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Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world. Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.
If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
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Armed with a background in marine biology, Cristina Mittermeier turned her focus to images — realizing they were a better tool to tell the story of humans and nature. At the heart of her work, Cristina amplifies the idea that people and nature are not isolated from each other, but are inexorably connected. In 2005, Cristina founded the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) — a prestigious team of photographers who believe that awe-inspiring photography is a powerful force for the environment.
Focusing on the relationship between nature’s most spectacular and endangered wildlife and Earth’s vanishing traditional human cultures, Cristina and iLCP aim to replace environmental indifference with a new culture of stewardship and passion for our beautiful planet.
You changed your career path quite radically from a marine biologist/biochemical engineer to a conservation photographer. How did that happen – was there a defining moment at some point that pushed you to redefine yourself or was it a more gradual transformation?
I had always been interested in the communications aspects of conservation, but after having published several articles in the scientific literature, I realized people don’t have access to that kind of information and I wanted to find a more expressive way of engaging larger audiences. I stumbled unto photography by accident, when some of my images, snapshots really, were published by a museum. When I saw the impact that those images had on the people who viewed them, I realized that I had found a better storytelling tool for conservation.
The Conversation 