Michael Yamashita, National Geographic's first regular photographer of colour, delivered a masterclass in sustained passion and cultural bridge-building during a conversation at Xposure International Photography Festival (2026).


In conversation with fellow National Geographic photojournalist Rick Smolan at the landmark 10th edition of the festival, Yamashita traced his unlikely journey from third-generation Japanese American with ‘no knowledge of his heritage’ to becoming one of the world's leading photography influencers with 1.7 million Instagram followers.


"I am a total amateur," Yamashita told the audience. "And my greatest motivation was the fact that when I was told I can't do it. That probably pushed me more than anything else.”

That drive sustained a career spanning more than 30 major National Geographic stories, 16 books, and two award-winning documentaries. Yamashita spoke candidly about the pressure of long-form assignments, where failure was not an option, he declared. “Someone looks at your past work and gambles that you can deliver again,” he said. “You cannot fail.”

A trip in the 1970s to his native Japan, where he bought his first Nikon camera after university, transformed his life. "Like everybody, I was taking pictures of everything I was seeing, doing, and sending them back home to my family and friends," he recalled. "I bought a good camera...and I figured I'm gonna learn how to use it. And then I got hooked."


During the session, he described photography as just one part of a broader journalistic practice rooted in research, cultural immersion, and long-term commitment.

“Always carry your camera,” he said, recalling how one of his most enduring images; a woman washing clothes in a village in southern Iran– emerged in an unplanned moment, years after Marco Polo had first written about the community. “You never know where the next picture is,” he said, talking about what eventually became the cover photograph of May 2001 National Geographic Magazine . “If I had checked the back screen and thought I had enough, I might have walked away.”


That was his breakthrough moment, he said, and it came through retracing historical journeys, most notably Marco Polo's 13th-century Silk Road travels. "I shot porches like crazy against different backgrounds, mud backgrounds, windows, doorways," Yamashita recounted. After exhausting 10 rolls of film setting up portraits, "a portrait is a posing picture", he walked back to his car when something unexpected happened.


"I see this woman down by the street, and she's washing clothes, and she looks up at me, just like this, looks up, and I go, click, click, click. I got about three frames before she looked back down, and that's what ended up on the cover," he said. "Always carry your camera."


The anecdote illustrated a career-defining principle: remaining perpetually ready for the decisive moment whilst managing the uncertainty inherent in film photography, where images couldn't be reviewed until months later.


Yamashita's work carried him into dangerous territory, including Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He credited his camera with providing courage: "The camera kind of makes you brave, because you're concentrating on the subject, and shutter speeds...maybe there's a lot of action going on around you."


The session also touched on Yamashita's ventures into emerging technologies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became "one of the pioneers of selling photographs on Non-fungible tokens (NFT)," he revealed. "Collectively sold over a million dollars in NFT...was a boom, now a bust."


When Smolan asked for advice for a beginner photographer navigating today's transformed media landscape, Yamashita returned to his founding principle.


"It's all about your passion. Find the subject," he said. "Find something you love, and you focus on that. I like to say you have to eat, sleep, and drink photography. You really have to be obsessed to make it today."