One photographer’s quest to reveal every animal on Earth

The Photo Ark is photographer Joel Sartore’s crusade to document the complete spectrum of our planet’s animal kingdom, one species at a time. That makes Sartore the modern-day Noah of this almighty zoological project, supported by the National Geographic Society, that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary. And if you know him, this fits. Sartore has got a secular, science-driven kinship with his predecessor: Noah didn’t favor any of God’s creatures for cosmetic reasons, and neither does Sartore. His operation, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, just does its job, chipping away at its task, gathering up all of the species, great and small, splendid and unsightly, as many as it possibly can, before it’s too late.

The first animal that Sartore brought aboard the Photo Ark, so to speak, back in 2006, was a naked mole rat—a bald, bucktoothed rodent that he photographed in the kitchen of Lincoln Children’s Zoo. Such a humble, homely creature turned out to be an apt start, says Sartore, a National Geographic Explorer. Of the more than 18,000 animal images he’s accumulated since, mainly of creatures living in sanctuaries or under human care, the vast majority “are just not on anybody’s radar. They’re not polar bears or tigers. They’re minnows and they’re sparrows and they’re things that live high up in the trees or in the soil. They’re not things that get photographed much.”

(The National Geographic Society funds Explorer Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark project, which aims to document every species living in the world’s zoos, aquariums, and wildlife sanctuaries.)

For every far-flung voyage to snap a photograph of, say, some majestic bird of paradise in New Guinea, Sartore and his scrappy team will make multiple stops along the way to shoot an insect under a porch light or a moth that happened to land on someone’s shoulder. Every marathon trip is a sprint, because many of the Ark’s inclusions are just barely staving off extinction. Some vanished soon after Sartore reached their sole survivor, like Toughie, a Panamanian tree frog about the size of a fist, that lived to be at least 12 years old in a silver trailer called the FrogPOD that was perma-parked at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Toughie’s species, the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, along with dozens of others in the mountains of Panama, has been wiped out over the past 20 years by something called the chytrid fungus. Toughie escaped to Atlanta, but his species’ unique mating call vanished from the night chorus back in Panama before anyone could record it. A sound—a type of communication—was gone forever.

On the day of Toughie’s shoot, Sartore asked his caretaker, an amphibian conservationist named Mark Mandica, how it felt “to be in charge of the last of something. And he said, ‘Every morning when I go into work, Joel, I’m sick to my stomach because I’m afraid this is going to be the day.’ ” One rainy morning a few months later, Mandica had just arrived outside the FrogPOD when he heard a sound he’d never heard before—“like a dog barking,” Sartore says—and he knew it could only be one thing. “Frogs like to call and breed in the rain,” Sartore explains, “and it could probably smell the wet air, hear the rain.” Mandica managed to record about 10 seconds on his phone. Less than two years later, in 2016, Toughie died. The previous year, his image from the Photo Ark had been projected onto the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, along with an audio broadcast of his barking call, for an audience of the pope. It’s a tale that Sartore returns to often in lectures and at conferences and fundraisers as the Photo Ark’s legend has grown in the conservation community. It’s also a mantra—an orienting rationale of sorts for the entire project—that he repeats just as often: Because this is what extinction looks like.

Every image in the Ark represents Sartore’s best effort to put paddles to our hearts, to jolt them by confronting us with irrevocable death. He knows just how hard it is to deny the soul of a creature when it’s staring right into yours.

One plot point in Noah’s story that the Bible really skates past is how exactly he went about tracking down all those distant species and managing the sheer logistics of getting everyone aboard before the weather turned foul. If Sartore’s version is any clue, it must’ve been quite an operation.

Sartore’s core Ark team includes his family. Son Cole, 33, will take over when his knees give out, he says. For now, Cole does tons of technical work—building out sets, rigging lights, testing shots, capturing video—as well as the occasional shoot (“usually the animals he finds most interesting,” Sartore says). His wife, Kathy, pitches in with the thicket of scheduling and also functions as a sort of external hard drive for Sartore’s decades of travel memories. Among other staff, he employs a database manager in Lincoln and a couple of self-trained taxonomists and self-described “zoo nerds.”

Pierre de Chabannes, a former drummer and wildlife photographer based in France, joined the Ark team in 2015 after a single record-setting day of shooting at a bird sanctuary outside Paris: During the marathon session, he helped Sartore identify and photograph 51 different species of birds, the most Sartore had logged in one go. “The aviaries [at this location] are made only for displaying a huge number of birds,” de Chabannes says, “[so] there’s no names on them at all.” He wound up spotting each species by sight, then cross-checking for matches against the wish list on Sartore’s laptop. “I kept birds coming for, like, seven hours,” he says. “I didn’t even have dinner.”

On the drive back to Paris, while de Chabannes was behind the wheel, “Joel was flashing his computer screen at me whenever I had a little bit of time, and I would tell him the scientific name and conservation status for all those species.” Sartore stayed up until dawn double-checking de Chabannes’s memory and didn’t spot a single mistake. The next morning, he asked de Chabannes to come aboard the Ark as one of its taxonomists.

But what really keeps Sartore’s calendar full with shoots for six months out of the year is his staggering global network of sources and contacts. Name any species of animal you want to find—Sartore knows a guy, or a gal. The names of institutions in cities worldwide come tumbling out of him in conversation.

Sartore’s network is the human architecture that keeps the Photo Ark sailing onward, but he assembled it long before the idea occurred to him, over the course of 17 years working for National Geographic. The project began as a bittersweet by-product of family hardship: In 2006, Kathy was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the treatment required seven months of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries. The Sartores had three young kids, 11, nine, and two. Joel wasn’t going anywhere. Already he’d been feeling a gnawing sense of futility about the work he was doing, the seed of something you can hear more palpably in his voice now—a hint of exasperation that still, after all this time, so few people are seriously reckoning with what’s at stake.

During those first few months of his wife’s treatment, while he was at home caring for his family, his thoughts kept turning to John James Audubon, the famed ornithologist, who’d painted several species of birds that soon went extinct, and now those paintings are the only documentation we have left. One day it struck him: What if he made his own version of Audubon’s paintings, a series of portraits, a single image for each animal? Like an ark. An idea to keep him busy—to keep him sane, productive—became a passion project, then a full-time occupation, then a life’s calling.

Now, at 64, two decades into the work, he’s thinking about how to keep it going with so much left to be done. Old species go extinct, and sometimes new ones splinter off or sprout up. Eighteen thousand photographs is a drop in a bottomless bucket. It helps, though, that the project is a global institution now. Everyone in the conservation world knows about the Photo Ark and its potency in the fight against extinction.

And every so often, the Ark shows up just in time to be a savior. Sandra Sneckenberger, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based in Vero Beach, Florida, had spent years trying to rally support for the imperiled Florida grasshopper sparrow—an ordinary brown bird from afar, she says, but “a work of art” up close. Meanwhile, the sentinel species’ numbers kept dropping, at one point as low as about 75 individuals, and “just pennies were being spent. It just wasn’t getting any traction.” Out of desperation, she emailed Sartore. He replied within five minutes.

Over more than two decades with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Sneckenberger has worked so often with Sartore that she jokes she’s the “Florida branch” of the Photo Ark. The sparrow was one of their earliest collaborations. Within a year of the shoot at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, she says, her team received more than one million dollars in funding to rescue the sparrow, and its plight even reached the cover of Audubon magazine. “We [are] doing captive breeding, genetics—all these things that were absolutely not possible,” she says. “Without [Joel], I’m sure that there would be no Florida grasshopper sparrow.”

Shortly after the calendar turned to 2026, Sartore and the core Ark team departed for a three-week trip across Australia, from Alice Springs Desert Park in the center of the outback to a lab in Hobart, Tasmania, collecting animals at their standard sprint-against-the-clock pace. “We reached out to 135 locations,” Sartore says, “and we ended up going to 36.” At some stage along the way, the Photo Ark crossed another milestone—species number 18,000—but when you’re moving so fast and logging so many animals, things get fuzzy. (Which creature was the landmark photo? Does it really matter?) And Sartore isn’t above putting his thumb on the scale in order to lend some attention to a species whose existence might depend upon it.

And so, at some point it was decided: Photo Ark entry number 18,000 would be the critically endangered red handfish, a reef species decimated by habitat destruction. “[It] walks on the ocean floor, little bitty thing”—about three inches long—“like a frogfish or scorpion fish,” Sartore says. “It’s really cool-looking and cute as can be.” But only about 520 remain, and many of them are at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, which is where one of them posed for Sartore, scampering along the bottom of a little plexiglass container. An image in the Photo Ark can’t offer the same divine reassurance that a ride aboard Noah’s ark provided. It’s more like a Hail Mary—one last long shot. But he chose the red handfish because this is what survival looks like.

So much of the Ark’s mission is a race to capture something before it’s lost, but every now and then, Sartore’s photographs represent a rediscovery, a chance at rebirth—lost but now found. Like the Lord Howe Island stick insect, a four-to-five-inch “tree lobster” native to the sheer cliff face of Ball’s Pyramid, about 500 miles northeast of Sydney. Long believed extinct, the Lord Howe stick insect was miraculously rediscovered by a team of researchers in 2001 during a frightful night climb and later reintroduced to the world through Sartore’s camera lens. Or consider another coproduction with Sneckenberger: the Florida bonneted bat, which has thick round ears and a snout. It looks more like a bulldog than a bat. Some had feared the creature to be extinct as recently as 1979, but Sartore’s photograph for the Ark, also taken this year, is visual testament of the bat’s fragile resurrection.

And what about species number 19,000? Or the next major milestone, number 20,000? Sartore keeps a mental list of animals he and his colleagues often refer to as their “drop-everything” species. In other words, they’d drop everything in their lives for the opportunity to meet them in the flesh. Number two on his list: the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, a blue-faced, puffy-lipped primate (definitely go look it up) native to northern Vietnam. And number one: the Javan rhino, found only in Indonesia’s Ujung Kulon National Park on the far western tip of the island of Java.

“There’s been 60 or less my entire life,” he says. The Indonesian government, though, has been making noises about launching a breeding center, a development with drop-everything potential. “So we shall see. I’m patient. We’re willing to wait years to get access to animals. At the Photo Ark,” he says, “we play the long game.”

Sartore estimates that even at his breathless pace, banking a reasonably representative sample of the Earth’s animal species will take at least another 25 years. Sounds like he and Cole have their work cut out for them.

Among the more than 18,000 animals that Joel Sartore has photographed are some of the most threatened species on Earth. During the 20-year project, some have disappeared, others are rapidly slipping toward extinction. Here are a small number of the ever growing category of vulnerable animals—photographed with Sartore’s urgent hope that portraits might galvanize protection.