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American Morning

National Geographic's 100 Best Pictures

Aired November 23, 2001 - 08:49   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Some of the world's most compelling photographs have been shot by "National Geographic." Well, that magazine has now published its 100 best pictures. Now, that must have been an incredibly difficult task, probably one that was also a lot of fun.

From Washington, "National Geographic" Editor Bill Allen joins us. He's going to tell us about the selection process and some of these photos, as well. Good morning. How are you?

BILL ALLEN, EDITOR, "NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC": Good morning. I'm just great.

HARRIS: I've got to tell you, I'm pretty envious of you. Were you, did you have the task of going through all these photos to pick the top 100?

ALLEN: Well, there were several of us that did. We have a staff of just crack illustrations editors and layout and design folks, and we all worked on this together, and we really worked hard, as you can imagine, going from 10 million down to 100.

HARRIS: I can imagine, yes. And I don't think I've ever seen a bad picture in "National Geographic." Let's take a look at some of the ones that we've culled from the magazine.

Now, what is this one?

ALLEN: Yes, this is on the border between South Africa and Botswana, a magnificent male lion striding across, just striking across the plains there, into a really strong head wind.

HARRIS: Wow. Is that sand he's walking across? It almost looks like snow.

ALLEN: It's sand, it's almost a sand storm that he's going into. Right.

HARRIS: Well, interesting. All right, how about the next one? This next one is, that looks like...

ALLEN: Yes, this is, it's a group of seven pears on a windowsill in Moscow. And just as the photographer was preparing to shoot this, all of a sudden the light comes out and it hits the Kremlin and hits Saint Bathals Cathedral and a wind comes in and just blows the curtain and everything comes together and you capture this wonderful image.

HARRIS: Now, and an image like this, what does it say to you?

ALLEN: Well, what it, this really captures, to me, an emotional experience, as most of these photographs do. It's something, you can really feel what the photographer felt when that was actually going on.

HARRIS: Yes. OK. Let's take a look at the next one. Tell me what the photographer was feeling on this one.

ALLEN: Well, this is really a mixture of sadness and joy. These poor children look as if, at first glance, they're just ordinary children having a great time. And then you suddenly realize they don't have any left forearms at all.

HARRIS: Oh!

ALLEN: They were all born with a birth defect from a suburb of Moscow all about the same time. This was for a story that we did on Soviet pollution.

HARRIS: You know, I've got to tell you, I didn't realize that until you just said that and I've been looking at this this morning. I didn't even realize that.

ALLEN: Now I think what -- that's right. And what it does is really show the resilience of kids and how wonderful they are worldwide. They're just normal kids and you have to look and see wait a minute, there's something wrong here.

HARRIS: Oh, my goodness. That is something else. How about the next one? Let's take a look at the next one.

ALLEN: Oh, this was a magnificent silver backed gorilla in Odsala (ph) National Park in the Congo. This was a male gorilla in the middle of this huge clearing, eyeing another male rival and surrounded, all of a sudden, by butterflies. It's just a combination of power and beauty all together in the same frame.

HARRIS: That is an incredible juxtaposing there. How close was the photographer, do you know?

ALLEN: He was about 75 feet away on this one.

HARRIS: That's about 75 feet too close if you ask me.

ALLEN: I agree with that completely.

HARRIS: Let's check the next one. I've seen this one before.

ALLEN: Oh, yes. This is a famous image. Harold Edgerton, Doc Edgerton from up at MIT, was the father of the strobe and this just shows how you can stop a bullet at 1,900 miles per hour going through an apple.

HARRIS: How many frames per second would you have to shoot to capture something like that?

ALLEN: Oh, this is going to be in the thousands of frames per second.

HARRIS: That's fascinating. Let's take a look at another one. This, oh, this is beautiful. These are the northern lights.

ALLEN: Yes. This was, this is a very recent photograph, just in a very recent issue of the magazine. It's a combination of a science picture and beauty that just shows that science is not boring. Science can be one of the most beautiful things in the world.

HARRIS: That's fascinating. This next one, how much science is in this one?

ALLEN: Oh, this one is, oh, yes, this is an archaeological excavation. Lewis Martin, one of the really great men in photography and great men at "National Geographic" took this as this pot is being brought up out of a synotay (ph) down in the Maya area in Mexico.

HARRIS: This is underwater!

ALLEN: It's underwater, yes, with this huge plume of dirt coming up around it as the pot is being lifted so that the archaeologists can study it.

HARRIS: That's fascinating. How many years did you have to go back to dig photos up to come up with these 100?

ALLEN: Oh, we looked through all 113 years of "National Geographic" to come up with these, everything from, oh, I think the earliest may be in the like 1906 or something and on up until the current issue.

HARRIS: What is the earliest photo you've got?

ALLEN: I think it's, the one that's the most memorable to me of the early pictures is not the very earliest one, but it's one of a group of several dozen men carrying an old Mercedes on bam, on a bamboo raft. And they were carrying it out, we photographed it in 1948 on an expedition.

But some of the others come from the very, very early 1900s.

HARRIS: You know what I would wonder? Those photos that you've got from way back then in the 1900s, when you compare photos that you all took from other places around the world, say, for instance, those countries that, places you went in Africa or South America or whatever, comparing them to the same places, visiting them later today, are they still similar? Do they look the same?

ALLEN: You know, you can go to some parts in the world and you can't tell whether the picture was made 75 years ago or last week. And certainly a lot of that is true, of course, with the wildlife photographs, as well. But one of the things that we really want to do is do exactly what you're talking about. We want to go back and take a look at some of the most famous places and see what they're like today. And that may be another book that we're going to be doing very soon.

HARRIS: Well, I hope we'll be, we'll take a look at that one, too.

ALLEN: Great. Great.

HARRIS: When you come out with that one, give us a call, all right, Bill?

ALLEN: Great. I hope everybody gets a chance to go down to the bookstore or the newsstand and ;pick this one up.

HARRIS: That's a fascinating topic and it looks like you guys did a great job.

Bill Allen of "National Geographic," thank you very much. Appreciate the time this morning. Good luck to you. Happy holidays.

ALLEN: And happy holidays to you. Thank you.

HARRIS: Thanks.

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