Photography is Pascal Maitre’s medium—he loves the magic of photographs and is fascinated by color. But above all, he sees himself as a reporter. The key to his work, he says, is the human connection. He tells me the photographs themselves are easy to take. Gaining access to people is the hard part. And, “Sans les gens il n’y a rien—without people, there is nothing,” he says.

We are talking in my office at National Geographic headquarters, going back and forth between his native French and my English. It is May 2014 and Maitre is in D.C. for the final review of his story “Lifeblood,” a chronicle of a voyage by boat along the Congo River, which is coming