Jasper Doest

About Jasper Doest

Sometimes a photograph only reveals its true story when you look a little longer.

Jasper Doest must have been about five years old when his mother handed him her Kodak Instamatic. It was a simple little camera, but it opened a door to a way of seeing the complexity of the world that has never left him.

Today, Doest works as a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. His work takes him all over the globe, to remote ecosystems and densely populated cities — from Central Africa to Antarctica. In Svalbard he once found himself standing a little too close to a polar bear. He walked hand in hand with a Japanese macaque through a busy streets of Tokyo. And one morning he woke up beside a flamingo he now considers family.

At first glance his photographs often seem to be about animals. But those who look a little longer discover that his images ultimately say something about ourselves. For Doest, the many encounters with other species aren’t simply isolated adventures, but clues — small moments in which it becomes visible how humans and other species are trying to inhabit the same world.
That question runs like a thread through his work. His visual stories explore how this shared landscape is constantly shaped by culture, economics and the instinct to survive. From storks living off our waste at landfills in Southern Europe to farmers and elephants sharing land in Zambia, from sacred monkeys in Japan to communities in the Carpathian Mountains searching for ways to coexist with wolves and bears.

With a background in ecology, Doest approaches these stories as part of one larger system in which nothing stands alone. In his lectures he combines powerful photography with personal experiences from the field, showing how choices made in one place can have unexpected consequences somewhere else — for ecosystems, for societies, and ultimately for ourselves.

Jasper Doest is an internationally acclaimed photographer. His accolades include four World Press Photo Awards and the title Environmental Photographer of the Year awarded by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. He is also a Senior Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers.

In his talks, Jasper Doest takes audiences on a visual journey through the world as he has come to know it through photography. Through powerful imagery, personal stories and a touch of humor, he invites audiences to look at the world with fresh eyes. His presentations move effortlessly from a moment of laughter to a moment of silence — when an image or story suddenly reveals something about ourselves and the choices we make in a world where nothing exists in isolation.