When designer Abbott Miller was asked to co-curate "Design for a Living World," a traveling exhibition co-presented by The Nature Conservancy and the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, he knew photography would be essential to the success of the show. For the exhibition, which opened at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York in May and runs through January 2010 before traveling nationally, ten renowned designers were commissioned to create products using sustainable materials from Nature Conservancy preserves around the world. Miller wanted the exhibit to include photos to show where these materials are grown and how they are harvested. That turned into an eight-month, round the world assignment for photojournalist Ami Vitale.

The exhibition encourages viewers to consider the objects we use each day and what effect their manufacture can have on the environment. While the products the designers created are the center of the show, the large-scale environmental photography enables viewers to consider the sources of the products. "The primary motivation for engaging a photographer was to make the places as much a part of the exhibition as the projects themselves," says Miller.

Those places were as far flung as Micronesia, Idaho, Australia and Bolivia, so Miller wanted one photographer to shoot them all to avoid visual inconsistencies. He met photojournalist Ami Vitale while the two collaborated on a project for the Ford Foundation, and Miller was struck by the quality of Vitale's work. Although he was worried she wouldn't be able to commit to the eight-month assignment, he asked her to join the project and she agreed.

Working on "Design For A Living World" provided Vitale a number of opportunities. She was able to step outside her normal photojournalistic practice, travel to remote areas of the world that most people have never seen, and find a new outlet for her work. "It's so interesting how it's this domino effect, because once you start with one project that's outside the lines of what your traditional role was, they sort of build on each other," says Vitale.

Before Vitale set out she and Miller discussed how the photographs would be used in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue. "We knew we wanted a mix of people and process, but most importantly we wanted these establishing landscape photographs," Miller recalls.

Vitale had roughly two weeks for each of the locations, but she says a fair amount of time was eaten up by travel. She traveled light, carrying a backpack with her Nikon D3 and a backup body.

One of the challenges was finding ways to illustrate the origins of the materials, because key points in the various production cycles often occurred simultaneously or at times when she wasn't able to be there. Vitale says the remote locations and the small numbers of people she could photograph in some areas also made her work tricky and interesting. Although she traveled with the designers to a few of the places, it was left up to her to determine who to photograph and what the story would be.

Among the materials the designers used were Chinese bamboo from Yunnan Province, salmon leather cast off from Alaska fishers and chiclé latex harvested from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. "I got to do everything from way below freezing, to underwater photography, to humid, salty environments," says Vitale.

For the exhibition, which is spread through several rooms on the second floor of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Miller used a unique printing process and a combination of large landscape photographs and smaller images to create a sense of place for viewers. For each location a single landscape photograph was enlarged and printed across several recycled aluminum panels using a unique encapsulated process. The panels were then assembled into a sort of collage, overlapping each other like shingles. Miller also added smaller, single frames of details, portraits and further landscapes to the collages. The luminosity of the aluminum, the texture created by the overlaid panels, and the near-and-far perspectives of the photographs engage viewers through a sense of movement and activity, which helps the exhibition achieve its goal of balancing the importance of product and place.

Vitale says the show is unique because it considers how people can be stewards of the environment while still making a living. "Traditionally conservation organizations leave people out of the equation," notes Vitale, suggesting that people are often moved off of land in conservation efforts. "They forget that human beings are key to preserving these landscapes. This is one of the first examples where they're actually recognizing that we need to help people create a sustainable livelihood."