Motion
Wild Horses
Melissa spent most of a year in the American west to do a National Geographic Magazine story on wild horses. The story titled: Mustangs—Spirit of the Shrinking West, ran in the February, 2009 National Geographic Magazine.
Camel Beauty Contest, Empty Quarter
For the Arabs, camels are their most sacred animal. The camel was critical to their survival. Historically, camels provided them with milk and transportation. When they could no longer find water on their lands, they used camels to locate new sources. Although they call the festival a beauty contest, in reality it is more like a dog show or a horse show. Participants have to know lineage of the camel, and it must be a pedigree. A pedigree camel must be pure breed; the owner must know who the camel’s parents are. In order to attest to the purity of the camel, the owner must make an oath before god – this is how pure breeds are verified.
They have special contests that are just for sheiks. In the UAE they only have one royal family – they have 19 sons, and a few cousins. In Abu Dhabi, there are less than 100 sheiks. It’s a bit strange to westerners that to enter some of the competitions an owner must have multiple camels that are all worth multiple millions of dollars each.
Promo for HSBC
Jay Hanrahan – a great Australian cinematographer spent a month with Randy and did this promo film for HSBC International Bank about him working on HSBC advertising photography. National Geographic Assignment coordinated stills and motion for a number of photographers on this project to create an advertising photography library for HSBC Bank.
Duality Exhibit
Two, Pair, Parallel, Double, Duo, Twin, Mate, Couple…Randy and Melissa have walked lockstep through careers in newspapers, education and magazine photojournalism. They are social documentary photojournalists and have put together 50 National Geographic assignments into visual pairings for the first time.
These are picture puzzles from assignments that have taken them to 50 countries around the world—into the heart of large, bustling cities as well as expansive, empty wilderness. They photograph people, wildlife and landscape.
We are not tourists. We travel to places and spend time to document truth as we come to know it. Although many times the place seems foreign, we have done this long enough that we no longer look for what is different i these cultures…we look for what is the same…what connects us all.
When we return home, we try to make sense of it all by finding these connections in our photographs. The pairings of these photographs reflect a personal interpretation of culture and species in diverse landscapes.
