This Amazing Archive of Animal Photography Reveals 18,000 Species and Counting. Here's How Joel Sartore Built His 'Photo Ark'
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Science | August 7, 2026 3:15 p.m.
This Amazing Archive of Animal Photography Reveals 18,000 Species and Counting. Here’s How Joel Sartore Built His ‘Photo Ark’
For 20 years, the National Geographic photographer has showcased Earth’s animals in a series of striking images that make even the tiniest creatures look immense
A koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, with her babies at Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, 2011<br>Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
A koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, with her babies at Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, 2011<br>Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
The naked mole-rat was first. On August 9, 2006, at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Nebraska, Joel Sartore focused his camera on the little rodent with big front teeth and snapped pictures.
As a longtime field photographer for National Geographic magazine, Sartore had always been interested in the natural world and cared about its creatures, big and small. But those photographs of the mole-rat sent him in a new direction: It was the inaugural species of Sartore’s Photo Ark project documenting the variety and charisma of the planet’s animal species. For the Ark, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, Sartore and his team travel the globe making stunning portraits of animals as a testament to their existence in the face of biodiversity loss.
An octopus, Octopoda, at the Dallas World Aquarium, Texas, 2013
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
In late 2005, Sartore’s wife, Kathy, was diagnosed with breast cancer. He stayed home to care for her and their three children while she was sick and being treated. “That year at home gave me a new perspective on the shortness and fragility of life,” he wrote. The idea for the portrait collection, in which the beauty and vulnerability of animal life is displayed, came to him then.
Kathy made a full recovery. “She’s just fine to this day,” Sartore tells me during a video call on a Monday in July, as coffee brews in the background. “She was the one making the coffee just now.”
Twenty years after those first images, Sartore is still taking pictures, his digital Ark filling with fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals and insects. When we spoke, he had just spent the previous night and the morning photographing insects in the Minnesota Northwoods. He typically takes pictures of multiple species per day. On August 3, the National Geographic Society announced that Sartore has photographed his 18,000th species for the Photo Ark—the critically endangered red handfish, a thumb-size animal that walks on its fins along the seafloor. Sartore visited a red handfish breeding lab and set up a photo tank on a tabletop. “We put one in our little fish tank, and it kind of walks around,” he says. After getting photos with two or three fish, “we were probably done in under an hour.”
A critically endangered female red handfish, Thymichthys politus, at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
Through his pictures, Sartore’s goal is to show “all animals that you can see with the naked eye,” he says, from tree dwellers to soil burrowers to ocean swimmers. He wants to “get people to care while there’s still time to save habitats and all these other species.” But if the threatened creatures he photographs aren’t saved, his images at least document that they were here and won’t be entirely forgotten.
Sartore has taken pictures of various extinct-in-the-wild species, including the Guam kingfisher and the Monterrey platyfish, which survive only through efforts to care for them in captivity. He even photographed a preserved young thylacine, a long-extinct carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
The animals he photographs are usually in human care at zoos, aquariums, wildlife sanctuaries and science laboratories. This ensures that Sartore will have better access to the animals and that they’ll be accustomed to being around people.
A springbok mantis, Miomantis caffra, at Auckland Zoo, New Zealand, 2013
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
An African leopard, Panthera pardus pardus, at the Houston Zoo, Texas, 2011
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
An African slender snouted crocodile, Mecistops cataphractus, photographed in Tampa, Florida, 2012
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
A ribboned pipefish, Haliichthys taeniophorus, at the Dallas World Aquarium, Texas, 2013
Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark
His portraits are usually set against both black and white backdrops so that he can take close-ups in good lighting and depict true color with no distractions: “Just the animal, nothing else,” he says. “You can look them in the eye, really see...