Addie Morfoot Contributor After making their first narrative feature “Nyad,” which debuted last year and earned Oscar nominations for the film’s stars Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, Academy Award winning directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (“Free Solo”) are returning to their documentary roots with “Photographer.” The six-part National Geographic docuseries features seven photographers — Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, Dan Winters, Campbell Addy, Krystle Wright, Muhammed Muheisen, and Anand Varma.

Vérité footage of each subject’s current mission is interwoven with interviews and archival footage to demonstrate how each photographer approaches their work, the intention behind that work, their process, and how they each discover, see and experience the world.

To bring each of the National Geographic photographers’ stories to life, showrunners Chin and Vasarhelyi hired six veteran documentary filmmakers: Marshall Curry (“Racing Dreams”), Pagan Harleman (“The Trade”), Crystal Kayiza (“Rest Stop”), Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”), Kristi Jacobson (“Solitary”) and Rita Baghdadi (“Sirens”). “We were really trying to pair world class documentary filmmakers with world class photographers and see what would happen,” says Chin. “We gave the filmmakers some space to look at which photographers would resonate or which stories resonated with them the most.

But in a lot of ways we thought that intersecting these two great creatives together from the filmmaking side and from the photography side would be a really cool experiment.” Chin and Vasarhelyi directed the series’ first episode about acclaimed ocean photographers and partners Nicklen and Mittermeier.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin Play Matchmakers With Nat Geo Series Pairing Doc Filmmakers With Photographers

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