Speaker

Ami Vitale

Ami Vitale

American photojournalist and documentary film-maker, a longtime National Geographic photographer known for her conservation work — including the last northern white rhinos and China’s panda reintroduction programme — after roughly a decade as a wartime conflict photographer.

Vitale began her career photographing business figures for a small newspaper in the Czech Republic in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, before quitting to cover the 1997 Balkan conflict and becoming a war photographer without formal training. Over the following decade she covered Kosovo, Gaza and the second intifada, and lived in Kashmir for four years reporting the India–Pakistan conflict, having concluded early that ‘parachute journalism’ — moving quickly between conflicts without dwelling in any of them — could not do a story justice. After roughly ten years, exhausted and close to quitting, she shifted towards conservation and environmental photography, a change she traces to recognising that scarcity of water, fertile land, and a destabilising climate sit behind nearly every conflict she had covered. She has since travelled to over a hundred countries and become a leading voice in wildlife conservation photography, working extensively on the northern white rhino, elephant orphan rescue in northern Kenya, and China’s panda breeding and rewilding programme. She is the author of the 2018 best-selling book Panda Love, and founded Vital Impacts, a nonprofit supporting arts education and conservation storytelling worldwide.

Core positions

  • Conflict and ecological collapse are one story, not two. Nearly every conflict she has covered traces back to scarcity of basic resources — water, fertile land, a changing climate — which she treats as reason enough for journalists to cover conservation with the same urgency as war.
  • Community ownership drives conservation outcomes more than policing. Kenya’s near-elimination of poaching (zero rhinos poached there during the pandemic, versus over 400 in South Africa) rests on communities understanding wild animals as essential to their own survival, not on stricter law alone.
  • A photograph carries an obligation, not just an opportunity. She asks ‘what gives me the right to be taking this picture?’ before every frame, and holds that photography can be as exploitative and colonial as it is empowering — permission and relationship with the subject come first.
  • Keystone species restoration heals landscapes within a human lifetime. Reintroducing elephants and rhinos to parts of northern Kenya absent those species for decades produced visible ecosystem recovery within five to ten years.
  • Authorship should shift towards the communities being photographed. Through Vital Impacts she works to put cameras directly into the hands of the people whose stories she has historically told on their behalf.

In the wiki