainbow_boa_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1096457.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/14/04/1404c958-6c55-4322-a84a-11c50bb2df02/11_-_bornean_orangutans_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_12323107.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/17/bb/17bb64c1-47cd-4ee0-aac2-ab326cff762c/03_-_victoria_crowned_pigeon_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2165607.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/2c/3c/2c3caccb-4342-44a6-946b-28dd529c5dc5/01_-_florida_panther_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_1762957.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c1/91/c1917cf0-0a54-4d2f-8363-2b00c8779950/18_-_bobtail_squid_cr_joel_sartore-national_geographic_photo_ark_2325448.jpg)
At age 64, Sartore’s succession plan for the Photo Ark is set. His son Cole attends the foreign trips, and “he’ll take over when I’m too old to do it anymore,” Sartore says. But until then, his work continues. Many more animals await the lens of his camera—about 25,000 species are in human care worldwide, and Sartore wants to photograph all of them.
“My thing is to give my life to this,” he says. “I’m a photographer and a storyteller—what else was I supposed to do? What else can you do?”
Sartore hopes that this big body of work will have value far beyond his time. When people view his photos, he says, “they can see what it is that’s out there and decide whether or not they want to save it, because it really is a choice.”