Buddy Mays

A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, writer and photographer Buddy Mays is a former contract photographer for the National Geographic Society, a former field editor/writer/photographer for Outdoor Life Magazine, and the author of more than two dozen books. He has also written more than 500 newspaper and magazine travel articles, and in 2008, he was selected as one of the world’s 60 best wildlife photographers by Digital Photographer Magazine.

After four years in the United States Coast Guard stationed aboard the square-rigged training bark EAGLE in New London, Connecticut and then aboard the USCG Cutter Rockaway as a rescue swimmer in the North Atlantic, Buddy returned to New Mexico and attended New Mexico State University in Las Cruces majoring in vertebrate zoology and archaeology. He began his photography career as a newspaper photographer with the Albuquerque Tribune in 1969, and started freelancing full-time for TIME, Newsweek, and United Press International in 1971. Seven years later he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for a series of photographs of American cowboys and was among the five finalists. That same year, the Smithsonian Institute requested three of his black and white prints of American Indians for their permanent collection.

From 1980 until the late 1990s, still based in Santa Fe, Buddy spent five to six months each year traveling both in the United States and overseas, shooting photographs and writing articles for a variety of companies that included the National Geographic Society, Chevrolet, Northwest Airlines, Abercrombie & Kent, Sobek Travel, and others. He and his wife Stephanie have lived in Bend, Oregon, since 1996.