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Nichols’ full photograph of a 300′ tall, 1,500-year-old redwood demanded that he meticulously plan 84 separate digital photographs. The seamless composite is the only high-definition image of a full redwood ever taken. |
Few of us can claim to be the person who took the definitive photograph of anything but our children. Globetrotting photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols, on the other hand, has taken definitive pictures of elephants, chimpanzees, even Jane Goodall.
Nichols is an editor-at-large for National Geographic, for which he’s leaving this month to scout locations to work with elephants and lions on the African savanna. He’ll be photographing orphaned elephants, he says, because it’s “a way to pull away at people’s emotions,” and to alert people to the global issues that are pitting people against elephants there.
But when he’s home for the other half of the year, “I rarely leave Sugar Hollow,” he says. “People have to make me leave.” Nichols does come Downtown for at least three days a year to oversee the festival he helped found here, the industry-renowned LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. (This year the festival is taking a year off from public exhibition and will host LOOKBetween, an industry conference for emerging photographers.) The strength of the festival has a lot to do with the strength of Nichols’ personal connections, many of which he forged as a member of Magnum, the elite photography cooperative that was founded by the legendary photographers Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
As for his photographs, including one top-to-bottom photograph of a 300′ redwood tree that hung outside the Market Street Garage last year: “One of those pictures may represent a split second in time, but that’s 10 years of my life.”
