Tui De Roy: If I Had a Religion, It Would Be Nature
Tui De Roy was born in Belgium, but her family moved to the Galapagos Islands when she was two years old. She’s a naturalist, a wildlife and nature photographer, a writer and conservationist, an expedition leader and a Galapagos Islands consultant. And she will be giving a keynote presentation at the 2025 NANPA Summit (May 15-17 in Tucson, Arizona) in which she’ll share her passion for seeking, finding and photographing some of the wildest creatures and the wildest places. She’s a past recipient of NANPA’s Outstanding Photographer of the Year Award and says that “was one of the greatest honors of my life, and I will be so pleased to be back [in North America] to be able to share what I’ve been doing since then.”
Uncommon beginnings lead to an extraordinary life
Tui De Roy’s led an unusual life, which might have been foreshadowed when her parents gave her that unusual first name. “People wonder what it means,” she says. “It’s actually the name of a bird in New Zealand, but my parents didn’t know that. They’d just heard the name.”
Her mother taught her the basics of school—reading and writing, etc. “My father taught me how to look for answers,” she says. “He taught me curiosity. He taught me how to learn.” Her native language was French, but when she started writing, it was in English “because I had more contact with English-speaking people.” And along the way, she also learned German and Spanish, mostly self-taught.
She became interested in photography as a child, through her dad, and then through scientists who were studying the wildlife in the Galapagos. She started photographing those amazing animals as a hobby but, through a fortunate series of coincidences, got a cover story in Audubon magazine when she was 19 years old.
De Roy was told at an early age, after she had written a few articles to accompany her photographs, that she should write a book to go with her photos. “I met an editor of Viking Penguin who was visiting the Galapagos. I showed her three pages of my manuscript (which was handwritten, by the way) and she said, ‘Yep, we’ll publish that!”
De Roy was 26 when her first book came out, “Galapagos, Islands Lost in Time.” Now she’s done about 20 books, her photos have been published in roughly 40 countries, and her books have been translated into Japanese, French, German.
After that first book, she was approached to do a film about it. “And that basically meant looking at Galapagos and all its wonders, but not through the Darwinian evolutionary theory approach, the David Attenborough—BBC documentary approach, but instead through the eyes of a local person who knows and loves the islands.” There were and have since been dozens of films made about the Galapagos, but that’s the only one from the perspective of a local.
blizard enveloping commuters returning to nesting colony
Naturalist and photographer
“I consider myself a naturalist first and a photographer second, even though I have taken hundreds of thousands of photos and I’m a professional photographer, but actually I look at the world as a naturalist and then I try to portray what these wild creatures are doing and how they live. But I always try to show it from their perspective as much as I can.”
“If I had a religion, it would be nature and life on earth,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to capture in my photography. I am fascinated by wild, natural, living organisms and how they go about being what they are, how they became what they are. And that’s what I try to capture in my photographs.”
De Roy has explored the world fairly broadly, but she’s looking for the less popular places. “I’ve only been to the famous African wildlife scenes a few times. I’ve more often looked for things like kiwis and South American maned wolves and things like those which most people haven’t heard about.”
She spent more than ten years working on a project that led to two books, “Albatross: Their World, Their Ways” and “Penguins: Their World, Their Ways.” De Roy and her then partner rigged up their own sailboat, a 46-foot steel cutter, to reach the islands where the birds nest. They did seven expeditions covering nine months at sea visiting the storm-blasted, windy islands that were home to albatrosses and penguins.
She says “that sailing period was probably the best thing I ever did in my life. We were totally self-sufficient for weeks and months at a time. And we had a boat that we trusted through any storm that the ‘Roaring 40s’ and ‘Furious 50s’ latitudes could throw at us. And we were in planet nature. There is no better place for me.”
De Roy is currently working on a third book in the series, this one on sea turtles. In that effort, she’s made 14 trips to different parts of the world because, “while albatrosses and penguins will stand in front of your camera and, literally, dance for you, sea turtles don’t do that. It’s actually a lot harder to photograph sea turtles doing what they do because a lot of it is far below the surface of the sea and, during different times of year, in different parts of the world.”
In spite of the difficulties, she’s “very excited about it. I’ve known turtles as far back as I can remember, but I’ve rediscovered them by looking more closely and photographing them in all sorts of different places.”
Mother with young calf in tropical sheltered coastal waters
What’s next?
What does the future hold for De Roy? “My next project has been brewing for more years than I can remember,” she says. “And it’s going to take me into uncharted waters, literally, into blank territory because I think it’s time for me to write my memoirs. And that is a completely different exercise than anything I’ve ever done.”
“I’ve always written about my adventures,” she continued, “but that’s different than delving into who I am, what are the lessons I learned. Everybody thinks I’m strong. I’m actually not at all strong inside, but I’ve learned how to manage my life in a strong way.”
Growing up in extreme isolation in the Galapagos, with only a few other people around her had a major impact on her development. “We had a very tight family, but also at times a somewhat dysfunctional family,” she says, “which I didn’t realize while I was living it, but only in hindsight. There was nobody to turn to. You had to make yourself who you are. And my brother and I turned out very different in that regard. We coped with it in totally different ways. For me, it opened doors. For him, it closed doors.”
“I really would like to explore this whole story in a way that isn’t so much about my life in Galapagos, but more about a series of lessons that I’ve learned that I think can help other people who are either, for whatever reason, feeling boxed in or oppressed or lonely, about how to stand on your own feet and let things just slip off your shoulders if you don’t want them to sit there.”
Full circle
For about 20 years, De Roy split her time between living on the South Island of New Zealand and the Galapagos. She visited friends in New Zealand and was enamored with the beauty and the mystery of the land, so she and her partner applied for residency. She found it “a magical place to live” with unusual landforms, flora and fauna. But she was also troubled by two waves of human-caused extinctions that had dramatically reduced or eliminated native species while introducing foreign plants and animals. De Roy carries that awareness with her as she photographs unusual species across the globe.
She returned, full time, to the Galapagos when her mother became ill and decided to stay after her mom passed. “I started rephotographing Galapagos with a new eye and with new technology and started falling in love with the place all over again. And now it’s 10 years later and I’m still here and I don’t think I’m going to move away anymore. I’ve just turned 70 and I think this is it. My mum brought me back to where she brought me in the first place with my dad. This is where my soul resides.”
Don’t miss your chance to see Tui De Roy’s keynote at the 2025 NANPA Summit, May 14-17 in Tucson, Arizona.
Alcedo giant tortoise (Chelonoidis vandenburghi) sleeping under the sweep of star trails during a five hour mulriple exposure sequence. Alcedo Volcano, Isabela Island. Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
