Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott

Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott, a wife and husband team, are internationally published photographers of nature. They practice long commitments to places they love and spend most of the year following animals, ever-changing landscapes, and moving with the light and the seasons while exploring the rhythm and wild essence of remote places.

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Born in Poland, Momatiuk has a Master’s degree in architecture and worked as a designer before she left the Manhattan landscape for a remote Wyoming cattle ranch near the Great Divide, where she rode horses, chased cattle, photographed and wrote. A New Zealander, Eastcott published his first book of photographs at 17, earned a degree in photography in London, and met Yva in Wyoming near the Grand Tetons while touring the American West. They soon decided to share their photographic credits, proposed their first story idea to National Geographic and embarked on their Canadian Arctic assignment for the Still Inuit, Still Free article in 1976.

More articles for the Society followed, documenting the lives of Maori of New Zealand’s East Cape, high country sheep farmers of New Zealand, mountain people of Poland and Slovakia, and the inhabitants of the marine and sub-Arctic realm of Newfoundland and Labrador. In recent years, National Geographic published their article Dance of Death, the first known pictorial account of a dying Alaskan moose stalked by a family of wolves and grizzly bears who move in to share the bounty.

Momatiuk and Eastcott ventured repeatedly to Antarctica in a small sailboat and photographed Shore Leave, a National Geographic photo essay about the southern elephant seals of South Georgia Island, and a Defenders of Wildlife article about global climate changes and their impact on many species of penguins.

Their photographic essays appeared in Audubon, Smithsonian, Nature Conservancy, GEO, BBC Wildlife, Stern, The Observer, Nature’s Best, Wildlife Conservation and National Wildlife. They have published six books: High Country (A.W.& A.H. Reed); This Marvellous Terrible Place: Images of Newfoundland and Labrador; In a Sea of Wind: Images of the Prairies (Camden House Publishing); Mustang (Rufus Publications) and two titles for the award-winning National Geographic Society series of nonfiction children books: Face to Face With Wild Horses and Face to Face With Penguins.

Among other honors, they received four awards at the National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year, five awards at the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year international competition, as well as awards in Nature’s Best and National Wildlife magazine competitions.