Robert Clark

Robert Clark (born c. 1961) is an American photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a longtime contributor to National Geographic, for which he has photographed stories on science and natural history subjects including evolution, feathered dinosaur fossils, and biomimetics. Earlier in his career, he photographed the Permian High School football team for Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights. His photographs of the September 11 attacks, taken from his Brooklyn rooftop, received a World Press Photo award in 2002. Early life and education Clark grew up in Hays, Kansas, where he received his first camera as a birthday gift from his older brother, who worked as the sports editor at The Hays Daily. His brother assigned him to photograph a high school basketball game, and Clark produced the lead photo for the sports page. Clark has spoken about struggling with dyslexia during his school years and finding his direction through photography. He graduated from Hays High School in 1979 and went on to study photojournalism at Kansas State University, where he was a classmate of Pete Souza, who later served as Chief Official White House Photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama. Career After college, Clark worked as a newspaper photographer for seven years at The Ogden Standard-Examiner, The Cincinnati Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked under photo editor Gary Haynes alongside photographers including Larry Price and Sarah Leen. He shot the magazine's first digital photographic cover in 2003.

In 2003, Anne Wilkes Tucker of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston commissioned Clark to document the inaugural season of the Houston Texans NFL franchise. The project was exhibited at the museum and published as First Down Houston: Birth of an NFL Franchise (2003); the museum holds photographs from the project in its permanent collection. Clark also served as principal photographer for First Lady Hillary Clinton's book An Invitation to the White House (2000), In 2016, Clark directed and photographed short films and commercials for sportswear brand Russell Athletic's "Settle Your Score" campaign, created with the Kansas City advertising agency Barkley, which documented six high school football teams that had narrowly lost state championship games and drew on his Friday Night Lights work. The campaign received a Gold award at the 2017 Clio Sports Awards.

On September 11, 2001, after seeing television coverage of the first plane striking the World Trade Center, Clark went to the roof of his apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and photographed United Airlines Flight 175 approaching and crashing into the South Tower using a motor-driven camera. Time published the images as a double-page spread in its special edition on the attacks, and the Associated Press distributed them internationally. Evolution: A Visual Record (photographer; foreword by David Quammen, text by Joseph Wallace, Phaidon Press, 2016) Friday Night Lives (photographer, University of Texas Press, 2021)