In a 2008 TED talk, David Griffin, National Geographic’s photo director at the time, showed eleven professional photographs and one by an amateur to argue that the frame is the easy part. Checked against later reporting, his examples from a Chadian elephant reserve to a Mumbai slum describe a method of focus, time and room to change direction, with a few details that need correcting.
Griffin opens with twelve photographs and holds back that one of them was not taken by a professional. It is a comet, shot in New Zealand by an amateur and published in the magazine. His point is that everyone has a great picture or two in them, while a photojournalist has to produce them repeatedly and build a narrative around them. For anyone commissioning or producing visual content, that distinction is the useful part of the talk: the unit of value is the story. His examples show how National Geographic organised time, money and attention around it. Checked against later reporting, most of them hold up and one detail does not.
The amateur’s comet and what memory gets wrong
Griffin explains why photographs work with a story about a Delaware beach, four years before the talk, where his son was pulled toward a jetty by a rip current. He says he can still see the frozen moment: the rocks, the wave about to break, his son’s face. His son remembers it differently and says he stood on the shore yelling. The anecdote happens to match the research. In 2003, Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin asked 54 Duke students the day after the September 11 attacks to write down how they had heard the news, and to describe an ordinary event from the same days. They retested the students after one, six or 32 weeks. The details of both memories decayed at the same rate, yet vividness and confidence stayed high only for the dramatic one. The authors concluded that such memories are special in perceived accuracy, not in actual accuracy. Reading that against Griffin’s argument is my interpretation: a photograph matters because it fixes the details that confident memory loses.
The comet reached the magazine through Your Shot, a section of its website where, as Griffin describes it, anyone can submit pictures for possible publication. The April 2007 issue carries a page of Your Shot selections and invites readers to send in their own. Griffin says the quality can be amazing, but he does not conclude that amateurs can replace professionals. The difference he draws is consistency and the ability to tell a story.
Zakouma, an assignment that changed course
Photographer Nick Nichols went to Zakouma, a little-known wildlife sanctuary in Chad, to bring back a classic story about species in an exotic place. Automatic cameras took thousands of pictures, including a serval that tripped a beam and photographed itself. The assignment pivoted when Nichols and researcher Michael Fay collared the herd’s matriarch, named her Annie and followed her. According to Griffin, the herd was safe inside the park until the rains sent it out to feed, and Annie was killed outside it, along with 20 members of her herd, for ivory.
The magazine’s March 2007 story, “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma”, carried Fay’s text and Nichols’s photographs. Annie’s collar reported her position for three months in 2006, and a blogger who covered the launch noted that her track ends on 15 August. The magazine published that track as a Google Earth layer, alongside paths, animal sightings and poacher camps, so readers could follow her herd on a map. Fay told NPR that a herd of about 800 left the park and that within 24 hours 20 carcasses were found. Griffin’s reading is that the pictures moved readers from knowledge of a park to empathy for the elephants and the rangers.
What the numbers say about Zakouma afterwards
The story did not end the poaching. African Parks, the non-profit that took over management of Zakouma in 2010 at the Chadian government’s invitation, reports 4,350 elephants in 2002 and 454 in 2010. Fay told NPR in 2007 that the park held about 4,000, so counts differ by source and year and do not form a clean series. The factsheet says no elephant was poached inside the park between 2012 and 2014, that the population passed 550 at the end of 2017 and that 127 calves were counted in 2018. None of these sources credits the magazine’s story with the recovery, which they attribute to new management and law enforcement. What the sequence does show is that the pictures recorded a collapse that later counts confirm.
Dharavi and the case for staying in one place
Photographer Jonas Bendiksen proposed documenting every slum in the world. Griffin says the budget could not carry that and that a survey would show only a little of everything, so the magazine sent him to Dharavi, part of Mumbai, and let him stay. One place instead of a survey produced pictures of a community that works as a living part of the city, not a catalogue of bad conditions.
The urban premise holds. The UN Population Fund’s 2007 report projected that in 2008, for the first time, more than half of the world’s people would live in urban areas, and that the urban population of Africa and Asia would double in a generation. Bendiksen’s own account adds a wrinkle. In a 2009 interview he said the fastest-growing neighbourhoods are slums, that about a billion people live in them, and that Dharavi was once a rural village that Mumbai gradually swallowed. The wider ambition found another form: he lived for weeks or months in slums in Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta and Caracas, and the work became an exhibition and an Aperture book, The Places We Live. He describes it as a search for how people build dignity, not for extremes.
Overfishing, a method applied to a whole issue
National Geographic’s April 2007 issue ran a special report, The Global Fish Crisis, in three stories: the hunt for Mediterranean bluefin tuna (photographs by Randy Olson and Brian Skerry), New Zealand’s marine reserves (Skerry) and a Newfoundland village after the cod collapse (Joachim Ladefoged). Griffin describes Skerry swimming under a boat to photograph bycatch going overboard, and Olson photographing a market where the remains of filleted fish were sold locally while the best parts were exported. A caption in the same issue describes a comparable scene on Lake Victoria, where Nile perch fillets go mostly to Europe and some Tanzanians can afford only the carcasses. Griffin stresses that the magazine also wants to show a solution, which is why the New Zealand reserve is in the issue.
The framing leans on a scientific claim. Griffin calls the pattern fishing down the food chain, a phrase from a 1998 Science paper by Daniel Pauly and colleagues. It reported that the average trophic level of global catches fell between 1950 and 1994, as landings shifted from long-lived fish-eaters toward short-lived invertebrates and plankton-eaters, and it called present exploitation patterns unsustainable. The magazine itself admits the figures are contested: marine biologists differ on how far stocks have fallen, with some arguing 80 to 90 percent for many large fish and others saying less, though all agree that too many boats chase too few fish.
Nachtwey and a medical story with a human centre
James Nachtwey’s coverage of wounded American soldiers is the heaviest example in the talk. Griffin says it turned what could have been a medical-science story into one with a human dimension, following casualties from the battlefield through the field hospital and Germany to Walter Reed. The photographs ran in December 2006 with text by Neil Shea, under the title “The Heroes, the Healing”. Nachtwey came to it with his own history: in December 2003 a grenade thrown into a Humvee in Baghdad wounded him, and he later said he had been through that system from the wrong end.
Reader mail suggests the approach worked. The April 2007 issue says that story drew the most letters of the month. One writer, a surgical technician at Balad Air Base, said she first found the photographer a nuisance during a long surgery and later came to value what the pictures recorded. That is the effect Griffin describes: people responded to a story built around people.
A leopard seal, and a correction
The leopard seal is the talk’s light story, and it needs one fix. Paul Nicklen photographed a female about four meters long in Antarctica in February and March 2006 as she brought him penguins. The sequence took first prize in the nature stories category of the 2007 World Press Photo contest. The captions say she relaxed after several threat displays, offered the penguins and grew agitated over several days because he could not accept them, which matches Griffin’s account of her growing frustration.
The correction concerns the danger. Griffin says a researcher had been killed by a leopard seal a year earlier. The same captions date that attack, which killed British scientist Kirsty Brown, to 2003, a few years before Nicklen’s pictures. They add that the seals may not always be as aggressive as believed.
What a content team can take from the talk
Four habits follow from his examples, and they are editorial interpretation, not Griffin’s own list. Define the story before the shot list, and be ready to drop the plan when the subject changes it, as in Zakouma. Narrow the scope until it fits the budget, as with Dharavi in place of every slum on earth. Put a solution or a human angle beside the problem, as with the New Zealand reserve and the wounded soldiers. Treat data as part of the story, as the Google Earth layer did with Annie’s track.
Two limits apply. This is a 2008 talk by an insider presenting his own magazine’s best work, so the examples are selected successes, and the leopard seal date shows that even a polished account needs checking against the record. And a magazine that can place a photographer in one slum or one reserve for long periods works on a scale most content teams lack, so the transferable part is the method, not the budget.
Author:
Jan Bielik
CEO & Founder of Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency
This article is an original analysis supported by the sources cited below
How photography connects us
TED’s page for the talk, establishing the speaker, his role as National Geographic’s photo director, the TED2008 date and the talk’s stated subject; the talk’s content was reviewed from its full transcript.
Poachers Target Elephants in Chad Preserve
NPR’s 2007 interview with Michael Fay, confirming the March 2007 “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma” story, the photographer Michael Nichols, the herd of about 800 and the 20 carcasses found within 24 hours.
2007 Paul Nicklen NAS1-FL | World Press Photo
The contest’s record of the leopard seal photo story, giving its first prize in the nature category, the February–March 2006 dates, the four-meter female and the 2003 date of Kirsty Brown’s death.
2007 Michael Nichols NA1 | World Press Photo
The contest’s record of Nichols’s 2007 first-prize nature photograph, a serval on the banks of the Salamat river taken on 11 April 2006.
The Sacrifice
FOTO8’s 2007 review, establishing Nachtwey’s commission with Neil Shea for the December 2006 issue and his own wounding in a Baghdad grenade attack in 2003.
State of World Population 2007
The UN Population Fund’s report summary, projecting that in 2008 more than half of the world’s population would live in urban areas and that urban populations in Africa and Asia would double.
Fishing down marine food webs
The bibliographic record and abstract of the 1998 Pauly et al. paper in Science, documenting the decline in mean trophic level of catches from 1950 to 1994.
Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories
Talarico and Rubin’s 2003 Psychological Science study of 54 students, showing equal decay in consistency for flashbulb and everyday memories but lasting confidence only in the former.
National Geographic, April 2007
The issue’s text, giving the structure of The Global Fish Crisis report, the Lake Victoria caption, the debate over the size of stock declines, the Your Shot page and the reader letters on “The Heroes, the Healing”.
National Geographic tracks an elephant’s last days in Google Earth
A February 2007 post on the Google Earth layer built for “Ivory Wars”, including Annie’s three-month GPS track ending on 15 August.
Zakouma National Park
African Parks’ factsheet with elephant counts from 2002, 2010, 2017 and 2018, and the period without poaching inside the park.
New Grub Street
A 2009 interview with Jonas Bendiksen about The Places We Live, covering his stays in slums in four cities, his view of Dharavi’s origins and his estimate of slum populations.
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