Photos take us around the world
Popular program adds additional shows at Roy Thomson Hall
After a wildly successful first season, National Geographic Live will return with twice the opportunity to see iconic photography and hear from extraordinarily adventurous shutterbugs.
Another series of four presenters was announced as the first season concluded Tuesday night, this time with two nights scheduled for each, after overwhelming demand saw Roy Thomson Hall turning hopeful attendees away in droves.
“The fact that we sold out on subscription exceeded our wildest dreams,” says Jesse Kumagai, director of programming for the Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall.
New programs often need a couple of years to become established, so they were prepared to build the National Geographic series. But it was an instant hit, he says.
“We had so many people calling up trying to get tickets, I feel terrible in my position to turn people away,” he says. “This is one of the most popular things we’ve staged in years.
“It’s amazing when you see how much resonance it has with this city.”
The series kicks off Nov. 12 and 13 with Kenny Broad, National Geographic’s Explorer of the Year for 2011. He will present the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, flooded caves described as “largely unexplored, unimaginably beautiful and considered among the most hazardous places to dive.”
Audiences will next go deep sea diving with Robert Ballard, Dec. 3 and 4. Ballard has led more than100 undersea expeditions, from hydrothermal vents in the Galapagos Rift to the Titanic. Two decades of documenting Vietnam follows on March 4 and 5, with Catherine Karnow, a San Francisco-based photographer who grew up in Hong Kong in the 1960s, when her father, Stanley Karnow, was a foreign correspondent for Time magazine and the Washington Post.
She grew up fearing Vietnam but, after becoming a photographer, went for the first time in 1999 and stayed for 30 days. She fell in love with the country and its people and has gone back every couple of years for the last two decades.
“I find it absolutely fascinating,” she said in a telephone interview. “You can never get to the bottom of Vietnam. It’s like an onion: you peel back a layer and there is another layer.”
Karnow has tried to understand — and capture — all the elements, from communism, new money, the legacy of the war, the offspring of American military and the effects of Agent Orange.
It’s an honour to present such a personal body of work through National Geographic and the high standards that are expected, she said. “You can count on the sound being perfect, the picture quality on the screen being perfect. Nothing is shabby or shoddy with them.
“There are no boring shows, that’s for sure,” Karnow said with a laugh.
Rounding out the series will be photographer Tim Laman and ornithologist Ed Scholes, recounting wild and hairy adventures in New Guinea rainforests in search of birds of paradise, some of nature’s most extraordinary wonders. For tickets call 416-872-4255