Victor Englebert

Victor Englebert (b. 1933) is a Belgian-born travel and documentary photographer whose restless curiosity has taken him from the streets of Brussels to the world’s most remote corners. After training in visual arts at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound in Brussels, he traded studio work for the open road—first in 1957 when he hitch‑hiked and scooted across Africa, living off his Leica and bartering prints with local communities.

Over the next four decades, Englebert’s lens captured the daily lives and rituals of more than thirty indigenous peoples across five continents. His intimate portraits of the Tuareg salt caravans, Yanomami villages in the Amazon, and nomadic herders in the Himalayas appeared in nine National Geographic features, as well as in Smithsonian, Paris‑Match, and the London Sunday Times. He learned local languages, traveled on foot, by camel, and even by dugout canoe, believing that photography is inseparable from genuine cultural exchange.

A prolific author, Englebert has published seventeen books—including the award‑winning Wind, Sand and Silence: Travels With Africa’s Last Nomads—and his images have become benchmarks in visual anthropology. A longtime member of the American Society of Media Photographers, he continues to lecture on ethical fieldwork and story‑driven photography, inspiring new generations to explore the world with empathy, patience, and an unerring eye for the human spirit.