Cristina Mittermeier chose an indirect route to a glamorous career as a global conservation photographer.
She customarily schlepped her photo gear up a mountain as she tried to keep up with a group of men that included her husband, Russ, a photojournalist who is president of Conservation International in Washington.
Cristina unconsciously adopted what she says is a male-oriented tendency to “carry every lens that was ever built, and try to carry it up the mountain.”
But she is small, and camera lenses are heavy.
“I was left behind with the people who would carry my equipment,” Mittermeier said. “I would talk to them, share food with them, and take their pictures.”
When the men came back and saw her pictures, she said, they would ask “How did you get that [photo]?”
“I would say, ‘I shot it while you guys were chasing monkeys,’” Mittermeier said.
That is how she broke into a male-dominated field built on the precept that “The first limitation to being a woman photographer is how much you can carry,” she said. “It is frustrating being a girl.” But being a woman worked in her favor, too, she said.
Instinctively, she empathized with the people she photographed so much that they opened their lives to her.
When she and her husband came back from an assignment to photograph an Indian village in Brazil, some of Cristina’s negatives got mixed up with Russ’s. “All my pictures were credited to my husband, “ she said.
That was the episode that convinced her to enroll in photography courses to learn the technical side of photograph. She had instinctively grasped the intuitive, artistic side.
“My field is nature photography,” Mittermeier said. “There are NO women in the field. Or all too few.”
Cristina Mittermeier’s photos are distinctive, particularly when they are grouped with those shot by the other men who venture into the far reaches of the world to bring back strong images of nature, and nature being abused.
“Russ has the stomach to go and shoot the poachers with the dead gorillas,” Cristina said.
“I am a people photographer. I love portraits. But I am still going to cross the finish line” by establishing herself in a competitive and demanding field, she said.
As a writer, she’s already done that, completing several high-quality books on topics related to conservation.
As a small girl growing up near Mexico City, she read “The Population Bomb” by Paul Relish. Its influence shaped her life.
She studied to be a fisheries manager, but the first time she went out in a shrimping trawler, she saw dead sea turtles and other magnificent forms of wildlife mixed among the shrimp captured in nets.
“I realized there was something wrong,” she said. “I didn’t have enough words” to say what it was, so she turned to photography, she said.
Now she combines words and photographs to carry her message. “An elephant going extinct in a jungle in Africa can affect us directly,” she said.
Mittermeier is presently cooperating with one of her earliest role models, marine biologist Sylvia Earle, on a book about “wildlife spectacles;” -- large groupings of species such as jellyfish, flamingos, and horseshoe crabs.
She wants to demonstrate the ecological impact of losing one of those congregations, she said. The costs are “huge. They are enormous,” she said. But special wildlife populations are non-renewable. As Mittermeier explains it, “You cannot take some things back to Wal-Mart,” she said.
“Sometimes we feel defeated. We have to build a structure big enough to educate people and governments.’”
“I am very optimistic. All we need is money and political will.”
A collection of Mittermeier’s photographs is on display through March at the Great Falls Community Library, 9830 Georgetown Pike. It is sponsored by the Friends of the Great Falls Library. For information, call 703-757-8560.
Mittermeier’s latest book is on sale at Gilette’s in the Great Falls Shopping Center for $65.