arly in her career, Jodi Cobb faced an agonizing decision, one that would end up changing the course of her life.
MIZZOU MAGAZINE WINTER 2019
The year was 1975. She was four years out of Mizzou, where she’d earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree (the latter in photojournalism), and she stood at a crossroads. She’d just been offered a sought-after staff position at a major metro daily when she got a call from Robert Gilka, director of photography at National Geographic. Cobb had been attending photography workshops run by Gilka, and he’d been impressed by her grit and persistence. For her part, Cobb was honing her visual storytelling skills alongside some of the most accomplished photographers in the business. But he had counseled patience and urged her to keep at it. Now, he was on the phone. He wanted to know if Cobb was available to take a trial assignment photographing California’s Owens Valley for a story about the place that supplies water to the city of Los Angeles. It was a one-off deal. No guarantees of future work. She was torn: Go for the security of the staff job, or pursue her dream no matter the outcome? She decided to take the assignment. “I didn’t know if it was my first assignment for National Geographic or if it was going to be my only assignment.” All she knew for sure was that she had to make the most of it. Cobb’s hard work paid off. When she returned to the Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., several weeks later, Gilka reviewed her images and liked what he saw, especially her willingness to engage human subjects in her images. He offered her a new assignment — to photograph in the coal mines, on the rivers and in the misty hollows of West Virginia. Cobb, BJ ’68, MA ’71, was off and running at the start of a career that has spanned five decades, including 30 years at National Geographic. She is among the most successful and widely published female photographers on the planet, the only woman ever to hold the coveted title of National Geographic staff field photographer in the magazine’s 130-year history. In the process, she has visited 65 countries on nearly every continent to complete dozens of groundbreaking assignments for the magazine. Her book on the hidden life of geishas in Japan was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her work is featured in the traveling exhibition Women of Vi-
sion: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment, and one of her photographs from the West Virginia assignment was loaded aboard the spacecraft Voyager, currently traveling out into the universe on the ultimate open-ended journey. At first, her assignments were all domestic and nearly all set in the South: the Suwanee River, Nashville, and Plains, Georgia, home of the then newly elected president, Jimmy Carter. They centered on a particular place, with no obvious storyline — an old Geographic staple that has all but disappeared as readers have grown more familiar with the world and come to demand more sharply focused stories. “They were quiet places,” Cobb says, “but they did let me do evocative photographs.”
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hen Communist China opened to the West in the late 1970s. Following a long stretch of successful, award-winning assignments, Cobb was one of just five photographers assigned to the country for a special book project. She would be the first American photographer to travel across China since the triumph of the Maoist revolution in 1949. In the course of two extraordinary months, she covered 7,000 miles by train on her way deep into the country’s remote interior. There was no phone, no way to communicate with the outside world. “It was just me and my government minders,” she says, thinking back on some of the trials and absurdities of this remarkable assignment. “I got on the train, and the minders said I couldn’t photograph the train.” Little by little, Cobb won over her main guide with gifts and kindness. “I thoroughly corrupted her,” she says with a laugh. “I painted her fingernails and gave her Western clothing. We bonded.” That proved decisive when disagreements arose with other minders over what she could photograph. “They’d say: ‘You can’t do this. You can’t photograph that. That doesn’t exist.’ She ended up taking my side.” Even when Cobb was allowed to take pictures, she found that her status as an outsider involved other challenges as well. “Most people had never seen a Westerner before,” she remembers. “Babies burst out crying. I only had photos of screaming babies because they thought I was a ghost!” The resulting book, to which she contributed a chapter, was a magnificent, leather-bound volume entitled Journey into China. Published in 1982 and reprinted in five subsequent editions, the book stands as an enduring and definitive record of the world’s most populous nation on the brink of momentous change. It was a turning point in her career. “I proved to the editors I could really do it.” She had also proved to herself that she could handle a big assignment in a foreign country, one that kept her out in the field on her own for weeks on end.