Michael “Nick” Nichols: Charger, Bandhavgarh National Park, India, 1996

In every one of his images, Michael “Nick” Nichols touches the very spirit of wildness. In this photograph, we meet our cover boy, Charger. Nick had learned that National Geographic had wanted to do a story on tigers and he wanted the assignment. For this project, he was in the field for thirteen months altogether—traveling through Russia, Indonesia, and Thailand—but focused his work on the wild tigers in India, where he met the jungle’s dominant male tiger, nicknamed Charger.

A Wild Life author Melissa Harris writes of this powerful image of Charger, “His back paws barely touch the rocks as he pushes off from a cliff, weight forward, body outstretched, taut, muscular, front paws seemingly relaxed, his gaze bright and directed upward. The supple grace of the animal’s thrust over the void and his propulsive power is extraordinary: the image practically drips of adrenaline.”

Nichols’s tiger portraits are the result of “strategic timing, exasperating trial and error, and gifts of serendipity,” she writes. “Nick is a photojournalist working in a time of crisis. Habitat and species are continually threatened by humans. For nearly thirty years, Nichols has conspired with scientists, naturalists, journalists, and activists to take on these issues. Wildlife photography is not the right term to describe what Nick does. Nick approaches his work in this reportorial tradition: he is a photojournalist working in the wild.”

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