Meet Noppadol Paothong “I’ve been watching Noppadol’s rise for a long time,” Jackson Hole–based wildlife photographer Tom Mangelsen told the NMWA’s annual magazine Call of the Wild. “Sure I admire his skill with a camera and the compositional design of his images, but most of all I respect the feel and knowledge he has for the animals he portrays. Great photos either have heart or they don’t.” Growing up in Thailand, Paothong did not think about wildlife photography as a career. “My mom always knew I would be something different. I wasn’t that typical kid in the classroom; I wanted to go outside and fish or look at insects,” he says. Wildlife photography wasn’t on his radar even after he came to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student in 1993. “I did not plan on living here. My mom wanted me to get educated and learn English and then go back home and help,” he says. After studying for a couple of years in northern Idaho, Paothong moved to Missouri and, he says, “I just fell in love with the landscape there.” He graduated from Missouri Southern State University with a degree in communications in 2001. Before he had even graduated, he was working as a photojournalist at the Joplin Globe and doing wildlife photography in his spare time. It was while at the Globe that his editor sent him on an assignment to a small town in southwest Missouri to photograph greater prairie chickens. “I immediately felt in love with these birds, and it was the beginning of my obsession to photograph
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all prairie grouse species across the U.S., from the West (sage-grouse and sharp-tailed grouse) to southern Texas (endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken) to Martha’s Vineyard (extinct heath hen).” That year, Paothong started work on his first book, Save the Last Dance. He thinks it was because of his commitment to this book—this is the one he worked on for eleven years—that the Missouri Department of Conservation hired him as a staff photographer in 2006. “It showed the depth and level of my commitment for a long-term project,” he says. Paothong has been with the department ever since, shooting more than 160 covers for its monthly magazine, Missouri Conservationist, which publishes about 500,000 copies of every issue. “It isn’t just a dream job, but it is the best for me as it allows me to explore every corner of Missouri and learn to appreciate the state,” he says. “Even Audubon doesn’t have staff photographers.” With Icon of the West published and the exhibit based on it traveling to museums around the West, Paothong is looking for his next big project. “I’m actually more of an insect person [than birds] and have been working with a lot of pollinator species. It’s a different direction, and it doesn’t mean I feel like I’ve finished with sagegrouse. I am still photographing them, too. I think that, with all of the years I’ve photographed them, I’ve only scratched the surface.” npnaturephotography.com
Male greater sage-grouse gather on a lek in southern Wyoming.
They’re iconic.” More of these iconic birds live in Wyoming than anywhere else in the world, and many of Paothong’s images in Sage Grouse (the exhibit and the book) were taken in the state. “As a wildlife art museum, it’s one of our goals to educate visitors about topics that affect wildlife and our natural world,” says Tammi Hanawalt, Ph.D, curator of art at the National Museum of Wildlife Art (NMWA). “With Sage Grouse: Icon of the West, we have an exhibit about a species that, if their habitat is destroyed, it affects the whole ecosystem of the surrounding area, which our museum is right in the middle of. [The NMWA] seemed like the perfect place for this exhibit.” The Sage Grouse exhibit features about sixty of Paothong’s photographs. “I selected images with the goal of telling a story,” he says. “Each image leads to the next one. There are shots of males at leks
