‘A Desire to See the World’

Like many journalists, Jodi Cobb — the award-winning, 30-year mainstay National Geographic photographer — found her way into the line of work by possessing a simple character trait: “curiosity about what’s going on.”

“Every story I did would lead to another one because I would learn something that I didn’t know about and I thought, well, I don’t know about this, so I bet a lot of other people don’t either,” Cobb said while recalling a time where travel wasn’t as popular and small, high-resolution cameras weren’t in everyone’s pockets.

That insatiable cycle of asking and answering questions snowballed into a nearly half-century career marked by a series of “firsts,” capturing cultures largely unknown to the West and documenting societies on the brink of immense change.

By Lauren Frick