Photos of the Secret Corners of Humanity
National Geographic’s tenacious photojournalist Jodi Cobb is here in March
Jodi Cobb has brought us some of the most incredible stories of our time, exposing mysterious practices and cultures and revealing the humanity – and sometimes inhumanity – behind them.
Her 2003 article on 21st-century slaves received the strongest response any National Geographic article had ever received up to that point. Over the course of a year, she covered bonded labour, child labour, sex trafficking, organ selling, and illegal adoption.
“It took me a long time to recover from doing that. I had to go out and search out evil every day,” Cobb said in an interview. During that year, she spent about 12 weeks in the field, photographing the world of human slavery.
For a NatGeo article on beauty, she travelled to 10 different countries on six continents and shared with us what beautiful actually means around the world. This is a case where words don’t do her work justice. Watch this 3-minute talk on some of the discoveries she made during this assignment.

One famous image of beauty is the Geisha in Japan, a very secretive and cloistered culture of beauty. The painted white faces, bright red lips, and traditional kimonos are known far and wide. Through her tenacity, Cobb penetrated the private world of the Geisha culture and wrote another famous article for NatGeo.
“The purpose of a Geisha’s make-up is to completely disguise the individual behind the make-up. It was to completely take away her identity as a woman and replace it with the image of the perfect woman,” Cobb says in another interview.
But these aren’t the only topics she’s covered: Cobb has been a photojournalist since the 1960s. Join us and Jodi Cobb on March 30 to learn more about this stranger in a strange land. Get your tickets now.