Roger Ressmeyer

Roger Ressmeyer’s dazzling career as a photojournalist has its roots in his childhood fascination with space exploration. When Roger was eight, John Glenn became America’s first man in orbit and captured young Ressmeyer’s imagination. By the age of eleven, Roger was polishing optics for telescopes he built by hand, and photographing the stars from his backyard at night. In the years since, Roger’s diverse subjects have included musicians, authors, earthquakes, and volcanoes. However, his chronicling of the heavens and human space flight remains the work for which he is best known and to which he brings unparalleled originality and beauty.

Roger’s professional career began in San Francisco, shortly after his graduation from Yale. For the first ten years, Ressmeyer focused upon stars of another sort—celebrities. He photographed hundreds of rock stars, musicians, writers, poets, politicians, scientists, philosophers and business leaders. His work appeared on record albums and book jackets, and in national publications including People and Rolling Stone.

But despite his early success as a portrait photographer, Roger was drawn back to his childhood love of space. In the early 1980s he began to turn his cameras once again to the night sky and things scientific. During this time, Roger’s frequent clients included Life, Time, Newsweek, Discover, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Stern and Geo. Later, from 1987 through 1995, Roger worked nearly full time on picture stories for National Geographic Magazine. From such assignments, Ressmeyer produced a breathtaking body of award-winning work.

In 1995, intrigued and lured by the opportunity to participate in the convergence of photography and digital technology, Ressmeyer cleared his desk and stunned the industry by taking a revolutionary step. He sold his photography collection and stock photo business to Bill Gates’ Corbis Corporation—the company’s first major acquisition—and turned his attention to the world of business. For the next three years, Ressmeyer worked at Corbis developing content acquisition and distribution strategies, as well as quality standards for digital imagery.

In 1999, Ressmeyer became Vice President at Getty Images where his primary responsibilities included corporate strategy, business development, and photographer relations. Among other accomplishments, he helped develop the company’s Third Party licensing program and personally designed the highly successful “Photographer’s Choice” marketing initiative. He left the company in 2003 and has returned to full-time photography, editing, and business consulting for individual photographers and image archives. Ressmeyer is a member of Canon’s celebrated Explorers of Light program and lectures frequently at industry events.

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