Home and studio: Telluride, Colo., and upstate New York.

Clients: National Geographic Publications, Time, Life, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations.

Personal Projects: He has two book projects in the works, one that deals with capturing the meaning of the word "sacred" and the other on ancient Asia. Visit chrisrainier.com for details.

Advice for aspiring travel photographers: "You have to be driven by passion. You have to be driven by a love of telling the story. And if that's not there, something's missing.

Website:chrisrainier.com

The mission of the Enduring Voices Project is to document endangered languages around the globe and work to prevent the extinction of those languages. According to a sobering National Geographic statistic, almost 80 percent of the world's population speaks only 1 percent of its languages. The corollary is that only a handful of people are left who speak some of the several thousand other languages. When those people are gone, the language becomes extinct – forever...

Chris Rainier was born to travel. With a father who worked in the oil industry, Chris was in constant motion as a child, living, at various times, on four different continents. Growing up in so many different parts of the world has given him the ability to feel at home no matter where he finds himself.

"I feel very comfortable getting on a plane. I have a very high tolerance for travel," Rainier says. "I spend a significant amount of time each year on the road, because there's so much to see and there's so little time to understand this dynamic, changing world."...

Chris Rainier recently released his latest book, Ancient Marks, which documents traditional tribal tattooing around the globe. Images from the book were displayed this summer on the photo screen in New York City’s Times Square. Rainier’s portfolio also was included in the October 2004 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine.

Rainier, who specializes in documenting indigenous cultures, is a codirector of the Culture Initiative and...

The Internet has always held the promise of bridging the gap between diverse cultures, but so far most of the information seems to have flowed in one direction: from developed nations in the West, and particularly North America, to the rest of the world. "The validity of information that flows from indigenous cultures towards us is as strong as the other way around," says Chris Rainier, a photojournalist for National Geographic Traveler magazine and cofounder of Cultures on the Edge (cultureontheedge.com), a web site designed to share information between disparate cultures around the world...