Ami Vitale  can attest to the transformative power of photography. When she first picked up a camera as a teenager, it was not with the dream of one day shooting stories for National Geographic, though that is what she would end up doing. Rather, she began taking pictures to overcome what she says was “a fear of the world, and people.”

“I was incredibly introverted, very shy, and I found that the amazing thing about photography was that it forced me to be around people and gave me a reason to go out in the world,” she says.

She found out just how far photography could take her in 2000, while living in a remote village in Guinea Bissau, a West African nation largely overlooked by the world’s media. She was sharing a mud hut with four women from the Fulani tribe, experiencing their world and learning, she says, “how the majority of the people on the planet live.” Vitale had already seen a great deal of the planet shooting news stories for wire services and as a freelancer, but her trip to Guinea Bissau was something different: Supported by a newly-established grant from the Alexia Foundation, she settled down for six months, spending her days learning the Fulani tongue, carrying water and firewood for miles on her head and cooking on open fires. “It was,” she says, “really hard.”

In the end she had a case of malaria and a new outlook on what a photojournalism career could be. “I realized that if I wanted to cover anything, I should spend time to understand it. And to do that,” she says, “you have to go and live in a place and commit to it. You just go live the story.”

People Stories and Nature Stories

At her website, Vitale refers to her career in photojournalism as a “journey,” and that’s apt. She’s been to 85 countries, documenting life in Tibet, Tanzanians living with lions, and the torn landscape of American coal country. Her work has appeared in Time, Geo and other magazines, including National Geographic, where she is a contract photographer. Many of her stories focus on conservation issues, including an ongoing personal project about a small group of Northern White Rhinos, the last of their species, being relocated to Kenya from a zoo in the Czech Republic. The work was singled out recently in the 2015 World Press Photo  competition.

She is currently working on two stories, one of which is a study of Sri Lanka, a country of great natural beauty that emerged from a murderous 26-year civil war and is now, she says, facing an uncertain future. She spent six weeks on the National Geographic assignment earlier this year and will go back to the country after upcoming elections.

She describes her other long-term project, about the re-wilding of baby pandas, as “the best story in the world,” in part because, as she puts it, "baby pandas can reduce even the hardest person to mush." The work involved a trip last year  to the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda at Wolong, where Vitale, along with a film crew from PBS and National Geographic, documented pandas being prepared for the wild. The result is the new public television series Earth: A New Wild.

Vitale notes that all of her stories about nature and wildlife are really stories about people. “And,” she adds, “all my stories about people are really about nature.” She came to that understanding after years spent covering conflicts around the globe, including the Kosovo War of the late 1990s. “I realized,” she says, “that all these things are often connected to nature and we don’t realize it. Often the conflicts I was covering were about resources.”

Photojournalism's Evolving Mission

Her start in photojournalism was not as a photographer, but as a picture editor at Associated Press, a job she fell into after studying International Relations the the University of North Carolina. At AP, she says, she “learned how the news industry works, where the holes are, and how I wanted to fit in and add something.”

The holes, she says, were the lack of photo stories that explained issues in depth. “Sometimes I felt like I was working at McDonald’s, taking orders and shoveling pictures,” she says. After deciding she needed a change, Vitale moved to Prague, where she’d taught English at age 19, and began shooting pictures for a small business newspaper. Then the war in the Balkans began. “It was right in my backyard, so I started making these trips there. That’s where I cut my teeth in photojournalism,” she says. She went on to cover conflicts in Gaza and elsewhere, then decided to get away again and went to live in India. She stayed there for four years, covering the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, among other stories.

“That’s when I decided I was not going to be just a photojournalist but a storyteller,” she says.

Her career, and life, changed when she received the Alexia Foundation grant in 2000. The grant was established to support photography exploring social injustice and cultural understanding, and in her proposal Vitale imagined a project that would look closely at the lives of impoverished villagers in Guinea Bissau as the country emerged from a civil war.

“My sister had been in the Peace Corps there, so that’s how I knew about these people,” she says, “but my story changed and developed as I was doing it. That was the moment when I transitioned from covering hard news to really thinking about things. Alexia was fundamental in that transformation. It was the first time somebody gave me the opportunity to go to a place without the pressure of deadlines or editors telling me what they needed.”

In a sense, Vitale was at the forefront of a larger transformation that would change the nature and mission of photojournalism over the next 15 years. As magazines began feeling the effects of the Internet, many cut their photography budgets. But while that door was closing, another opened: More organizations, such as the Alexia Foundation, began offering grants to photographers to pursue stories that traditional media might not see as newsworthy, or newsstand worthy. The result has been an explosion of documentary projects that, says Vitale, “really explore and humanize issues and help people understand them.”

Learning to Slow Down

She was ahead of another trend when she went back to school at the University of Miami in 2009 to study filmmaking. Vitale has since produced a number of multimedia projects, including one  examining the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. She has also begun working with Ripple Effect Images, a group of photographers, filmmakers, writers and scientists who create photo and video stories for organizations that aid women in developing countries whose lives have been affected in some way by climate change.

“I became a better photographer by learning to shoot film,” Vitale says. “I learned to be more patient. You can shoot a photo in a 60th of a second, but with video you have to sit out each shot for at least a minute. It made me realize that I was moving too fast, that I need to slow down and really look at things.”

The hardest part of her life, she says, is all the travel. “I have a relationship, and he’s like, ‘Can you stay home?’ But I think I’m just genetically hardwired differently,” Vitale says. When not traveling, her home is Missoula, MT, a place where she can see firsthand the connectedness between people and nature. “There aren’t many people in Montana, and nature is all around you, so people here have a fundamental understanding and respect for the landscape,” she says. A story she shot for the Nature Conservancy  on sustainable ranching, which was later selected for the American Photography 30  annual, was, she says, “a way of getting to know this place better.”

“I took that early fear of the world and turned it into an obsession for being out in the world,” Vitale says. “I’m most comfortable when I’m continuing to learn and being uncomfortable. I like being uncomfortable.”