by Steven Higgs | Dec 28, 2025
Telling National Geographic ‘No’? – Leaving a Trail of Footprints to Follow
Most of the photocopy I have of a January 1987 Bloomington Herald-Telephone piece about my old mentor, muse, and friend headlined “Bill Thomas and the Call of the Wild” is unreadable. But I remember the lead like I wrote it yesterday afternoon.
National Geographic had been on him for several years “to do this, that, or the other,” the recipient of the 1976 National Geographic Award for Photography told me. But he was just too busy – too busy for National Geographic, which, according to my notes, I told him was my “Everest.”
“Well, that seems strange, doesn’t it?” he replied. “That does seem strange.”
by Steven Higgs, 1987
From the moment we met at Hazel’s Camera Center in 1979 until I published a Thomas-inspired coffee table book in 2025, I’ve been channeling my old friend.
Indeed, as I prepared my Bill Thomas paper files for transfer to the IU Archives for safekeeping, I was reminded that my North Star walked into that shoebox of a camera store where I worked that fateful summer day. A radiant smile on his ruddy cheeks, framed by a full white beard, Bill asked if I’d put some fliers on our counter announcing the “Brown County Photojournalism Workshop” he was holding that fall.
I of course relieved him of his fliers and signed up for the class, which turned out to be a watershed moment in my life and career. Today, I am preparing to also transfer to the Archives thousands of nature images I’ve captured since that spectacular weekend workshop – images whose existence I trace directly to Bill’s support and encouragement.
And, from my quick review of his career, two facts became clear.
Bill Thomas was one of the most influential nature photographers of his generation – 1934-2009 – a cutting-edge Photo Artist, innovator, and educator.
And his contributions and accomplishments are largely unrecognized and under-appreciated on the Internet.
Briefly, from that first workshop held in the 30-acre, Southern Indiana upland forest that encircled his and wife Phyllis’s towering wooden A-frame home with pond, Bill developed the Touch of Success Photo Seminars that he led around the world for at least a decade and a half.
In 1982, Indianapolis Monthly magazine dubbed him a “Natural Nomad.”
Our last correspondence was in 1993, and I’m not sure how long Bill continued leading workshops or how many students’ photographic skills and appreciation for nature he developed.
Eleven years after the first workshop, he told me about a two-week Touch of Success Photo Safari to the Galapagos Islands and Amazon Rainforest. Well, photographing the latter was an adventure I’d already dreamed about for 14 years, but I was five years into a newspaper career with two daughters ages 9 and 7 and had neither time nor money to realize it.
(It would be another 34 years before I would follow Bill’s Upper Amazon path and photograph the world’s greatest riverine environment – with my girls and my grandkids in tow.)
In 1993, he had just finished his last Indiana workshop and sent the 1994 schedule, which included five weekend and five week-long seminars – from Pensacola to the Indian Southwest, from the Olympic Peninsula to the Oakbrook Farm in Kentucky, the latter once part of a 2,000-acre horse farm operated by Bill’s “Gentleman Farmer” great grandfather.
The 1994 schedule also included three Writing Workshops for Photographers; for 1995, he had Adventure Safaris planned for Australia/New Zealand and Africa.
In his 75 years on the planet, Bill also published 26 books, wrote for just about every magazine of any significance of his time, including Saturday Evening Post, Field & Stream, New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Audubon, and Sierra, even Redbook and Better Homes & Garden.
He was also a pioneer in the field of multimedia nature slideshows.
When we met three years after Bill had won the National Geographic photography award, I was an aspiring, 28-year-old shutterbug. But I wasn’t sure that photography was my calling, that I had what it took, or could find a path even if I did.
The manager at Hazel’s Camera Center where I worked in the summer of 1979 had told me: “There’s a lot of ‘em who think they’re good. You are good.” During my first exhibit in the Monroe County Public Library Fine Arts Lounge, a joint effort with my talented artist wife and muse Judy, an artsy guy stopped me in the middle of Kirkwood Avenue to say he was “stunned by every image.”
At that time, I had shot a couple weddings and had considered a commercial photography program at a nearby college. I knew Bob Talbot from Talbot Studio across Kirkwood Avenue from Hazel’s and could have learned from him, perhaps could have eventually taken his place as the town photographer. But commercial work had no appeal for me.
In 1980, during my pre-parenthood, Rock ‘n’ Roll Photography period, I sold John Cougar a photograph for $100, a sky-pie price I had affixed to the glass but never expected to receive. His guitarist and childhood friend Larry Crane told me the future Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer was impressed and would call me someday. He never did. As much as I would have loved to be a rock ‘n’ roll guy, however, I didn’t really fit with musicians.
That left nature photography, as unlikely a path to career success as any of the time. Or, as I would soon discover, thanks to Bill Thomas, a trail that led to photojournalism.
