Through late November and December last year, photojournalist Brent Stirton  was working in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Congo. But he found his way home for the holidays—home being Ventura, CA, where he moved from New York a little more than year ago. “It was enough for me with New York,” he says. “My lady was like, ‘Okay, I need a little more quality of life if you’re not going to be around.’”

While he was in California he managed to spend a few days chilling out in redwood country. “I needed to clear my head,” he says. Then he was off again, first to Chad and Togo in West Africa, and then back to Congo.

A senior staff photographer at Getty Images, Stirton’s work has appeared in Time, the New York Times, Paris Match, Le Figaro and other publications, most notably National Geographic, for which he’s shot 13 stories since 2007. Over the past two decades, Stirton has earned a place at the top of his field, both for his editorial photography and for his work with humanitarian and other non-profit organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund. He’s won multiple prizes from the World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International competitions—most recently a first-place prize  in POYi’s Issue Reporting Picture Story  category for a photo essay called "First Sight," about two young girls from West Bengal suffering from congenital cataracts. The project, done in collaboration with WonderWork, an organization that supports surgeons who operate on children suffering from a variety of maladies around the globe, has also been shortlisted for this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.

“I tend to work more on features—why things happen and what the likely repercussions are, or what’s really going on behind the scenes of a phenomenon, rather that covering what’s going on in the front lines,” Stirton says. One of the things he has learned over the course of his career is that photojournalists, as he puts it, “tend to run after the sensational.” Stirton, who has chased some of the most sensational stories in recent history, has been mindful of that as he developed a meaningful career as a documentary photographer.

“If you sit down and look at numbers, the vast majority of people are affected by what you might call mundane issues, rather than war,” he says. “The world’s real tragedy is disguised in the everyday.”

The Education of a Photojournalist

Stirton’s education as a photojournalist began in the maelstrom of history: A native of South Africa, he had finished his studies in journalism—after a stint in the South African army—just as the country’s ruling government and its policy of apartheid were coming to an end in the early 1990s.

“With everything happening then, and with what I’d seen while in the military—well, it was just a real wake-up call about what was going on in my country,” he says. “At the time, the South African media was largely controlled by the government, so it was really quite hard to know what was going on.”

Based in Durban, Stirton was writing for newspapers about the unrest taking place in South Africa’s townships when he was asked to supply photos as well. “So I went out and bought a used Canon AE-1,” he says, “and I found that photography was just much more instantly gratifying for me than writing.”

As a news photographer, he was in the right place at the right time, covering the historic 1994 South Africa elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power and, that same year, the genocidal mass murder of ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda. “That was my first international story,” he says, “and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But I was able to make some connections with news agencies and just went on from there.”

What he remembers from the time, not surprisingly, were the bodies that lay everywhere—that and the refugee camps just across the border in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Later, as power shifted in the region, he covered the horrific Congolese civil wars of the late 1990s. Stirton documented the forces of Laurent Kabila  driving Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko from power, but, looking back, he is not satisfied with the work he did. “I never spent a long time on those pieces. I never lived with those guys for months at a time, which is what I think you really need to do if you want to do those stories properly,” he says.

However, it was during that period that Stirton got another wake-up call. The Rwandan and Congolese civil wars had an extensive impact on the region’s land and wildlife—particularly, as one study  has noted, on the great apes living there.

“Together the two Congolese civil wars represented the deadliest conflict since World War II,” states the Worldwatch Institute. “The Virunga Volcanoes region has been at the center of all these events.”

Death of a Gorilla

If there was a single turning point in Stirton’s career—and his outlook on photography—it came in 2007, when a silverback alpha male gorilla and three females were shot and killed under mysterious circumstances in Congo’s Virunga National Park. Stirton had been covering paramilitary groups in the area when he heard about the killings. He trekked several hours to the scene and took a photograph  of conservation workers hauling away the giant male’s body, the once powerful animal now outstretched on a makeshift wooden litter.

The impact of the pictures was immense. “Brent Stirton's photographs of the dead creatures being carried like royalty by weeping villagers ran in newspapers and magazines around the world. The murders of these intelligent, unassuming animals the park rangers refer to as ‘our brothers’ ignited international outrage,” noted National Geographic.

Since then, Stirton has continued working on stories that focus on what he calls “the juncture of conflict and the environment,” including a 2008 investigation into the killings of the Virunga gorillas for National Geographic. “We got to the bottom of that investigation—we found out what was happening. There were successful prosecutions, and it was nice to see that effect,” he says. Later this year, he plans to release a book collecting together images he has made in Virunga over the past decade as a fundraiser for the park.

The Nature of Suffering

The episode awakened Stirton to the power a photograph could have in moving people to action—especially when the subject of the picture is an animal. “When we photographed those mountain gorillas, attention was paid,” he says. “People get tired of human tragedy; but if there are animals, that’s another story. For one reason or another, there’s a greater sense of outrage. I still haven’t figured out why.”

If our capacity for outrage and empathy are puzzles, the nature of tragedy is perhaps one of those things we can describe yet not fully comprehend. Stirton has witnessed it in a historic sense in central Africa, and revealed its everyday presence in work like his essay on the blind girls in West Bengal. “The World Health Organization estimates there are 40 million blind people in the world, and 51 percent of those people can be cured. But they continue to live in darkness because they can’t afford the surgery or don’t know it’s available,” he says.

Set against the misfortune in his stories, however, is improbable hope born out by the work of people like the surgeons who donated their time to give the girls the gift of sight and the park rangers and conservation workers who continue to struggle against poachers and paramilitary.

“Humankind continues to suffer, continues to be in a precarious position, for the majority of the world’s population. That continues to be a mystery to me,” Stirton said in a 2008 interview  with Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein. “We should be at a point in a civilization where these things are not happening.”