One of the world’s leading international news agencies features a weekly thread on its website titled, “World sport: 10 photos we liked this week.”
It sounds generic — and it is — but it reminded me of how so often of how I find my favourite nature photographers. Often they are cameramen and women I’ve never heard of before. I end up stumbling over one of their images — I’m a restless reader, and constantly curious — and am moved and inspired for reasons I can’t quite pin down.

Photography — not just the taking of photographs, but being appreciative of other people’s work as a consumer — is subjective. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve come across the winner of a high-profile photography contest, and then seen the runners-up, and thought to myself: What were they thinking?

Nine times out of ten, I see a runner-up that, to my eye, is so much more revealing and emotionally stirring than the one the judges picked that I’m at a loss for words. Who’s to say one image is “better” than another, anyway? It comes down to personal taste, an instant reaction followed by a gut feeling and a dawning realization that one has just witnessed greatness, a seminal moment captured in time forevermore.

So often, when I think of “10 photos we liked this week,” I think of a single image, and then an entire portfolio of images by that photographer, once I check that person’s website, their past work and present work.

I’d be terrible at editing a “10 photos we liked this week” list because, inevitably, my list would feature 10 photos by the same photographer.

And this past week, that photographer was Ami Vitale.

I came across a web article by BBC News picture editor Phil Coomes, ‘Ami Vitale: A life devoted to photography’

http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-43329546

and was immediately reminded of an image I had glimpsed briefly once before, while editing a blog item on this year’s World Press Photo Awards. Her picture of a ranger bonding with an orphaned baby elephant at the small, community-based Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya had just been nominated in the environment category for this year’s awards. (The winners will be announced on April 12th in Amsterdam, followed by an exhibition at the World Press Photo Festival on April 13th and 14th.)

I read the piece by Phil Coomes, and Vitale struck a recurring chord in me. My own background is hard news — I came to nature photography in early retirement from daily journalism — and I was struck how Vitale started out as an intern at a small newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina in the early 1990s, around the time I started to cover municipal news in my local big-city newspaper-of-record. Vitale quit her job in North Carolina to pursue her dream of being a foreign correspondent; I, too, briefly entertained ambitions of one day being a foreign correspondent, early in my career. The difference is Vitale took a leap of faith and took the jump. She did a brief spell at a newspaper in the Czech Republic, then found herself covering the conflict in Kosovo.

One of my first media interviews at the time was with CNN’s London-based correspondent and anchor Christiane Amanpour, who had made her own reputation covering the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1998.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/v/photographer-ami-vitale/

This is actually quite common for high-profile conservation and wildlife photographers. South Africa’s Brent Stirton, current holder of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award — sponsored by London’s Natural History Museum and the largest and most influential wildlife photo competition of its kind in the world — began his career as a photojournalist covering famine, genocide and political upheavals in conflict zones throughout his home continent of Africa. Stirton won numerous prizes, including several citations from the United Nations for a long-term project he did based on the social, economic and political instability caused by the HIV-AIDS epidemic sweeping across Africa and the developing world at the time. Several years ago, in 2007, while covering an outbreak of violence in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he took a stirring image of a dead mountain gorilla being hauled out of its rainforest home by park rangers, and vowed to become a conservation photographer for the remainder of his career with a camera.

http://infocus.gettyimages.com/post/brent-stirton-the-photo-i-took-that-meant-the-most-to-me#.WqgwEoIh14Y

It’s no coincidence that Stirton, Steve Winter, Cristina Mittermeier — and Vitale herself — have done some of their finest, most stirring work for National Geographic. As Vitale told BBC’s Coomes, she learned over time that she wanted to work on stories that bring people together and reflect life beyond the latest headline.

“The thing that struck me,” Vitale told Coomes, “after witnessing so much conflict and violence in my career is that every single issue I covered, whether it was war or poverty or health, always ended up being dependent on nature for its outcomes.”

Coomes’ interview with Vitale brought me in a roundabout way to her website (amivitale.com), and her striking portfolios of ‘Pandas Gone Wild’ (soon to be a book, Panda Love: The Secret Lives of Pandas); ‘Montana Ranching Redefined’ (the state Vitale now calls home); ‘Kenya’s Last Rhinos,’ ‘Kashmir: Paths to Peace,’ ‘Coffee and Ethiopia,’ ‘Budapest Baths,’ ‘The Cost of Coal,’ ‘Gujarat,’ ’Cappadocia’ and ‘Israeli Palestinian Conflict.’

If asked right now to pick “10 photos I liked this week,” I’m afraid all 10 would be Vitale’s, as I only now devoted the better part of an hour poring through her images on her website. They’re, in a word, stunning.

The word is getting out. She will appear as a featured speaker this weekend (March 17) at The Photography Show in Birmingham in the UK, and is scheduled to talk as one of the featured NatGeo photographers in the National Geographic Live series, in Kitchener, Ontario on April 26th; Buffalo, NY on May 8th; and San Jose, Calif. the following night, on May 9th.

“The world is a beautiful place and we need to celebrate the goodness,” Vitale said in a TED Talk in Shanghai, two years ago. “It’s everywhere.”

All together now, to the strains of Hotel California:

“Welcome to the Katten Kabinet. Such a lovely place for cats (such a lovely place).

“They livin’ it up at the Katten Kabinet. What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise), bring your alibis.

“Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice. And the Cheshire said, ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.’

“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door, I had to find the passage back to the place where I was before.

“ Relax,’ said the night man. ‘You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave.’”

Yes, welcome to the cat museum. If you’re a cat lover, you may never want to leave.

First, the broad strokes. Amsterdam is rightly renowned throughout the world for its museums, whether it’s the Rijksmuseum or the Hermitage, the Van Gogh Museum or Anne Frank House.
Anyone looking for the quirky, offbeat and downright weird is unlikely to bedisappointed, either, whether it’s a side trip to the House of Bols (Bols liqueurs, EST 1575 — check out the rainbow-hued “Hall of Taste”) — or a detour to the increasingly famous, if hard-to-find cat-themed museum, the Katten Kabinet.

The museum — a remodeled heritage home off the Herengracht canal — is full of posters, handbills, oil paintings, sculptures, tapestries, wall hangings and other forms of art depicting nothing but . . . cats.

Certified 20th-century eccentric and financier philanthropist Bob Meijer founded the museum in 1990, in commemoration of the legendary ginger cat John Pierpont Morgan (1966-1983), aka J.P. Morgan, often described as Meijer’s “stubborn, headstrong companion.” Wherever Meijer went, it is said, J.P. Morgan was there to tell him he was going the wrong way.

When J.P. Morgan passed in 1983 — the forensic examiner at the time attributed it to old age, but rumours persist that J.P. Morgan simply became fed up with his owner and opted for the easy out — Meijer sought to immortalize him with an art gallery dedicated to cats and nothing but cats. Art snobs can have their Van Gogh’s and Rembrandt’s; Meijer was determined to pay homage to the likes of Stubbs, the cat mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska (pop. 900, as of the 2012 census), and Simon, the cat appointed a war hero after serving aboard HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident, a 101-day siege that trapped the navy frigate on the Yangtze River during the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Then there’s Sockamillion, the cat with 1.4 million followers on Twitter (@sockington), and Créme Puff, the oldest cat known to humanity, who reportedly passed away on Aug. 6, 2005, at the age of 38, according to his owner, Jake Perry, of Austin, Texas.

An advertising poster from 1911 for Chettalín shoe polish is just one of Katten Kabinet’s guaranteed conversation starters, partly because of its historical significance and partly because it’s, well, weird, like much of what else can be found in the Kabinet.

So wirkt Schuhputz. Kitt-eh! Kitt-eh! Kitt-eh!

“The tree of revenge does not carry fruit,” goes an old Dutch proverb, but then cats don’t care much for fruit. They’re meat eaters, all the way.

Affectionate carnivores, though, when they want to be.

Among Katten Kabinet’s numerous charms is a wall devoted to Dick Whittington’s Cat, named after the folklore surrounding real-life 14th-century English merchant Richard Whittington, who would later go on to serve as Lord Mayor of London.

Legend has it — and, really, how can these things ever be proved to historians’ complete satisfaction? — that Whittington supposedly escaped a poverty-stricken childhood by living off the avails of his rat-catching cat. A cat with a reputation for murdering rats at will would have been a prized commodity in 14th-century London.

Regardless of whether the story holds water or not — and who would begrudge humanity a lively tale on a dark and rainy night? — Dick Whittington’s cat certainly fits in at the Katten Kabinet.

Besides, no other cat immortalized at the Kabinet can lay claim to being the subject of their very own puppet show, as first performed at Covent Garden in 1711, as recorded at the time in the Spectator:

"At Punch's Theatre in the Little Piazza, Covent-Garden, this present Evening will be performed an Entertainment, called, The History of Sir Richard Whittington, shewing his Rise from a Scullion to be Lord-Mayor of London, with the Comical Humours of Old Madge, the jolly Chamber-maid, and the Representation of the Sea, and the Court of Great Britain, concluding with the Court of Aldermen, and Whittington Lord-Mayor, honoured with the Presence of K. Hen. VIII. and his Queen Anna Bullen, with other diverting Decorations proper to the Play, beginning at 6 o' clock."

katten dick w. 4445387900_dfa68bc3ca.jpg

Like cats themselves, the Katten Kabinet is small and not that easy to find. It’s tucked away in a canal house on Amsterdam’s Groudon Bocht — Golden Bend — a section of the Herengracht canal that features some of the city’s grandest and oldest houses. The official address is no. 497, 1017 BT Amsterdam, but even frequent visitors say they could easily miss it if they didn’t know where to look. Only the smallest of signs provides a clue.

This part of Amsterdam may have been established in the early 1700s, but the Katten Kabinet comes with a very 21st-century signature: its very own website, complete with gallery images, a set of directions on how to find it, and that mainstay of 21st-century commerce, an online shop.

http://www.kattenkabinet.nl/en

TripAdvisor reviews are mixed, ranging from “Terrible” (one star out of five), “Not worth the time or money,” (also one star) and, “Should be called the Krappen Kabinet,” to, at the other end of thespectrum, “Our favourite museum in Amsterdam!” (five stars out of five), “Purrfectly enjoyable,” (also five for five), “This place is the cat’s pyjamas!” and, perhaps most honest of all: “If cats and art are your thing, this is great. If not, I imagine this could be your own personal nightmare.”

There you have it, then. As one final customer review on TripAdvisor warns, “Only go if you love cats.”

Some truths are still self-evident, you see, even in 2017.

Rob Cerneus gaat voor Uit de Kunst ter gelegenheid van Dierendag naar het Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam. Yes, it’s true!

Dick Whittington, ladies and gentlemen!

And finally, a visitor POV video tour.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen