Robert Anthony Caputo died on December 18, 2025, age 76. He passed peacefully, surrounded by his family, at a medical aid in dying clinic near Basel, Switzerland. He had Alzheimer’s, and chose to pass on his own terms rather than go through the slow and bad death that would otherwise have been inflicted by his condition. He remained himself to the last, filled with love, laughter, and gratitude for the world. We miss him.
Bob was born on January 15, 1949, to Mary and Tony Caputo at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. His childhood was filled with baseball games and Elvis records until at nine years old his family moved to Sweden, where Tony, a career Marine, was to be a military attaché at the American embassy. Along with his older sister Kathryn (Boots), Bob attended Swedish school and quickly picked up the local language and activities, skiing and playing soccer.
This early exposure to a new culture and the quasi-itinerant life of a military kid created his foundational interest in foreign places and a kind of solitary self-confidence that would let him form deep and warm connections with people across the world. Returning to the States, Bob was sent to Woodberry Forest, a boarding school in Virginia where he balanced playing quarterback and escorting debutantes with a budding interest in Bob Dylan and the counterculture. At Trinity College in Connecticut, he quickly fell into the company of the art crowd and began experimenting with such illicit substances as avant garde playwriting, experimental literature, and the poetry of William Blake.
In 1970, the fall of his senior year, Bob dropped out of college to be a hippie. Seeking adventure but deciding that it would be boring to go to India because everyone was going there, he and some friends bought a truck in Denmark and drove it south across Europe, across the Strait of Gibraltar, and across the Sahara into west Africa, before turning to drive east across the continent. This was Bob’s third trip outside the United States. Somewhere in what is now the Congo, the group traded blankets and cigarettes to some villagers for a baby chimpanzee whose mother had just been killed. They nursed the chimp, now named Coco, on baby formula from a repurposed wine bottle and played with it late into the night to tire it out so that it would sleep quietly as they smuggled it across the borders into Uganda and Kenya. Reaching Kenya, the crew realized that Coco was getting too strong for them to safely keep. In Nairobi, they asked for help with the chimp and were introduced to a young primatologist named Jane Goodall. She invited them to her chimpanzee study area at Gombe in Tanzania, where Coco might be reintegrated into the wild. At Gombe, Bob hit it off with Jane and her husband Hugo van Lawick, including during one memorable occasion in which he ran naked and screaming through the camp at teatime after a lion interrupted his bath in a nearby river.
Coco ultimately ended up in a zoo in Arizona, but Bob stayed in Africa, shooting film for Hugo in the natural wonderland of the Ngorongoro Crater. He returned briefly to the United States to finish his undergrad, earning a BFA in film at NYU in 1976, before heading back to Africa. He worked as a stringer out of Nairobi, covering coups and civil wars, to fund expeditions into the wilderness. In 1981, National Geographic Magazine commissioned him to photograph and write a story on Sudan, then the largest country in Africa and one that the Magazine had never covered because of the extreme difficulty of travel within it. But Bob did it, driving a 16,000 kilometer loop mostly on rough tracks from Juba in the south to Geneina in the west to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, traveling into the swamps, savannas, mountains, and deserts of the vast country, visiting tribal peoples including Nuer, Dinka, Nuba, and Kawahla. He spoke of walking with Peter, a Nuer man he met on his travels, outacross an infinite plain to the Tree Where Man Was Born at the beginning of time, and sitting under it as Peter told him the story of the origin of the world.
National Geographic would prove a home for Bob. The Geographic was dedicated to “the world and all that’s in it,” and spared no expense sending Bob on adventures, from Venezuela to Mustang and Tanzania to Tubuai, to discover what was out there and share it with the readers. Many of these trips, most of them in Africa, were difficult, filled with physical danger, sickness, and long stretches of boredom and frustration. But for Bob, they were wonderful challenges, and richly justified by the moments of beauty and of kindness that he experienced and recorded along the way. Everywhere he went, Bob found that the people he met were fundamentally good and generous, happy to share their often limited food with him, a perfect stranger, and excited to tell him about their lives. Bob also found a community among the other freelancers and staff of National Geographic and across Washington, D.C. With some friends, he organized an annual, and unofficial, National Geographic Prom, and walked around the building making sure that every person who worked there, in whatever capacity, was invited to attend.
While doing a story featuring a great barge that plied the Congo River for a thousand miles between Kinshasa and Kisangani and was ship, city, marketplace, and discotheque to the isolated people who lived along the river, a filmmaker reached out about covering his journey for National Geographic Television. Bob was agreeable, and he and Amy would ultimately collaborate on several stories and two sons. The proper story of their love begins on assignment in the Amazon Rainforest, where they were looking for a group of Yanomami, one of the most isolated indigenous peoples in the world. On their way out of the rainforest after finding the group, Bob and Amy went ahead of her film crew so that he could get aerials and she could arrange transport for everyone back to Caracas.
The radio at the local missionary station was down, but one afternoon Bob suddenly heard the rotor of the chopper that would take him up for his aerials. The chopper landed and a runner told Bob that he had to go immediately, or the pilot would leave without him. Bob urged Amy to come along. Torn between her obligations to her film crew and her desire to go, she decided to go with him. As they ran to the jungle airstrip they heard the engines of the film crew’s boats coming down the river and watched the cameraman pelt too late down the path as the two of them lifted off over the green and endless rainforest alone together. She was not fired upon her return and the two of them married a few years later, in 1997.
Bob and Amy had two kids, Nick and Matt, and moved from D.C. into an old farmhouse in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Bob threw himself into fatherhood with enormous joy, love, and enthusiasm. He was soccer coach and cub scout leader and would wake up at 6:15 every morning to walk the kids to the school bus. When they were young, he would make up stories each night about the fabulous adventures of WWII secret agent Messenger Mouse, and pirates with many-colored beards. He built them a treehouse in the backyard and didn’t get upset when they mostly didn’t use it. Always with a ready laugh, Bob would recount the time he saw six-year-old Matt pause on the way in from school to stuff his homework into a convenient bush and then innocently claim that his teacher had let him off with nothing to do yet again. During one little league baseball game, Bob was pitching to Nick, who hit a line drive right into his nuts. Doubled over in pain, Bob looked up and waved at Nick to start running the bases or else he’d be thrown out at first. Bob believed in his sons and loved them no matter what happened, teaching them that the most important thing is to do your best and to be kind. When the kids were young, the family went together to Kenya and Tanzania, and he introduced them to the great beauty and grandeur of the places that had formed him. He was the world’s best father, and we regret only that he will never get to be the world’s best grandfather.
Bob lived well, and deeply loved the world. He even loved the world when it didn’t deserve to be loved. In the Somali famine camps, which he covered in 1992, young children would point him to others in the final stages of starving to death, bones stark against the skin of their small bodies. They had learned that these sights were what the well-fed Western photographers wanted. Bob would recall his horror upon returning to D.C. and walking into a grocery store filled with food, much of which would spoil before it could be eaten. He was one of the first to cover the emergence of AIDS in Africa, on assignment in Uganda. In one small village there, he came across piles of the bones of small girls wrapped in wire. During a recent civil war, they had been bound and raped by soldiersin a nearby house before being thrown off the roof to die slowly in the field below. Back at National Geographic, Bob cried outside the layout room after higher ups overruled his editors and decided that the story would not include many of these pictures because, as one remarked, “Who gives a damn about a bunch of sick [Africans].”
Bob was deeply marked by these experiences. He told his sons that, on the Red Cross plane into one famine camp, he realized that he and his gear had replaced food and medicine that would otherwise be getting to people in need, so his story had better justify their sacrifice. He taught that we lucky few raised in plenty have a duty to do what we can to make the world a better place for those without, and never to forget that the deep and essential goodness of humanity must be supplemented by hard work to improve things. He had an idea of how a person should live, and he lived that way: chase what you love, and in doing so be good to others.
The world mostly returned Bob’s love. Growing up, his family called him “buttered side up,” because no matter how he fell he always seemed to end up the right way, and his life was full and lucky. At the end, though, the world’s love ran out, as it seems to do for everyone. Bob began to enter cognitive decline and lost much of his energy. His decline manifested most prominently in losing words, which had been his dear friends from childhood and accompanied him on all his travels. His aphasia made conversation difficult and reading impossible, and mounting memory problems began to take the stories we all loved. He was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the beginning of 2025 and decided shortly thereafter to use medical aid in dying rather than let the disease hollow him out completely. He spent his final months surrounded by family and friends, swapping stories of the joys and adventures that made up his rich and generous life and laughing late into the night. He was himself to the end, loving and being loved.
On December 18, 2025, Bob Caputo embarked on one last assignment, a journey greater even than driving from the mouth of the Nile to its source or becoming a husband and father. He left beloved and smiling, loving each of us, regretting that he had to go so soon, but ready to go on into the undiscovered country where we must all go someday. We think of him sitting on the roof of his car, camera in hand, smiling his great big smile at us across the savannah, immersed in life. We will miss him and carry him with us always.
He is survived by his wife, Amy Wray Caputo; his sons, Nicholas and Matthew Caputo; his sister, Kathryn Kirk; his niece, Dayna Corcoran (John), his nephew, Chris Kirk, and his niece-in-law Tamara Kirk; his grand-nephews Connor, Quinn, Jude, and Jacob, and his grand-niece, Kyra; his many Wray family in-laws; and a host of friends and others around the world whose lives he touched and transformed with his brightness, warmth, and love.
A memorial gathering will be held for Bob on January 10, 2026 at 11:00 AM at the Kennett Friends Meeting House at 125 W. Sickle St. in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia.
If you wish to make a contribution in Bob’s memory, please consider a gift to Doctors Without Borders: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ (Click Donate, choose “Dedicate my donation,” and enter Bob’s name as honoree).
