It's not often you get to travel the world through one intimate museum show, but you can do it when visiting "Tom Abercrombie National Geographic Photographer." The exhibition has its premiere at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts February 2 and runs through April 15.
In his 38 years at National Geographic Magazine, the Minnesota-born Abercrombie produced 43 artic-les from his adventures around the globe.
Girl with Turquoise Headdress, 1968
© National Geographic
Tom Abercrombie at the South Pole, 1957, Self portrait © National Geographic
The first photojournalist to cover the South Pole, he also traveled to Tibet, Japan, Cambodia, Australia and other destinations, using his gruff, gentle personality to make friends with from everyone from exotic sheiks to fierce tribesmen.
If he once startled the magazine's bean counters by listing on an expense report two AK-47s as "auto insurance," he also won friends on the road with his medical exploits: sewing an ear back on an Afghan whose horse had chewed it off or amputating the gangrenous toes of a pilgrim in Tibet.
"My work records history as much as geography.
As has often been said, the past is another country."
-Tom Abercrombie
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More than a third of his articles focused on the Muslim world. Speaking Arabic as well as German, French and Spanish, he studied the Koran. Between 1956 and 1994, he wrote and photographed his extensive experiences in the Muslim world. This culminated in a monumental 1972 article titled "The Sword and the Sermon." It was his way of building bridges of understanding between Islam and the West.
His fascination was prescient, as was noted in the August, 2006 issue of National Geographic Magazine.
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"Much of that [Muslim] world has changed since our days in the field," he wrote in May 2005, less than a year before his death.
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Tom Abercrombie photographing Egyptian mummy, 1976, Lynn Abercrombie © National Geographic
Petra, Jordan, 1971 © National Geographic
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