Skip to main content
search
0
NANPA Summit

2025 Summit Spotlight: Brian Skerry / Keynote Speaker

By January 15, 2025January 16th, 2025No Comments

From Ocean Depths to Summit Awards

Brian Skerry is a photographer and filmmaker who focuses on marine wildlife, showing both the beauty of species and the threats they face. He’s photographed more than 30 stories for National Geographic magazine, is a National Geographic Fellow, Storytelling Fellow and, in 2017, received the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year award. In 2021, he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary as producer of Secrets of the Whales. He’s the author of a dozen books, a Founding Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers and has spoken before the United Nations General Assembly and the World Economic Forum in Davos. And Skerry will speak to you at the 2025 NANPA Summit, May 14-17 in Tucson, Arizona, where he will receive NANPA’s Outstanding Nature Photographer of Year Award and give a keynote presentation, “The Sentient Sea.”

From Seashore to Summit

Growing up in Massachusetts, Skerry was a frequent visitor to Cape Cod and the Atlantic shore, where he “fell in love with the sea.” He loved reading stories in National Geographic magazine and watching those old Jaques Cousteau documentaries. Wanting to become an ocean explorer himself, he started diving as a teenager. His life changed at a dive show in Boston, watching underwater photographers and filmmakers present their work. The fifteen-year-old Skerry “had an epiphany where the idea of being a photographer of these things I was seeing underwater really appealed to me. I was a visual person and the notion of traveling the world and making pictures of animals, particularly underwater, and sharing what I learned” became his passion. So he taught himself underwater photography.

He then studied photojournalism in college, but had to figure out how to apply those lessons, which were land based, to being in the sea. And, while he loves science, he isn’t a trained scientist. Rather his images can help scientists tell stories. “I think the real beauty of being a photographer has been being able to parachute into the lives of researchers who are dedicated to learning about one animal. So, I might be working on one story about great white sharks and I’ll spend months or years working with a particular group of scientists that study great white sharks. And then I might be doing something with whales or seals. So over decades I’ve really learned a lot about how to look at these animals, how to understand their behaviors, their habitats. I’m grateful for these people and their lifetime work for providing access to what I do. I try to give visual context to their work, but I’ve learned a lot through those associations.”

Working with scientists and researchers is a two-way street, where each has to learn to trust the other and to adapt to the needs of the other. First, you have to “let them know that I feel that animal welfare is paramount. I’m willing to put in the time and respect their work and listen to what they say. If they advise me to act in a certain way around animals or not approach beyond a certain distance, they need to know that I will listen. Conversely, I think it’s important to be a good communicator. I need to articulate to researchers exactly what it is that I’m trying to do. The types of photographs that I might have in my mind’s eye might be different than what they’re interested in. They may be, for example, just interested in research photos, so a snapshot might fit the bill for their applications or for a scientific paper, but I’m trying to do something a little bit different that might require special tools or working much longer into the day and trying to get the perfect light and so forth. Helping them to understand what my needs are and why it matters, showing them examples of my previous work helps give them visual context to what I’m trying to do.

From Film to Filming

Sometimes being a photographer is the most effective approach. Sometimes it requires a filmmaker. And, sometimes, doing both can really make a story sing. Skerry say “in my heart, in my soul, I am and always will be a still photographer. That is the thing that I’m most passionate about, that I love deeply, part of my DNA.” Still, he says, “I’ve recognized that, as a storyteller, humans are visual creatures and we respond emotionally to powerful images, whether they are still or motion. Being a storyteller means that different tolls can be effective in different ways.”

One example he offers is the three-year project that culminated in the film Secrets of the Whales. From the outset, he “wanted to do a National Geographic magazine story, but there were aspects of whale culture that could be best illustrated through motion pictures.” To illustrate a humpback whale singing, he could “get a photograph of a humpback male in the inverted position singing but, to hear that sound or to see the mom-calf relationship, … those things translate better through video.”

An Award-Winning Artist

Over the years, Skerry has received almost a dozen awards at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in London. His trophy case also holds a Peter Benchley Award for Excellence in Media (he’s the only photographer to have won that prestigious award). So, what does NANPA’s Outstanding Nature Photographer of the Year mean to him? “This award is is especially meaningful to me because I think it recognizes a career. It recognizes a dedication to something that matters deeply to me, being able to get out there year after year, decade after decade, trying to tell stories that matter and being recognized by your peers. This isn’t some remote group of judges somewhere … These are people who do what I do, what we all do. So, to be recognized with this very high honor from NANPA, from people who have dedicated their lives to photography, is a type of validation.” Skerry continued, “We photographers are always, I suppose, a little bit insecure. And we always wrestle with whether or not we’re doing well. And I think it’s just great to have somebody say that we know what you’ve been doing. And we want to recognize that.”

Summits, NANPA and Connections

“NANPA has been, for decades, a very trusted community and a vital source of information,” he says. And that’s important because “nature photography is somewhat of a solo pursuit. For most of my 26-year-career at National Geographic, I would travel eight or nine months a year. Many times it was just me and my assistant and we’re in some remote location. I often described it as sort of operating in a vacuum. You know, I’m on a boat or I’m on a remote beach somewhere and It’s kind of like Groundhog Day, where you’re getting up and doing the same thing every day and you’re charging batteries and downloading these days or back in the day, changing film. But it’s just us and we’re in this bubble and don’t really have a lot of contact with other people. That solitary existence of a nature photographer yearns for community, it yearns for camaraderie.”

That’s one thing that Brian Skerry gets from NANPA and from NANPA Summits. He went to his first Summit in 1999, just a year after beginning work with National Geographic. “It was like a fire hose of information. There was just so much material! I attended various lectures. Some were informative about technical aspects or equipment and technique. Others were more inspirational. I remember Jim Brandenburg doing a talk about his career, and you know I can remember vividly,25 years later, the pictures, especially a wolf paw print in the snow—just a lyrical image. “

So what’s a NANPA Summit? “It’s information, it’s community, but it’s also information with a group of widespread individuals, who have a commonality, a passion about the planet, about recording it, about telling stories, about advocacy” for the natural world.

And why an in-person event when so much is available online? “One of the most important reasons for me to attend a conference like this is to be able to interact with other photographers in person,” Skerry says. “We can subscribe to blogs or go to websites or watch YouTube videos and we can learn everything we ever wanted to know about technique and so forth. But I think there is there’s something uniquely special about those in-person meetings.” Along with the camaraderie comes the ability to network. “You know, it’s an old word, networking, but I think it still matters,” Skerry says.

“In the times that I have gone to NANPA Summits, and interacted with photographers, I inevitably learn things, things that maybe they don’t share in other forums just because for whatever reason it doesn’t translate as well in a video or in a blog. There’s a bit of wisdom that you can pick up but there’s also an intangible inspirational element. When you leave a NANPA Summit, you’re pumped up,” he says. “You’re inspired by the work that you see from others and by you see in your own potential.”

The Sentient Sea

Brian Skerry’s keynote presentation, The Sentient Sea, will be a highlight of the 2025 NANPA Summit. “As I created this presentation, I realized that it was something of a retrospective, and that was going to be part of what was necessary for this particular presentation. I will be sharing images from the arc of my career and showing the various phases that I’ve gone through as a storyteller but, for me, what this presentation is really about are the things that I’ve learned from spending a lifetime in nature, in the ocean, with wildlife, and seeing how everything is connected, that there really is a magical nature to our planet, all rooted in science. But, as science delves further into wildlife behavior and the connections between animals and their role in ecosystems, I think we begin to see this really almost mystical sense of our world. What I hope is that those who attend the presentation take away this sense of just how beautiful, fragile, and magical our planet is, and that it it really deserves our respect and our protection.”

“As I was creating this presentation, I was thinking about a retrospective. And it brought me back to my life as a little boy growing up in a country town in in Massachusetts, long before I was a photographer or interested in photography. But I always had a love of nature. And I think from that very young age, what I most wanted to do with my life was to understand nature and to protect it. My career as a nature photographer, as I look back, has really been about those things. I’ve tried to learn about it and use photography as a means to help educate people and make people fall in love with nature and ultimately protect it.”

Don’t miss your chance to see Brian Skerry, NANPA’s Outstanding Nature Photographer of Year, talk about The Sentient Sea at the 2025 NANPA Summit, May 14-17 in Tucson, Arizona.