This is a book about the people I have encountered as I traveled in more than fifty countries around the world. I have photographed them in all situations: at their work, in their homes, at play. In the process of passing through their lives, even briefly, I developed an emotional connection with many of them, remembering our conversations and the situations in which we met, writing letters, and exchanging visits. I never turn them loose.

I always try to send a photograph to the people who become my subjects, if they will give me their names and addresses. Often they will, and we enter into a communication that lasts through the years. I get Christmas cards from Israel and China, letters from Nepal and Russia. While I also photograph landscapes, wildlife, and a variety of other things, the documentary style is closest to my heart.

I know my interest in people must have come from my father. Dub Wright, as he was nicknamed, had a knack for meeting people and a deep respect for their lives, without regard for their station in life. As I followed him in business, the values that he passed along served me well, and I attribute much of my success as a businessman to his example.

While my father gave me an appreciation of people and a concern for the details of their lives, it was my mother, Lillian, who first taught me about the natural world. She brought me abandoned birds' nests and shells, and she talked to me about respect for nature and love for God's creatures. She allowed me to have pets--lots of pets--from skunks and snakes to dogs and chickens, and we raised horned toads and orphaned birds. She also introduced me to photography, and I took my first pictures when I was about twelve with her fold-up Kodak.

During my high school days, friends and I sometimes camped out along Elm Creek on one friend's family ranch. We fancied ourselves explorers and delighted in trying to find a place where no one else had ever been, a place where our footsteps were the first. We added to our bird lists and fossil collections and photographed the lizards and snakes we found. We developed a taste for adventure, and within the limitations of our youth, we traveled and explored much of western Texas.

In 1982, I attended the last Ansel Adams workshop held at Yosemite, and my technical skills improved substantially. Success in business afforded me the opportunity to travel extensively and experience many different cultures, and the faces I encountered through my travels haunted me. The wrinkles, the tears of pain and joy, the postures of triumph--I was compelled to preserve these images through my photographs.

I found the skills of interacting with people that were critical to business success also served me well in photographing the people I met, who became as interesting to photograph as landscapes and animals. Like a climber seeing over the top of a mountain, I discovered new territory to encounter and to understand. I wanted to learn how people lived as much as to explore where they lived. I wanted to go as a traveler rather than a tourist. I wanted to walk through villages alone or with a small group of like-minded friends, not ride in a bus with dozens of tourists shooting their video cameras. I also wanted to visually document the good I found in people's lives around the world.

I aspire to be among the photographers who celebrate the human condition. While not denying that the world is beset with war, disease, hatred, and evil, I choose to focus on the qualities in people that seem to me to be underrepresented by today's documentary photographers: strength, joy, love, courage, determination. As I have traveled and photographed, I have seen these qualities in abundance. I have seen them in places where I myself might have given up or quit because the challenge was so great.

I believe in people--their drive, ambition, and emotion. I see within them the unique and the universal. I am convinced that even in the most desperate of circumstances, people have the ability to know joy and to call upon their innermost selves and exhibit strengths they did not know they had. People can laugh, at others and at themselves. People laugh with happiness, and people laugh at the impossibility of their situation.

My photographic journey has been a two-way street. I have been the beneficiary of generosity and moral uplift from what I considered to be the most unlikely of places. As I photographed, I learned the most not from teachers but from people living their lives as best they could in poverty and in plenitude.

One of the most important lessons I learned was from a photographer at the tip of South America. The trip to Tierra del Fuego was the second for my friend Bob and me. The first time, we were on our way to Antarctica. This time, we brought our wives to share the experience of the majestic snow-covered tail-end of the Andes and the Beagle Channel with its bird life and sea lions.

At the end of the first trip, two years before, Bob had left for Texas while I remained behind to photograph the beautiful Parque Nacional, situated at the junction of Chile, Argentina, and the Beagle Channel. That night I received a frantic call from Buenos Aires. Wanting to hand carry his film through the X-ray machine, Bob had kept it separate. Unfortunately, he had left all thirty-six rolls of Kodachrome on the bus to the airport. Bob had lost all his film from ten days of photographing Antarctica.

Early the next morning, I stopped by the bus station with María Laura Borla, the very helpful director of the visitors' center in Ushuaia. The people there promised to search the buses and query the drivers. Two days later, as I was preparing to return home myself, I found out they had been unsuccessful. Bob's film was gone.

The trip with our wives promised to be better. We had already enjoyed a cruise on the Beagle Channel to photograph the wildlife. Our skipper, Héctor Elías Monsaive, a ruggedly handsome photographer, professional diver, and charter-boat owner with piercing blue eyes, took us to the best of places. We hiked across deserted islands and saw the southern sea lions as they fearlessly pondered our intrusions. We ate giant crab freshly pulled from the sea.

The following day, we visited Estancia Harberton, the historic ranch built by the first permanent European settler, missionary Thomas Bridges. We shunned the guided tour and photographed, enjoying the cool, cloudless day. We wandered through the historic buildings, admiring the bleached bones of whales and the stuffed condors that peered from their moorings in an abandoned shed.

While Bob selected some picture postcards in the small tea room the present owners maintained for tourists, he told the vivacious young woman who served him (herself a descendant of Thomas Bridges) of his misfortune with the thirty-six rolls of film. "I know who has them," she said. "Call Mingo Galussio in Ushuaia. Someone gave the film to him because he is a photographer!"

We rushed back to Ushuaia along the unpaved bumpy road and immediately called Mingo. Not only did he have the film, but we could pick it up that evening! Bob could scarcely contain himself. He fidgeted. He recalled the views he had photographed. He picked at his supper in the quaint French restaurant as he pondered the miraculous recovery of his film.

Bob and I took a cab in a light rain that had begun to fall. We found the modest house on the darkened street, the bluish glow of a television set showing through the draped window. Bob knocked on the door. Mingo appeared. "Yes," he said, "you are the one." He withdrew a photograph of Bob leaning against the rail of our boat in Antarctica. He had developed one roll to see what it contained, and there was a picture I had made of Bob with his own camera. "I recognize you from the photograph."

We sat in Mingo's tiny kitchen and shared a traditional meal while his wife and sick daughter watched a program on their ancient television in the corner of their small front room. He told us how he came by the film and that he had saved it because he knew it was valuable to someone who likely would claim it someday.

We thanked him and prepared to leave. Mingo spoke in a quiet voice. "Now that I have done something for you, I would like to ask a favor." We were both on the defensive. Bob had already given him the substantial reward he had advertised. What would this Argentine man at the bottom of the continent want of us? I thought it might be to take a package to a friend in the States. Drugs? Did he want us to get him a visa? My imagination ran wild.

Bob replied, "We will help you if we can. What would you like for us to do for you?"

Mingo said, "When you find another human being who needs help, do all you can for them," he said. "That's what makes the world a better place."

Shocked, and surprised at the request, we agreed. We shook hands and Mingo led us out of the small kitchen and to the front door. Silently, Bob and I walked out into the drizzly night. How ashamed I was of my suspicions. Was I being a typical American--suspicious of all "foreigners"?

As we boarded our flight to Texas the next day, I was still thinking of this powerful experience and the valuable lesson I had learned.

Perhaps my most deeply felt experience of all was one of my first. It was during my first trip to Nepal. Some Outward Bound friends and I had compressed what would normally be a twenty-six-day expedition around the great Anapurna range into a sixteen-day marathon. After the third day, I was ready to give up. Exhausted, discouraged, and trailing the rest of our group, I wondered how I had ever had the misfortune to commit to such a project. As I struggled up the trail, I met a Nepalese man coming down, carrying on his back an enormous basket of oranges. I stood aside from the narrow trail to let him pass. He stopped before me, and handed me an orange.

I reached into my pocket to pay, but he waved away my hand. "Nameste," he said, meaning "I salute the god within you!" Then he smiled and walked on down the trail. I never saw him again. Before that meeting, as I walked through the villages along the trail that were smothered in poverty, I had felt so superior to these folks. As I watched my anonymous friend walk down the trail with his heavy load, I realized that though I am privileged, I am hardly superior. His simple act of generosity placed him with the angels.

Over the years, I have met many men and women who opened their hearts to me. I cannot tell you why, but I know that I am the one blessed. While I set out to learn about the world that lay so interestingly before me, I have come home knowing more about myself.

I met Joseph while photographing Tanzania in 1985. Joseph served as a guide who assisted me while I was there. Black and poor, burnt by the sun, and wizened by work and many years without enough food, Joseph remained a man proud of himself and his country. He took the most pride in the majesty and rarity of the animals that inhabited this land. Because he could not afford a field manual for the birds and animals, on my return to the United States, I sent him one. I later received this reply: "Mr. Bill, . . . please remember that we can only secure the peace in the world we all passionately yearn for, by serving others. May you justify our hopes and rise to the top . . . and not forget us when you get there."

As I read Joseph's letter, I believe I understood what he was saying. Joseph had seen many Americans and people from developed countries of the world as they traveled to his country to learn about and photograph the African animals. He could not help but contrast the lives we led to the basic existence of most Africans. I took Joseph to mean that those of us from developed countries had a greater responsibility to secure peace among all peoples, and his letter was a plea to not forget those in need as our own countries became wealthier. It was also a plea to us as individuals to do what we can in the world as we gain positions of influence in our own countries.

I will never forget Joseph, or the thousands of "Josephs" I have photographed in my personal journey to understand other people's lives. These images form my tribute to those who, despite the often terrible conditions of their daily existence, remain proud and generous, living with a sense of purpose and capable of joy and hope.

Bill Wright
Abilene, Texas