Volkmar Wentzel

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Volkmar K. Wentzel (born 1915 - died May 10, 2006), was a German-born American photographer for 48 years for the National Geographic. He helped preserve the magazine's extensive photography collection.

[edit] Early life

Born in Dresden, Germany, he started taking photographs after he made a pinhole camera with the help of his father, a photo-chemist and amateur photographer. The family emigrated to the United States in 1926 to escape the burdens of post-World War I Germany.

[edit] Career

In 1935, Wentzel worked as a darkroom technician and news photographer at Underwood and Underwood.

In 1937, after taking a collection of night photographs of Washington, D.C., he was hired as a darkroom assistant at the National Geographic Society. His D.C. night photographs were later published in book form under the title Washington by Night: Vintage Photographs from the 30's (with Judith Waldrop Frank) (Starwood Publishing, 1992).

In 1941, Wentzel enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He helped to pioneer an aerial charting system for plotting military targets and served as a photo interpretation officer.

After the war, he traveled by freighter to India, where he used an old army ambulance as a darkroom and mobile headquarters for a 40,000-mile photo survey of the sub-continent. To reach western Tibet, he crossed the Himalayas on foot. His color photographs and motion pictures taken during the last days of the British Raj were among the first of little-known Nepal and the last of India’s feudal splendor.

Wentzel covered postwar Berlin and countries rimming the Atlantic Ocean from Spitzbergen to the Cape of Good Hope, and from Cape Horn to Newfoundland. He traveled in the Cameroons, Mali, Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland. He documented the last of the African kingdoms and of vanished tribal life. His photograph of a New Year’s Eve quadrille at the Spanish Embassy was awarded first prize in the color class by the White House News Photographers Association in 1958.