PhotographyCharles Convis
“My work aims to show and tell stories like this so that more people might be motivated to care, in the tradition of past photographer-conservationists like Ansel Adams.”
Charles studied to be a ranger-naturalist and worked for National Parks and the World Wildlife Fund at projects throughout Europe, Africa and Latin America. He came to Redlands in 1989 to help ESRI set up grant programs for parks, conservation and indigenous people.
He managed the programs for the next 30 years, including co-founding a new international society, co-authoring a conservation planning textbook, publishing numerous magazines, and receiving awards like “Landscape Practitioner of the Year”, from the International Society for Landscape Ecology.
Charles retired in 2022, in part to pursue a long-delayed passion for photography, that began when he spent the summer of 1978 working for Ansel Adams on a conservation plan for the Big Sur Region. What a long career in conservation taught him was that no matter how much you do to strengthen science, research and management, sometimes it’s still not enough to prevent greed, fear and ignorance from taking over and wiping away decades of hard work with the stroke of a pen. What Ansel understood, more than most, was the importance of imagery and story in establishing the emotional connection, that motivates people to care and act in protection of the sacred places that nature provides.
The photo of him is from a visit last year to the Mer du Glace glacier below Mont Blanc, which has a wonderful story of its own as the birthplace of Frankenstein – Mary Shelly visited here in 1816, and the stark landscape inspired her novel, credited as the beginning of science fiction.”
