Luis Marden (born Annibale Luigi Paragallo) (January 25, 1913 – March 3, 2003) was an American photographer, explorer, writer, filmmaker, diver, navigator, and linguist who worked for National Geographic Magazine.
Marden began his career at the WMEX radio station in the Boston area, where he had a photography program called Camera Club of the Air.
The magazine prided itself on publishing quality color photography, and Marden was making good use of a lightweight Leica, which could hang from a single neck strap.
This love led him to the bamboo groves of China's Guangdong, thereby becoming, in 1974, the first National Geographic representative since the Communist Revolution of 1949 to return to this country.
"Raw material for implements of peace and war, this botanical cousin to rice, corn, and Kentucky bluegrass may be the world's most useful plant," Marden would write.
The spot had caught Marden's eye in 1944 when he and his wife and had been fishing for hickory shad (Alosa mediocris) along the Potomac, near Chain Bridge.
The house is a flat-roofed, cinderblock home trimmed in mahogany that curves into the side of a hill; it comes to an abrupt point upriver, like the bow of a boat.
"Our beautiful house ... stands proudly just under the brow of the hill, looking down always on the rushing water which constantly sings to it, day and night, winter and summer," Ethel wrote to Wright in 1959.