Galen Rowell

In 1972, Galen Rowell became a full-time photographer. Less than one year later, he completed his first major magazine assignment: a cover story for National Geographic. The subsequent years found Rowell pioneering a new brand of participatory photography. Formerly an observer with a camera, Rowell would become an active participant in the image being photographed. Winner of the Ansel Adams Award, as well as producer of 17 large-format books of pictures and text, Rowell was a photographer who, as Tom Brokaw put it, “...shared his vision with — click — the release of a shutter, creating photographs as timeless, as stunning and as powerful as nature itself.” Rowell, his wife and two others were killed in a plane crash in 2002.