[2] He was one of the first people to take photographs of then-little known country of Nepal, and was noted for documenting the final years of many of the traditional tribal kingdoms of Africa.

"This was a terrifying, almost traumatic experience, until by accident, with the flick of the darkroom's amber-red inspection light switch, the magic world of photography, my lifetime love, was revealed," he later said.

[4] When Wentzel was nine years old, he and his father built a wooden pinhole camera and his first photographs were of statues in the Grosser Garten near their home.

Dr. Wentzel was offered a job as director at an Ansco photographic paper manufacturing plant in Binghamton, New York,[4] so the family moved to the United States in 1926.

[3][5] Wentzel's mother died in 1931, and his father (burdened with a demanding job, and writing books on photographic materials) became unable to adequately care for his four teenage sons.

[4] Wentzel and a friend, Bill Buckley, sold some personal items, pooled the money they had earned from their newspaper home delivery jobs, and decided to settle in South America.

[4][8] Although Buckley said he was returning to Binghamton, Wentzel rented a room in the Lafayette Square townhouse of Roosevelt aide Thomas Gardiner Corcoran.

While staying at Corcoran's home, he met German-born architect Eric Menke (who had come to D.C. to work on a proposed Municipal Center), who told Wentzel about a burgeoning artists' colony in Aurora, West Virginia.

[4][8] The colony offered to pay Wentzel $2.50 a week to care for the cabins and studios on the property; he accepted, and moved to Aurora in the summer of 1935.

[4][8] The artists' colony in Aurora consisted of a log cabin tavern on U.S. Route 50, and a lodge and studios (of various sizes, and constructed of various kinds of materials) in the nearby woods.

)[8] He was mentored by news photographer Clarence Jackson, and one of his first assignments (to take portraits of the wife of the French ambassador) was published in the Washington Star newspaper.

[4][7][12] Wentzel submitted some of these prints to the Royal Photographic Society in early 1936, and over the next six months they were displayed in galleries throughout Europe—winning several prizes.

[4] In late 1936, while passing the National Geographic Society, Wentzel decided on the spur of the moment to ask for a tour of their photographic facilities.

The personnel director was initially dismissive of Wentzel's interest in the job, but was impressed with the awards his photographs had won.

[4] Wentzel left the magazine at the outbreak of World War II and enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, where he was assigned photo interpretation duties.

[15][16] He later traveled widely around the globe, photographing people and landscapes in Angola, Cameroon, Cape Horn, Mali, Mozambique, Newfoundland, Norway, South Africa, and Swaziland.

[17] In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Wentzel became an advocate for saving, preserving, and archiving National Geographic's photographic negatives, plates, and prints, many of which were being lost due to damage (such as improper storage or pests) or because untrained staff didn't realize their value and destroyed them to obtain filing space.

[5] In 2001, he helped co-found the Aurora Project, an artist-in-residence program in West Virginia, where painters, writers and musicians are given time and space to work.

[3] On August 16, 1960, an automatic camera of Wentzel's captured Captain Joseph Kittinger making a 102,800 foot (31,333 m) skydive which set the record for the highest parachute jump of all time.

[24] Jane Livingston, chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, said his career was a "prolonged, quiet unfolding of genius.