by Steven Higgs | Dec 28, 2025
Natural Trailblazer, Friend, Mentor, Muse
During that inaugural workshop weekend in October 1979, I shot a self-portrait reflection in a pond bubble from the starboard side of Bill Thomas’s canoe that won Honorable Mention in a Bloomington Area Arts Council photo contest called The Roving Eye – the only photo competition I ever entered.
More importantly, Bill and I formed a mutual admiration society of sorts, me more admiring than him, for sure. He was 17 years older than me and had done everything I’d dreamed of since that pivotal moment in 1973, when I figured out the metering on my first 35mm camera, a Russian-made Kalimar.
Before I left Hazel’s Camera Center in December 1979, Bill recommended me for the first-ever Indiana Arts Commission photography grant. The commission had asked him to review the applicants and make recommendations. He told me to apply and, the next time I saw him, he was genuinely surprised I had not gotten it.
I don’t recall how many times we talked on the phone, but it was enough that their lengths and depths were the subject of friendly marital banter at home, as I never was much on phone talk. We met a couple times over beer at The Brigantine, now the Trojan Horse.
To my very last photography lecture on my final semester of teaching journalism at Indiana University in 2022, I shared with my students a detail Bill shared with me at the Brig: National Geographic photographers would shoot 200 rolls of 36-exposure slides to get the dozen or so magnificent photos in a magazine spread.
He also told me they made $2.000 a day, in the early 1980s!
“You didn’t know that, did you?” I recall him asking.
As it was for my public speaking and 27-year career teaching journalism at Indiana University, education was always central to Bill’s professional purpose.
Money doesn’t really mean anything, he told me. There are a lot of important things that can’t be bought. And he he’d known people who had quite a lot of money who were unhappy.
“The answer, as I feel, and the most important thing in life, is education,” he said. “If you can educate people, provoke them to thought, to learn not only about themselves but their place in the natural environment, then I think, perhaps, that’s the greatest role anyone can play.”
The photo seminars and safaris were just two avenues that Bill pursued in that vein.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, he regularly lectured on nonfiction writing and photojournalism at a variety of workshops and conferences, like the Central Indiana Writers Conference in Indianapolis and Midwest Writers Conference in Muncie.
A 1982 article in the Hoosier Schoolmaster headlined “School Assembly – Modern Mountain Man Turns Educator,” said his “circle of students” had expanded from his readers and seminar participants to include teenagers and their teachers.
“In between field assignments, he has begun presenting special programs to high school and middle school assemblies where he can share his some of his unique experiences,” the article read.
In 1981, Bill launched what he called in a brochure a “highly acclaimed multimedia light and sound program” called “Islands in Time,” accompanied by a “live lecture.” The then-futuristic show utilized multiple computerized slide projectors and dissolve units with a soundtrack and a rear-view screen for special effects.
“Nature photojournalist Bill Thomas narrates his own sound and light production,” a 1982 Bloomington Herald-Telephone article raved, “which takes the viewer from the rocky shores of Maine sweeping across the nation to the Pacific and up the inland passage to America’s 49th state – Alaska – in just 80 minutes.”
While I don’t recall the details, Bill and I traded some letters in 1983 and 84 about organizing a show for the Sierra Club, a collaboration that never materialized. But I do recall seeing the Islands show in Ellettsville, the first high-tech slideshow I’d ever experienced.
I likewise recall a multimedia slideshow on the Charles C. Deam Wilderness Area I created as a graduate student at the Indiana University School of Journalism in 1984, which Professor Will Counts told the class was as good as any he’d seen.
Bill had developed another project that kept him out of the book business in the late ‘80s – selling prints to hospitals and other large institutions.
“The way we did this thing was an effort to bring nature and wildlife indoors to people,” he explained. “… Patients in hospitals don’t have much else to do but look at the walls – or watch television.”
The program had received a “tremendous reception,” he said. At the time he had about a dozen representatives working in cities from Seattle to Los Angeles to Atlanta to Columbus, where they had a project that would take almost two years to complete.
But as with the big city nature books, once again eager to get back to shooting in the wilds, Bill was looking for someone to take over the print business.
“I don’t’ want to end up behind a desk,” he said.
Bill and I reconnected three years later, when I reached out to him about a project I was working on about toxic waste – one of my areas of focus my entire career. In a letter dated April 26, 1990, he critiqued a draft proposal I had sent and suggested editors at W.W. Norton Books and Harper and Row.
He also sent along literature on a 15-day “educational photographic adventure” to the Amazon Headwaters and Galapagos Islands he had scheduled for November and December that year.
“The Amazon Rainforest represents one of the most fascinating and diverse ecosystems on Planet Earth,” his safari flier states. “You can see pictures of it, read about it, but nothing comes close to actually being there.”
After six days on a yacht exploring the Galapagos, Bill and students flew to Iquitos, Peru, where they stayed in a backwater lodge owned by Dr. Paul Beaver, formerly a professor at the University of Washington, and his Peruvian wife Milly.
“You’ll travel via dugout canoe with Indian guides and explore a lush rainforest where live creatures such as jaguars, ocelots, sloths, anteaters, and one of the greatest arrays of exotic birds anywhere,” the flier said.
