Armed with a digital camera and a laptop, Newell has crisscrossed the globe as a “researcher” for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and as director of Friendly Planet, a nonprofit charity devoted to improving education in the world’s developing regions. He’s planned group expeditions and taken compelling photographs in places most of us have never heard of—Palawan, for example, and Sulawesi—although these days he focuses his camera lenses and considerable energy on Bhutan and Cambodia. “I’m the kind of person who loves to be flying around in constant motion,” Newell says.

That’s not so different from his Museum School days, when he played soccer with his teachers and covered everything from figure-drawing to welding steel. “It was all about learning the different processes,” he says. “I didn’t worry about making art.”

The more Newell has traveled, it seems, the closer he holds that sentiment. He works hard to create beautiful images, of course. But for him, photography is also a means to other ends, a fundraising tool to get a Bhutanese school connected to the Internet, to help silk weavers in rural Cambodia develop their traditional craft into a cottage industry, or to bring medical care to remote villages in both countries. “I want to do more,” Newell says simply.

That may mean small, intimate gestures such as sending prints to a tailor he met and photographed in an alley in Mombasa. It also means helping produce the book Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, which measures five-by-seven feet, weighs 133 pounds, and can be seen at libraries and museums across the country, including Harvard’s Houghton Library and the Library of Congress. It can be had, along with a smaller, liftable version, at Amazon.com, for donations of $15,000 and $100, respectively. All proceeds go to education development programs in Bhutan.