National Geographic Photographer And Archivist Volkmar Wentzel, 91

Volkmar Kurt Wentzel, 91, a National Geographic photographer who in retirement helped preserve the often-historic images taken over the past 118 years by the magazine's photographers, died of a heart attack May 10 at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He lived in Washington.

Mr. Wentzel, a German immigrant whose photos documented and illuminated places from Appalachia to India, worked for National Geographic for 48 years. He was recruited to the magazine after publishing "Washington by Night," a collection of his photos of the capital city in the 1930s.

He became a world traveler and a photographic artist whose prints have been shown in prestigious galleries and sell for thousands of dollars. But he remained a modest man who was interested in everything around him and could draw people out with a combination of charm and kindness, acquaintances said.

As he aged, he became concerned that the Geographic's historic negatives, plates and prints were being lost in periodic purges of the files by managers who weren't cognizant of their value. Using his stature as a longtime employee, Mr. Wentzel "bravely stood up and extolled the importance of the archive to the organization and the world," said Maura Mulvihill, vice president of the National Geographic Image Collection. "He thought it was a terrible shame that there were various times of unenlightenment here."

The collection today contains more than 10 million transparencies, black-and-white prints, glass plates and pieces of original art from the staff photographers and artists, as well as published work of freelancers.

A dedicated archivist himself, Mr. Wentzel amassed more than 12,000 images of his own. He also donated his darkroom to the Aurora Project, an artists colony in West Virginia.

Born in Dresden, Germany, Mr. Wentzel was 9 when he built a pinhole camera with his father, a specialist in photographic chemicals. The family left Germany in 1926 to escape widespread unemployment, financial hardship and political turmoil and settled in Binghamton, N.Y. He left home in the midst of the Depression and moved to the woods in the Youghiogheny area of West Virginia, where he and other artist friends set up log cabin studios. He built a darkroom in an old pump house and printed postcards of rhododendron blossoms, ferns and other natural subjects. Eleanor Roosevelt, on her way to Arthurdale, W.Va., bought three of his postcards.

An older architect he met there insisted that Mr. Wentzel complete high school, which he did. Mr. Wentzel moved to Washington in the mid-1930s and became a darkroom technician at Underwood and Underwood, a news picture agency in the District. He lived in an old rowhouse on Lafayette Square and shot the city on damp, foggy nights. The work earned him a job at National Geographic.

During World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served as a photo interpretation officer. After the war, he returned to National Geographic, where one of his first assignments was to "do India."

He took a freighter to the subcontinent and outfitted an ex-Army ambulance as a darkroom and mobile headquarters for a 40,000-mile photo survey. To reach Ladakh in western Tibet, Mr. Wentzel crossed the Himalayas on foot, by pony and by yak. His color photographs and motion pictures taken during the last days of the British Raj were among the first of little-known Nepal and the last of India's feudal splendor, he once told a photographic collection organization. With bats flying close to his ears, he said, he processed some of the first sheet-film Ektachrome in the ancient Buddhist cave temples of Ajanta.

Subsequently, he covered lands from Norway to the African Cape of Good Hope, and from South America's Cape Horn to Newfoundland. He traveled in Cameroon, Mali, Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland. His lens captured the wedding of King Zwilithini of the Zulus to a beautiful Swazi princess and documented the last of African kingdoms and vanishing tribal life.

His photographs of a New Year's Eve quadrille at the Spanish Embassy and the daring high-altitude skydives of Joseph Kittinger in the early 1960s were awarded first prize by the White House News Photographers Association.

His photography has been exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, among many others.

In 1964, he married Viola Kiesinger, daughter of German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. He helped start the Aurora Project, an artist-in-residence program in West Virginia, where painters, writers and musicians are given time and space to work.

In addition to his wife of 42 years, survivors include three children, Cecilia Bell of Sea Cliff, N.Y., Christina Wentzel of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Peter Wentzel of Rhinebeck, N.Y.; and five grandchildren.