Photographer Page

Pete Muller

Gwen Nordgren sits by the ruins of her California home two months after a wildfire destroyed it. Natural disasters, like wildfires, are getting worse as the planet warms, and people living in their path are experiencing grief and trauma.

An expedition paddles along the Okavango River in Angola. The wetland is forms during the river's rainy season, and each summer it's a home to tens of thousands of flamingos.

Fabian Leendertz handles an insect bat during a capture and sample operation. Three species of fruit bats have historically been suspected of being the reservoir host of the Ebola virus.

Gwen Nordgren sits for a portrait by the pool next to the charred ruins of her former home in Paradise, California. Two months after the fire, Nordgren allowed Muller to accompany her on her return to say goodbye to the “perfect retirement house,” a place filled with 15 years of memories. The pool holds a special place in her thoughts. “I would go in the pool in the morning by myself,” Nordgren says. “I’d get into my bathing suit and get into this gorgeous pool, and I just felt like a queen. I’d look up at this beautiful California blue sky.”

HASTINGS, Sierra Leone “This image haunts me like few others,” photographer Pete Muller says. On assignment in West Africa during a swiftly spreading 2014 Ebola epidemic, Muller was inside a Sierra Leone treatment center when a delirious infected patient bolted out of the quarantined area and tried to climb a wall to get out. This outbreak was devastating the region, making a contagious insensible person a deadly threat; it took an armed police officer and two hazmat-suited clinicians to subdue the man and return him to bed. He died 12 hours later.

Medical staff at the Hastings Ebola Treatment Centre in Sierra Leone escort a man in the throes of an Ebola-induced delirium back to the isolation ward from which he escaped.

A large colony of fruit bats takes flight out of the trees where they live in the village of Attienkru, outside Bouake, Ivory Coast. There's evidence that fruit bats may play a role in spreading the Ebola virus to other animals, who in turn spread it to humans.

Two doctors perform necropsies on bats at a makeshift laboratory.

A bat suspected of being a carrier of the Ebola virus is prepared for a blood sample extraction in Bouake, Ivory Coast, in 2014.

Bare-knuckled and poised to punch, boys from the Venda tribe in Tshifudi, South Africa, engage in the boxing tradition known as musangwe. For boys as young as nine, it’s both an outlet for male energy and a check on aggression. Adults oversee the bouts to contain the violence. This photo was originally published in "The Many Ways Society Makes a Man," in January 2017.