O'Rear was born in Butler, Missouri, in 1941 and first handled a Brownie camera when he was 10. As a child, he wanted to be a pilot and got his license at the age of 16. He attended State Teachers College and started his career as a sports reporter for the Butler Daily Democrat.[2] In 1961, he joined the daily newspaper Emporia Gazette as a photographer, and in 1962 The Kansas City Star as a reporter-photographer and, in 1966, he moved to Los Angeles to join as a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times.[3]
In 1971, National Geographic magazine hired O'Rear to document the lives of Russian villagers in Alaska who called themselves Old Believers. In 1978, the magazine sent him to Napa Valley to photograph the wine region. O'Rear became interested in wine photography and shifted his base to the valley to photograph the region. In 1985, he traveled to Indonesia for another assignment for the magazine where he carried 500 rolls of film and took 15,000 photos.[2] O'Rear has appeared on National Geographic magazine's cover twice: once as "Bird Man" flying an ultralight aircraft and later for the other photograph shown him holding a computer chip in his hand.[4] O'Rear had been associated with the magazine for nearly 25 years (1971 to 1995) and has photographed in 30 countries and every state in the USA.[2] For the magazine, he photographed 25 articles ranging in topics including the Mexican Riviera, Siberia, Canada, Silicon Valley and Napa Valley.[3] While working with National Geographic, he learned to use small strobes and taught the subject for 11 years at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop.[4]
From 1972 to 1975, O'Rear was part of the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project, aimed at "photographically documenting the subjects of environmental concern in America during the 1970s" along with 70 other photographers including Bill Strode, Danny Lyon and John H. White.[5][6] O'Rear is credited with the most photographs in the final DOCUMERICA collection.[7] In 1980, he co-founded the photo agency, Westlight, with Craig Aurness, which was acquired in 1998 by Corbis.[4][8] The same year, Corbis sent O'Rear around the world for a year to photograph major wine regions.[4]
