Seven Continents Through the Lens: How World Travel Shaped Loretta Kryshak as a Photographer and Humanitarian

There is a photograph I took in Antartica that I return to often. No people, no color, no movement just a vast plane of ice stretching toward a horizon that seemed to belong to another world entirely. The light was coming from everywhere at once, flat and blue-white and completely unlike anything I had encountered before. I stood there for a long time before I raised my camera. Sometimes the most important thing a photographer can do is wait.

That moment, and hundreds like it across seven continents, is what has shaped me, not just as a photographer, but as a person who believes deeply in the power of paying attention. Over the years, my camera has taken me from the markets of Southeast Asia to the glaciers of Antarctica, from the plains of Africa to the alleyways of South America, and every single place has left something in my photographs and in me.

Why Seven Continents?

People sometimes ask whether completing all seven continents was a goal I set out to achieve deliberately. The honest answer is that it grew naturally from a fundamental restlessness; a belief, held since I was young, that the world is far larger and stranger and more beautiful than any one place can show you.

My husband Mike and I have always believed that travel is among the most important investments a family can make. Not tourism exactly, though there is nothing wrong with tourism. But genuine, slow, attentive travel, the kind where you eat where locals eat, stay long enough to notice patterns, and bring your children along so they learn early that their way of doing things is one way among many. We have homeschooled our children in countries across Southeast Asia. We have volunteered alongside communities in Africa and India. We have stood on every continent and tried, imperfectly, to understand what we were seeing.

The camera is what makes me look carefully enough to actually see it.

Africa: Learning to Wait

Africa was where I first understood that wildlife photography is almost entirely an exercise in patience. You can have the best equipment, the perfect light, the ideal position and still miss the photograph if you move too soon or too late.

I photographed a leopard in the early morning, in that brief window when the light is neither harsh nor flat but golden and directional and alive. The leopard held still. I held still. For a few seconds, we were simply two creatures occupying the same patch of morning, and then it was over. I had the frame. But I only had it because I had learned, by that point, to resist the urge to shoot immediately and instead wait for the moment that was actually there, not the one I expected.

Africa also gave me some of my most humanizing experiences as a traveler. The communities I visited — often with volunteer groups, sometimes through connections made by Rebel Reform — maintained extraordinary social cohesion with far fewer material resources than any community I had encountered at home in Milwaukee. DELETE: That observation did not make me feel superior or generous. It made me feel instructed. These communities knew things about mutual support and human connection that I had been trying to build programmatically for years. I photographed what I saw and brought those images home as reminders.

South America: Grassroots Lessons

South America is where I learned the most about grassroots organizing, and I learned it not from a workshop or a book but from watching local nonprofit leaders work with almost nothing and accomplish extraordinary things.

I was particularly struck by the specificity of their interventions. Nothing was abstract. Everything was aimed at a particular person in a particular circumstance this family needs this, that neighborhood is missing that. The photography I did there reflects that specificity. I was drawn less to sweeping landscapes than to close, quiet portraits of everyday life: a woman arranging produce at a market stall, a child walking to school along a road that was more dust than pavement, an elderly man sitting in the shade outside a building whose walls told a hundred years of history in their peeling paint.

Those images, and the organizing philosophy behind them, came back to Milwaukee with me and shaped how I think about Rebel Reform's work. We try to be specific. We try to serve the person in front of us, not an abstraction of need.

India: The Weight of Scale

India humbled me in ways I did not fully expect. I had traveled widely before I went, and I thought I was prepared for the scale of what I would see. I was not.

What I found there was not only poverty though the poverty was real and confronting but also resilience of a kind that photography struggles to capture because it is so interior, so embedded in daily life that it doesn't announce itself. The most powerful images I made in India were not of suffering. They were of ordinary persistence: a family cooking dinner, a group of children doing homework on a rooftop, a man repairing a bicycle beside a road.

The bicycle image stayed with me for a long time. There is something universal about a bicycle about the modest miracle of human-powered mobility that cuts across every culture I've visited. It is perhaps part of why the bike giveaway program at Rebel Reform has always felt so personally meaningful to me. We have given away more than 4,000 bicycles to children in Milwaukee through our partnership with community organizations. Every single time I watch a child ride away on one of those bikes, I think about that man on the roadside in India, and the image I almost didn't take because I was moving too fast.

Southeast Asia: Color, Chaos, and the Case for Black and White

Southeast Asia presented me with a problem I have never entirely solved: it is almost impossibly colorful. Markets stacked with fruit and textiles, temples draped in gold, streets painted in ways that seem to defy any single frame.

And yet my best work from that part of the world is in black and white.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about why. Part of it is simply that color, in a scene so saturated with it, can overwhelm the photograph's other elements its geometry, its human story, its emotional core. Stripping the color away forces the viewer to look at what is actually happening, not just what is visually spectacular.

But I think there is something else too. Black-and-white photography insists on a kind of permanence. It removes the image from its specific historical moment from the particular fashions and signs and technologies that date a photograph and makes it feel, instead, like something that has always been true and will go on being true. The weight of a vendor's concentration over her stall. The way light divides a narrow street into two worlds. The laughter on a child's face. These things do not belong to a decade. They belong to the human experience.

That belief that there are things worth photographing because they are permanently true is one I carry into my humanitarian work as well. The need for dignity. The hunger for community. The particular joy of a child with a bicycle. These are not trends. They are constants.

Australia and New Zealand: Space and Silence

I have found, in my travels, that the photographs I treasure most from sparsely populated places are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the quiet ones. A single tree in a field. A road disappearing into distance. A sky with room enough in it to think.

Australia and New Zealand gave me space in a way that few other places have. Space to be a small thing in a large landscape, which is a perspective I find useful to revisit periodically. When you run an organization, manage relationships, coordinate logistics, and advocate loudly for the people your programs serve, it is easy to lose the thread of your own smallness. These landscapes restored it.

The photographs I brought back from that part of the world are among the most minimal of my career. Very little in the frame. A great deal of sky. I love them precisely because they are so different from the density and urgency of the work I do at home.

Antarctica: The Continent That Stopped Me Cold

I have already written elsewhere about Antarctica, but I will say again here what I always say: it is the place that stays with me most.

There is no culture to photograph in Antarctica in the way there is culture in every other place I have visited. No markets, no architecture, no faces shaped by generations of particular history. There is only the planet itself ice and sky and the sound of wind and, on certain extraordinary mornings, complete silence.

My black-and-white work from Antarctica was recognized with an honorable mention at the Monochrome Awards, and while I am proud of that recognition, what I value most about those images is what they remind me of every time I look at them. The world is ancient and enormous. We are brief and small. What we choose to do with our brief time in our small corner of it how we treat the people around us, what we build, what we give away matters more than the scale of the planet suggests it should.

I came home from Antarctica and threw myself into the work of Rebel Reform with a renewed sense of urgency. Not frantic urgency, but the settled, purposeful kind. The kind that comes from having stood somewhere that puts things in perspective.

What Seven Continents Taught Loretta Kryshak About Seeing

The through-line in all of this, the thing that connects a leopard at dawn in Africa to an ice field in Antarctica to a child receiving a bicycle in Milwaukee is attention. Photography has taught me that attention is the foundation of everything worth doing. You cannot photograph what you have not truly seen. You cannot help a community you have not truly listened to. You cannot lead an organization well if you are too busy to notice what is actually happening inside it.

I travel because the world is worth seeing. I photograph because the act of making an image forces me to see it more carefully. And I do the work I do at Rebel Reform because everything I have seen on seven continents and in the streets of the city where I live has convinced me that people, everywhere, are worth showing up for.

That is the only philosophy I have ever needed.

Loretta Kryshak is the Executive Director of Rebel Reform, the social outreach arm of Rebel Converting. She is an award-winning photographer whose work has been recognized by the Monochrome Awards, and she has traveled to all seven continents. She documents her journeys, photography, and humanitarian work at lorettakryshak.com.

From Finance and IT to Nonprofit Leadership: Loretta Kryshak on Building a Life of Purpose

If you'd asked Loretta Kryshak in her early twenties what she pictured for her career, she would have described spreadsheets, network architectures, and writing code, not warehouses full of donated bikes, or press appearances to announce million-mask milestones, or spending an afternoon photographing children at a park in Milwaukee receive their first bicycle.

Life has a way of taking your skills somewhere you never expected to need them and Loretta has spent a lot of years being grateful for that.

A Foundation Built on Finance, Technology, and Design

I graduated from UWM, where I earned two bachelor's degrees. One in Finance, one in Management Information Systems both landing me on the Dean's Honor List. I started out using my financial skills as a computer programmer, customizing financial programs focused on basic MRP to manage inventory control, production planning, and scheduling for manufacturing industries. Over time, I was a pioneer when barcoding became available to help make inventory control easier.

I also hold an Associate of Arts in Graphic Design and Photography from Milwaukee Area Technical College, where I earned Dean's Honor Roll recognition as well.

That combination; financial literacy, systems thinking, and visual design sounds eclectic, but it has turned out to be exactly the toolkit that nonprofit leadership demands.

Running Rebel Reform is not a lax job.  It requires understanding how money moves, where it should go, and how to make a case for specific allocations when resources are limited. It requires systems thinking: how do you coordinate 22 partner agencies to distribute 4 million masks during a public health crisis? How do you organize a warehouse, a volunteer team, a logistics chain, and a community outreach campaign simultaneously? Effective organizational communication requires a strategic blend of clear, compelling, and mission-true messaging, where both visual and verbal elements are aligned.

Finance. Systems. Design. I use all three, every single day.

The Corporate Path That Preceded the Nonprofit One

Before Rebel Reform, I worked in the corporate world as a consultant, project manager, and systems analyst. These weren't glamorous titles, but the work was intellectually rigorous and taught me skills that I don't think any amount of nonprofit-specific training could have replicated.

As a consultant, I learned to enter unfamiliar organizations, quickly understand how they actually function (as opposed to how they say they function), identify inefficiencies, and recommend solutions that could survive implementation. As a project manager, I learned to hold timelines and people accountable without destroying relationships. As a systems analyst, I learned to think in processes to see not just what's happening now, but what happens next, and next after that.

All of this became the architecture of how I lead Rebel Reform. When we partnered with Just One More Ministry to renovate their 24,000-square-foot warehouse, I wasn't just writing a check, I was managing a project. When we designed the #MaskUpMKE campaign, I wasn't just organizing volunteers, I was architecting a system that had to scale across county lines and health department relationships and manufacturing logistics simultaneously.

I am proud of what Rebel Reform has accomplished. I am equally proud of the professional foundation that made those accomplishments possible.

What Loretta Kryshak Believes About Women in Leadership

I am careful not to overclaim about my own experience, but I do think there's something worth saying about the path that led me here.

I came of age in fields of finance, information technology, systems engineering where women were present but not common. Where being taken seriously required a certain kind of persistent, unflappable competence. Where you learned quickly that you did not get the benefit of the doubt; you demonstrated it, every time, and then you moved forward.

The women I admire most in leadership share knowing that  confidence comes from knowing your worth and refusing to compromise it. I try to model that at Rebel Reform, and I try to model it for the young people in our community of both, boys and girls who are watching how adults show up when things are hard.

The Junior Women's Club and Community Roots

Before Rebel Reform, when I became a mother , I joined the Junior Women's Club of Mequon an organization that exemplifies exactly the kind of community-level relationship building that I believe underpins all meaningful civic work. Volunteering and organizing through organizations like the Junior Women's Club has kept me connected to the fabric of everyday life in southeastern Wisconsin in a way that a nonprofit executive role alone never could.

Local organizations matter. Neighborhood relationships matter. The woman you serve alongside at a community event is the person who calls when she hears about a family that needs bikes or backpacks or a warm meal. That network is irreplaceable and it doesn't build itself.

A Career That Keeps Evolving

I'm often asked whether I miss corporate life. The honest answer is: As a Graphic Artist I am still very much involved with our company and everyday chaos at Rebel Converting.

But, what I also have — leading an organization that directly changes the material conditions of people's lives, while also pursuing photography, and traveling with my family, and staying connected to the community where I've built my life — is richer than anything I pictured in those early years of spreadsheets and network diagrams.

The skills are the same. The purpose is larger. And the work, even on its hardest days, is worth it.

Loretta Kryshak is the Executive Director of Rebel Reform, the social outreach arm of Rebel Converting. She holds degrees in Finance, Management Information Systems, and Graphic Design & Photography and has spent over a decade leading community impact programs in southeastern Wisconsin. Follow her work at lorettakryshak.com.