Pascal Maitre has been in motion ever since he went to Africa as a budding photojournalist in 1979. Cast your glance anywhere on a map of the sprawling continent, and chances are Mr. Maitre has been there — from the shores of Dakar, across the Sahel to Chad, south through Rwanda’s lush forests and all the way eastward to Madagascar. And, like his locales, his topics are always changing — desertification in Niger, political turmoil in Somalia and Chad’s oil boom.

That means he’s always thinking, always adapting.

“Each story is like new,” he said over a crackling phone line from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he is on assignment for National Geographic. “You must find a new solution, a new piece to make the story.”

Compared to finding — and getting to — the right story, photography itself is easy, Mr. Maitre said.

“The most difficult part is to be in a place where something interesting is happening,” he said. “To get physical access, authorization and safety. Once you’re on the spot, shooting is never difficult.”

His decades-long trek across Africa was made possible by World War II. Mr. Maitre was born into a family of blacksmiths in a small town in central France. After the war, his aunt married an American solider who had been stationed at a nearby naval base. The couple relocated to Chicago and later sent their nephew his first camera — a twin-lens Rolleiflex.

He was enchanted.

“I was crazy about photography,” said Mr. Maitre, 57. He took pictures obsessively throughout high school and eventually abandoned his undergraduate studies in psychology to document the lives of France’s Roma population. After serving in the French army for a year — he worked in the military’s photo lab — Mr. Maitre decided to pursue photography professionally, and he began working for Jeune Afrique in 1979.

Pascal Maitre/Agence Cosmos

The publication, which published news and analysis from Africa, sent him on his first assignment to Morocco, to cover its war with the Polisario Front, a rebel group in the western Sahara. Two years later he returned to Africa to cover a military coup in Liberia and a meeting of the African Union in Sierra Leone.

Since then, Mr. Maitre has maintained a home base in Paris and spends roughly half of each year on assignment in Africa. Recently, in collaboration with Unesco and Edition Lammerhuber, he published “Amazing Africa,” a collection of photographs that span more than three decades in sub-Saharan Africa. To flip through the pages of “Amazing Africa” is to embark on a visual caravan. On one page, a woman walks beneath a row of towering baobab trees in Madagascar (Slide 8); on another, a group of horsemen is caught amid a sandstorm in Chad; on another, children bathe in an oil-slicked river in Nigeria (above).

There is one constant in his work — saturated colors. Relying in past years on Kodachrome, he captured deserts awash in golden light, early mornings that dawn a deep blue and earth so red it strains the imagination.

Pascale Maitre/Agence Cosmos

Mr. Maitre did not work alone. His book’s introduction describes it as a return gift to his subjects, and a tribute to his fixers, without whom none of the pictures would have been possible.

“The fixer is the guy without whom you are nothing,” Mr. Maitre said.

In particular, the book is dedicated to a man named Ajoos Sanura, who began as Mr. Maitre’s fixer in Somalia and became a dear friend. Mr. Maitre started photographing in Mogadishu in 2002 and returned to the country five times to document life in the embattled city. Each day was precarious then, he said, because Islamic militias were fighting for control of the city and pirates ruled the coastline.

“It was very difficult,” he recalled. “Al-Shabaab was very strong at the time. You had to take care, you could not stay a long time in one place, you had to shoot and go quickly. You could not be more than two times in the same place. It’s challenging to do a story in these conditions, about a country in this condition. You have to take care of many things: your security and the people who take care of you. You must be very precise, you must understand political situation; in a very short time, you must make a good picture.”

In 2010, Mr. Maitre won a National Magazine Award for his photographs that accompanied the National Geographic article “Shattered Somalia.”

Today, more than three decades since his first foray to Africa, Mr. Maitre says it is difficult to name a favorite country there, but he admits to outsized affection for Madagascar.

“I like everything about the country,” he said. “The color, the light, the vegetation, the people. If the painter Gauguin was living today, and could choose, I think he would go to Madagascar.”

Pascal Maitre/Agence Cosmos

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