+ By Christine Fillat + Photos by Robert Madden
In early July 1969, Robert Madden was on board the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the South Pacific, preparing to photograph the splashdown of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. NASA had sent three astronauts into outer space to walk on the moon, conduct scientific experiments, and then return to Earth. This was the very first mission of its kind.
Madden, age 30, was astonished to find himself there. He had been hired two years earlier as a contract photographer, not yet on staff, for National Geographic. He had sent a memo to his boss, asking for a week off so that he could go to New York City and photograph the ticker-tape parade to celebrate the Apollo 11 astronauts’ return, but about a week later, he received a reply indicating that his boss wanted Madden to go out to the aircraft carrier and be one of the pool photographers for the splashdown. “I was just floored,” he says. “I thought, ‘Wow! Of all the photographers here, how come he picked me?’” I was on contract! There were 10 staffers at the time.” Later, Madden asked his boss why he was given that assignment. “He said that he figured that if I was willing to give up an entire week of money for this, I would do a pretty good job if I’m out there on the aircraft carrier. That’s the kind of boss he was.”
And so, two weeks before the splashdown, Madden was on board the Hornet along with a host of media: reporters, TV crews, and still photographers. Needing a way to get a unique vantage point, Madden worked with the ship’s metal shop to fashion a camera stand that would put his cameras 10 feet or more above the sizable press corp. He planned to use infrared sensors to trip the shutters.
On July 24, 1969, riding on the bow of the Hornet, Madden commandeered a cinematography tripod to hold his camera, which was mounted with a massive
1000 mm lens. The tripod provided the stability necessary to withstand the ocean swells, but even so, Madden placed a sandbag on the tripod and had a sailor sit on it. The images that he captured recount the scene of the helicopter plucking the astronauts out of the spacecraft, bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.
Topside, as the helicopter landed, things were chaotic and triumphant. A naval band played “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” President Nixon was on-site. Fisticuffs broke out between journalists vying for a decent perspective. The image Madden captured with the camera mounted on his metal camera stand is of the three astronauts exiting the helicopter, wearing protective suits, making their way to an isolation trailer. His most iconic image, which he took with a handheld camera, shows the astronauts, jubilant in their return, peering through the trailer’s window at the throng of assembled media. This image resides in the Apollo 11 exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
“That’s what good journalists do,” explains Madden. “Whether they’re war journalists or photojournalists, they’re always trying to figure out what’s the best way to present this particular thing and work it out.”
Growing up, in Wheaton, Illinois, young Madden was a bit of an outdoorsman. From age 11 until he was 16, he would camp out for weeks on end. In the winter, he kept a trapline for muskrat and mink and sold the skins to Sears, earning $90, which today would be worth close to $1,000. “It wasn’t really the trapping that was of interest to me as much as it was being out there in the snow and cold,” he says. He figures that, by the time he turned 20, he had spent two years outside.
During a three-year stint in the army, Madden was sent off to Korea. There, he honed his photography with a rangefinder camera and produced some award-winning photographs. When he returned to the United States, he studied English as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and worked as a correspondent for a statewide newspaper based in Madison, Wisconsin.
During the summer after graduation and before graduate school, Madden worked in The Dubuque, Iowa Telegraph-Herald darkroom. He studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, during which time he won the 1966 College Photographer of the Year competition. In 1967, National Geographic hired Madden as a contract photographer, and by 1972, he joined its staff, holding editorial and directorial positions until 2002.
When Madden first came to the National Geographic, his portfolio was mainly images of people. He was comfortable shooting in black and white but not in color. “I couldn’t do landscapes worth a darn,” he says. But he studied how other photographers created color photography and found out that color is a friend of his. “Color separates better than black and white. Black and white is all about focus—something is focused in the foreground, and the background is out, it’s separated and makes the image more three-dimensional. The problem is you’re looking at a two-dimensional piece of paper and get a three-dimensional view.”
The content of the estimated three million-plus exposures that make up his portfolio serve as clues to Madden’s approach to photography. His images can be found in two anthologies of his work, self-published as a record to be given as gifts to his family, of his personal favorite photographs. Those are the images in his catalogue that he considers most significant.
The photographs in those books include pictures taken up until 2022. The early photographs were shot on film, and those taken after 2000 are digital; some were taken with an iPhone. The images are arranged by subject matter. “This book contains photographs that I have taken that express as well as possible what I was trying to accomplish from a photojournalist’s point of view,” says Madden in a statement about his books.
The breadth of his work is massive. Some of the stories that he tells about the photographs could be fodder for an action movie, such as rappelling into a cliffside cave with a British mountain climber in the Venezuelan rainforest. There’s also the painstaking setting up of multiple flashes in an impromptu photo studio to capture a portrait, on film, of the heads of the German banking world (one of whom was later assassinated by the Baader-Meinhof Gang); a mercury mine in Spain; tobacco plantations in Cuba; shots of hippos, alligators, hyenas, and Antarctic penguins; images of mountains around the world; and captures of active volcanoes with lava flowing, propelling red-hot liquid into the sky, to name a few.
Madden’s most famous photograph was taken in 1976, in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake in Guatemala. To get near the earthquake’s epicenter, Madden traveled on an Aeroclub (a private Guatemalan aviation club) airplane with an amateur pilot. The plane landed on a road, a makeshift landing strip. While sitting in the airplane’s back seat, Madden noticed another airplane coming in for a landing and readied his camera. “This might be cool,” he thought, “a plane landing on a highway.” But then the plane seemed a little off course. “I said, ‘Shoot, it’s going to hit us,’” recalls Madden. “I hit the pilot on the back of the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s get out of here!’ Vroommmmm, the pilot starts the engine. The landing plane hits a pickup truck that’s maybe 30 yards away. If it hadn’t hit the pickup truck, it would have hit us!”
Madden captured two men, who had been sitting on the truck, leaping into the air to get away from the impending collision. “Of course,” he says, “it rolled the pickup truck over. I was in the plane with a doctor. The doctor looks at me and says, ‘I want a copy of that picture!’” Fortunately, no one was terribly injured in the crash. “It provided a pretty dramatic picture,” he says. It was named one of the 50 Greatest Pictures from National Geographic.
Today, Madden still travels and makes images with his cameras. Many of his photographs can be viewed on his website. He also leads small educational photo workshops and gives talks.
The creative endeavor is what has inspired Madden. “It was a catharsis of my soul rather than being a job. I never said, even when I worked for the Geographic, ‘Wow, this is going to go across two pages.’ That wasn’t the idea. The idea was, ‘What’s the essence of this situation? And how can I capture it so that the reader feels similar to the way I feel about this?’ Either they’d love to be there, or they’d hate to be there. They’re interested in it, and the picture is graphically interesting enough for them to be involved.”
Buffeted by crosswinds, a rescue plane crashes into a truck while trying to land on a mountain highway.
