Nat Geo's Aaron Huey's Most Epic Photos | National Geographic

• That's how I actually get my work. It's not because I know how to take pictures. It's because I only wear gold shoes when I come into the National Geographic offices. (classical music) My name's Aaron Huey. I'm a National Geographic photographer. A lot of what I came into the magazine with was really deep dives into communities. I think that kind of intimate imagery was what I was known for.

Over the course of a National Geographic career, we end up with assignments that are kind of curveballs where we also may end up in the Himalayas or tracking wolves, and so the style has had to adjust sometimes based on assignment. (classical music) This was eight years of going and visiting people, and multiple families adopted me as a member of their own families, and I had a home with many people.

In stories about Pine Ridge or reservations, there's so much darkness, but this is one of those images of the light. You could throw a rock from this spot and almost hit the mass grave where they buried all of the bodies from the massacre of Wounded Knee, and there's still a community of people growing up literally in the shadow of Wounded Knee and everything that it stands for.

I saw the weather changing, and I was 10, 15 miles away, and I was racing trying to get to the marker to photograph that mass grave in this moment of this huge storm kind of circling overhead. As I was racing down the road to get to the massacre site, I saw these young couples. I had known them long enough that I could just start photographing.

This image has the light and the dark all wrapped into one. Something glows through. There is life, there is love in the shadow of a massacre site, and there's still a community of people living and loving and fighting and surviving in that place. I feel that I think when I look of this photo of this storm, of this kind of glow that comes from this incredible force and comes from these people despite the darkness of that history. (classical music)

(singing foreign language) That's like a song about friends having your back, like a good old-fashioned friends country song. This is Svanetia; this is a really isolated valley on the border of the Georgian Republic and the southern border of Russia. This photograph takes me back really to my own origin story as a photographer.

I was in Damascus as a backpacker, and a German linguist told me the story about a place where people spoke a language that had never been written, and they were surrounded by 18,000-foot peaks that were gods turned to stone. And there was no guidebook for this place, and he drew on the back of a napkin just this simple little map of the Republic of Georgia, and he drew a little line of how to get from Syria through Turkey and into the mountains of Georgia, and I left I think two days later.

When I finally arrived in the mountains, someone turned around to me on the bus and asked, "Where are you going?" because there were no hotels. There was no place to go. I just said, "I'm gonna go camping at the end of the bus route," and they just shook their heads and they said, "We're going to a wedding, come with us," and I ended up at the wedding of the eldest daughter of a family, and I drank and I danced, and I woke up in the morning part of a family.

And I went to visit that family three years in a row after that. I fell in love with that family, I fell in love with the song and the dance and the spirit of this place, and I returned year after year for three years in a row, and at the end of that I had made my first body of work, and it was all black and white. It was some of my first rolls of film, really, and 15 years later National Geographic sent me back to revisit the same families.

In this image, I returned to a place that I had already photographed, and nothing had changed. It felt like it was the same kids on the same horses in a time machine. There is something still important. I think about these timeless journeys into other worlds to just illuminate part of the human spirit. That's what this story was for me. This is a story that's really, it's just poetry. (classical music)

The Denali assignment was part of our national park series. A lot of this assignment was about buffer areas and about how humans and animals interact. I spent a lot of time with a really infamous hunter named Coke Wallace. We had read stories that he had set traps just outside of the boundaries of the national park, which is not unusual for a trapper, but he had taken an old horse in and shot it on the edge of the park and surrounded it with traps and ended up killing I believe one of the alpha females and several other wolves, and that's kind of the goal of a trapper, is to be clever enough to set traps and get as many wolves as you can get.

This is a difficult part of the assignment. Spending time with someone with a really different set of beliefs. It's a challenge that's I think important to keep taking on, to go into the worlds of people that believe something different and try to understand where they're coming from. I had to go into a part of myself and transcend my own biases and see him as a person because underneath all of that there were insights to the national park and to ways of life that I had not thought about.

I still don't like the idea of setting up traps on the edge of the national park, but I understand a little bit more about some of these communities, about trappers. At the end of a year and a half of work, I was there and had gained the trust of this man who called me and said, "We got a wolf. I'm gonna skin it if you wanna get down here." I think pictures like these images of Coke with this wolf are the result of National Geographic storytelling. It's a year in the field getting to know a person or a community and going deep enough that you're the person they call. That really is what's special about what we do here. (classical music)

This was the quintessential National Geographic assignment. I got a telephone call from my editor Sadie that essentially said, "Can you go to Everest base camp and can you do it in the next couple days, and can you be gone for a month and a half?" I had to quickly look at my calendar and tell my wife that I was going to the Himalayas and then buy all the gear that I would need to do that and then got on a plane four days later.

This story was really important because we so often see the stories of the western heroes on mountains like Everest or these other Himalayan peaks, but behind them and behind kind of this churning machine of tourists going up these mountains are the real heroes, the unsung heroes of these mountains, and it's the Sherpa people who are carrying the loads. Saving people's lives, setting up the rope lines that make any of that climbing possible. A Sherpa is an ethnic group. It's not a job.

I think that was another really important part of this piece: opening up the world of the Sherpa people and going deep into that community. This is a photograph I made really pretty much on arrival at base camp. It was the beginning of the assignment, and it really summarized a lot of what we were there to look at. This was a Sherpa carrying down loads from the summit, loads from the camps of westerners. Some of the Sherpa were carrying almost their body weight in equipment.

This story really dug a lot into the compensation, inequalities, and the lack of insurance and the kind of suffering that happens behind the scenes. One of the whole points of being able to do work that goes to hundreds of millions of people is that we can change the rules with it. We can change the laws. This photograph is one of my close Sherpa friends, and we're at the camp one, somewhere 19,000 to 20,000 feet.

He's surrounded by the ravens, the crows that were circling around up at that camp. Kind of one of those quiet moments before the next big push up to camp two and then beyond to the summit. This is a really special photograph for me because I plan an entire trip hoping to get this photograph. I didn't wanna climb Everest. I didn't think it was worth risking my life, but I thought I could probably get to this spot.

This is Ama Dablam, that's camp two. The tents there, you can only fit I think four to six tents, and they're all tilted kind of sideways and strapped into the rock into the snow there, and this is done Nuru Sherpa coiling ropes at camp two as his brother and I are going up towards the beginning of the summit climb. A lot of my focus right now is trying to understand new ways of storytelling.

20 years ago, I was shooting on a Leica M6 with slide film, and now I'm doing AR and VR work that can be 3D printed or may not have any print form ever. There is no one way to make or share pictures. It's infinitely flexible, and it's going to change beyond anything we can even imagine right now. (classical music)

Oh no, I don't know. I can't believe I did singing. (laughing)