Volkmar Wentzel

Volkmar Kurt Wentzel (February 8, 1915 – May 10, 2006) was an American photographer and cinematographer. He worked for nearly 50 years for the National Geographic Society as a darkroom technician and photographer, and his professional and personal work was highly acclaimed. He was one of the first people to take photographs of then-little known country of Nepal, and was noted for documenting the final years of many of the traditional tribal kingdoms of Africa.

Early life Wentzel was born February 8, 1915, in Dresden, Germany. Volkmar Wentzel later said his father would sometimes punish his sons by making them take a "time-out" in his photographic darkroom, but that Volkmar soon learned to love the space. "This was a terrifying, almost traumatic experience, until by accident, with the flick of the darkroom's amber-red inspection light switch, the magic world of photography, my lifetime love, was revealed," he later said. They dropped out of high school and departed Binghamton in February 1934, arriving in D.C. after three days of walking and hitchhiking. staying at the colony were the painter Robert Gates and his wife, the physician David Lindsay Watson, the psychiatrist Sigurd Graven and his wife, and the former Latvian diplomat Arved Kundzin.

Washington, D.C. Encouraged by Roosevelt's purchase, Once more, he rented a room in a townhouse on Lafayette Square.

Returning to his job after the war, Wentzel received a number of important assignments. One of his first assignments was to conduct a photographic survey of India. He crossed into Tibet on foot and by animal. While in Nepal, he also shot a motion picture, "Exploration in Nepal," which was the first film to be taken in that region. He later traveled widely around the globe, photographing people and landscapes in Angola, Cameroon, Cape Horn, Mali, Mozambique, Newfoundland, Norway, South Africa, and Swaziland. By the time he retired, he was one of the magazine's most widely traveled photographers. Not all of his travels took him far from home, however. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Wentzel was one of a small number of photographers and reporters who realized that the president's body would arrive at the White House early in the morning of November 23. Wentzel photographed the arrival of Jacqueline Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at about 4:20 AM as they and a Marine honor guard escorted the president's coffin from the ambulance into the White House.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Wentzel became an advocate for saving, preserving, and archiving National Geographic's photographic negatives, plates, and prints, many of which were being lost due to damage (such as improper storage or pests) or because untrained staff didn't realize their value and destroyed them to obtain filing space. and put in charge of the preservation and archive effort—which helped save more than 10 million images and artworks. In 1981, he and his wife purchased farm and farmhouse (built in 1868) near his original property in Aurora. His prints have also been displayed in numerous private galleries around the world, and have sold for thousands of dollars each. His 1958 photograph of a quadrille on New Year's Eve at the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C., won first place from WHNPA. WHNPA also gave this image a first prize.

Wentzel's work is highly acclaimed. Fellow National Geographic photographer Thomas Y. Canby called him an innovative, brilliant, "great man". Jane Livingston, chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, said his career was a "prolonged, quiet unfolding of genius." "History Awakens at Harpers Ferry" (National Geographic, March 1957). "Life in Walled-Off Berlin" (National Geographic, June 1961) "Mozambique: Land of the Good People" (National Geographic, August 1964) The couple had three children: Cecilia, Christina, and Peter. Wentzel died of a heart attack on May 10, 2006, at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.