A former National Geographic photographer shows what America was like in the 1970s and 1980s

Nathan Benn spent nearly twenty years as a photographer for National Geographic, beginning as an intern in 1972.

He traveled the world during his two decades with the magazine, though the vast majority of the photos he took never made it into print.

Luckily, National Geographic's Washington D.C. lab held on to all of his unpublished negatives, and when Benn quit working for the magazine in 1991, he transferred them to a storage space.

He didn't look at them again until twelve years later.

In 1993 he founded the world's first online commercial photo library, the Picture Network International, which he sold to Eastman Kodak in 1998. Then, in 2000, he started his three-year tenure as the director of the world-renowned Magnum Photos.

Benn finally started digging through his archives in 2003, curating a selection of work for his book, "Kodachrome Memory," which was published in 2013. The book, a collection of outtakes from his National Geographic days, depicts the United States between the 1970s and 1990s.

Keep scrolling to read Benn's story, as well as the back stories of some of his favorite shooting assignments.