Welcome

You can email me: ddimick [at] gmail [dot] com.

My interest is the collision between humans and geography. Showing this intersection between people and planet has dominated my life’s work. I have produced and encourage environmental photography that documents accumulating impacts of humanity’s expanding aspirations.

Eyes on Earth, co-founded with National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson, nurtures this idea of witnessing environmental change through photography. Our goal is inspiring a new generation of environmental photographers and visually literate citizens. Since 2018 I have mentored “River Stories,” a class in place-based environmental narrative at the University of Oregon School of Journalism in Eugene.

For more than 40 years I worked in journalism, first as a photographer, reporter, and editor at newspapers in Oregon, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky; and from 1980 through 2015 I was a picture editor, and for a decade environment editor at National Geographic in Washington, D.C.

I’ve been on the Missouri Photo Workshop faculty for more 25 years. In 2013 I received the Charles M. Sprague Memorial Award from the National Press Photographers Association for service to photojournalism. From 2016 to 2019 I served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

My slide show lectures address this ongoing collision between people and planet in what scientists call the The Human Age, or Anthropocene. Lectures I’ve presented include: 2019 Gardiner Lecture at Kansas State University, 2018 Ruhl Lecture at the University of Oregon, and the 2017 Seaman A. Knapp Lecture for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. In 2010 I was the Gov. Tom McCall Memorial Lecturer at Oregon State University. In 2018 I organized a mini-symposium on the Anthropocene as part of Science Festival at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2013 I organized a symposium on environmental photography at Visa pour l’image in Perpignan, France. From 2008 to 2012 I co-organized the Aspen Environment Forum in collaboration with the Aspen Institute.

I grew up on a small sheep and hay farm south of Portland in the Willamette River Valley of Oregon, a tributary of the Columbia River (above) in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. My parents were fisheries biologists.

Photography is a life-long passion, I have been photographing for more than 50 years. Some recent work can be found at the Photography tab on the menu, more is coming. Among projects here you will find an ongoing multi-year project showing Anthropocene landscapes as seen from commercial airplanes.

 (This supersedes an old blog called Signs from Earth.)