Photographer's Life Changed By Nobel-Winning Work
On rare days in Zambia, the Zambezi River runs quietly, revealing a swimming hole at the top of Victoria Falls. Annie Griffiths Belt of National Geographic took this photo at sunset — and she calls it "one of the most beautiful" she has ever taken. Annie Griffiths Belt/National Geographic hide caption
On rare days in Zambia, the Zambezi River runs quietly, revealing a swimming hole at the top of Victoria Falls. Annie Griffiths Belt of National Geographic took this photo at sunset — and she calls it "one of the most beautiful" she has ever taken.
Annie Griffiths Belt/National GeographicAnnie Griffiths Belt's life and work have been transformed by the breakthroughs in fiber optics and digital data transmission made by this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in physics.
The photographer for National Geographic has taken digital photos all over the world. And she has sent them home high speed, thanks to the fiber optic cables.
Griffiths Belt tells NPR's Michele Norris she vividly remembers the switch to digital about five years ago.
"It was like an earthquake," she says. "I remember sitting at a photographic seminar at National Geographic when we as a group — the photographers — were presented with this new reality and there were a lot of crossed arms and crossed eyebrows because people who had been doing something the same way for years were skeptical at first and then terrified. Two years later, everybody was digital."
The switch, she said, was hard for her.
"I had an intimate relationship with film for 25 years. I still have some film cameras that are lined up like little soldiers on a shelf that hold great memories for me," Griffiths Belt says. "I still have film in my freezer downstairs, but I don't know when I'll use it. But about five years ago, I started making the switch because it was clear it was coming like a freight train and anybody who wanted to continue to work had better get onboard."
She says she misses the community the darkroom created.
"The printmaking was a great source of pride — and a great source of community," Griffiths Belt says. "We're each sitting on our part of the world without ever seeing each other or touching each other. And this digital information can be interpreted in so many ways."
But once she did get onboard, Belt says she found it liberating "in ways that I couldn't possibly have imagined." Now, when she's in remote parts of the world, she can quickly send in her photos — like the one above of a man standing at the edge of a swimming hole at the top of Victoria Falls in Zambia in 2006.
"There was this sort of unbelievable feeling of having it and sending it to the editor. One of the most beautiful, privileged photos I've ever taken — and it was front of the editor that evening and that was extraordinary to me."