Photographer Travels to Document the World’s Indigenous Cultures (PHOTOS)

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but photographer Lisa Kristine trusts hers to keep her moving. “I am very curious and very trusting of my curiosity,” she told weather.com. “I feel like things culminate from that.”

Her curiosity has served her well, even as a child when she would browse her mother’s bookshelf of anthropology books. “I would go to this bookshelf full of these big books and look at these people who looked like the earth,” she said. Those images would inspire Kristine’s passion for photographing indigenous cultures.

“I saw them as really anchored and self-knowing and I remember just deciding when I would go meet them when I was old enough,” Kristine said. “I think that it sort of culminated together, because when I was old enough to go somewhere… I had no direct intention except to learn.” Her passions, she said, ended up coming together perfectly “like a Reese’s peanut butter cup.”

Kristine has traveled to 100 countries in six continents. Traveling has become such a big part of her life that she’ll get an “itch” if she can’t go back, especially to places like India and Nepal.

One of her projects, titled “Intimate Expanse,” portrays the relationship between humans and land, a connection that is being more affected and tested with climate change. “I’m trying to show this organic, symbiotic relationship between us and the planet,” she said. “Living with the land as opposed to [being] on it.” The photographs were shot all over the world, including Myanmar, the Andes, Gansu, Tanzania and Ecuador.

Her documentation of these people and of these cultures comes from her innate desire to show and not tell. “I think things just start to come up and I sort of eagerly become a sponge for unique or interesting people that I would like to meet and photograph and learn about,” she said. “It’s like percolating. It’ll arrive to me.”

For Kristine, photography is not only a career but also a medium for raising awareness of social issues like modern day slavery and sex trafficking. Her visual language is used to expand on the necessary dialogue needed to engage the viewer, to question the world we live in.

“You don’t need to read to understand what you’re seeing,” she said. “You need to see it and then you’ll feel it. So whether it’s to a horrible circumstance where you're feeling empathy for someone else in a horrible environment, it allows for somebody to be instantly aware and hopefully transform to want to be a part of change.”

Currently, Kristine is working on a long-term project that will focus on documenting all 59 minorities of Nepal.

For more on her work, visit her website and Facebook Page.