Beauty and the Beast: California Wildflowers and Climate Change

Nita Winter and Rob Badger take you behind the scenes of their 27-year journey
photographing wildflowers throughout California. It began in 1992, when they discovered
and fell in love with California’s spectacular wildflower blooms in the Mojave Desert’s
Antelope Valley California Poppy Preserve. Photographing these beautiful landscapes
and individual flowers evolved into their documentary art project, Beauty and the Beast:
Wildflowers and Climate Change. Their new beautiful book, co-published with CNPS,
focuses on California’s amazing plant diversity and is a companion to their traveling
exhibit. Gorgeous super bloom scenery is not the only thing that makes the Beauty and
the Beast wildflower photos so special; Rob and Nita developed unique field techniques
to capture one-of-a-kind images. They create every one of the photographs in the field,
lugging 80 pounds of cameras and their “natural light” studio equipment from below sea
level in Death Valley National Park, to 13,000-foot-high mountain passes.

Internationally acclaimed conservation photographers Nita Winter and Rob Badger have
been life partners and creative collaborators for more than three decades. Their work has
been featured in Time, Mother Jones, Sierra, Flora magazines, the New York Times,
Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times.

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