When Time magazine covered the 921 Earthquake that devastated central Taiwan in 1999, the photographer who captured the defining image for the issue was John Stanmeyer. This week he visited Taiwan again in happier circumstances to lead a seminar on the use of Aperture 2, Apple's pro-level photo management software, which was officially launched Thursday. A former fashion photographer who worked the catwalks of Europe's glittering world of haute couture, Stanmeyer was awakened in his early 20s to the power of what he describes as "reality photography."
The 43-year-old photojournalist is best known for his work for Time magazine and National Geographic and has picked up a slew of prizes for his work, much of it recording scenes of natural and man-made disasters. Now, as one of the world's leading photojournalists, he defines himself in direct contrast to the world of fashion he used to inhabit. "I love fashion photography as an art, and I am thrilled that I had that background because it does play a role in the way I see the world ... not in a style way, but in the sense of how I am so radically different from it," Stanmeyer said in an interview with Taipei Times at the Apple Training Center in Taipei.
SEEING THE MOMENT
Looking back on his transition from fashion to reality photography, Stanmeyer said: "I was young, and like we all are at certain ages of our lives, terribly misguided. I wanted to view things the way I saw it. I was a victim of mass marketing and everything else that we are all bombarded with all the time ... . It took until I was in my early 20s to wake up to the fact that what I was doing was great for self-creating, but I was missing the greater potential of what my human function is. I left fashion, left Italy, moved to Spain and started to discover myself as a street photographer. ... It was an epiphany, it made me realize that this (reality photography) was what I needed to do, otherwise it was uninteresting and too self-serving, and I was brainwashing people into thinking about who they were based on what they wore."
Of his visit to Taiwan the day after the 921 Earthquake hit, he recalled: "I remember sleeping on the street because there was nothing ... everything was destroyed ... so you just found cardboard and put some cardboard over you, it wasn't that cold, ... we had three days to put some meaning to the story. I remember the smells, the silence, because all the electricity was out, I got there so early they were still trying to get bodies out."
Stanmeyer has spent more than 20 years traveling the world's trouble spots. In the face of the overwhelming catastrophe he witnesses regularly in the shape of wars and natural disasters, he is very humble about he does.
"It's not me doing anything," he said, "it's more that they (his images) get into your consciousness or make you go read about the people in the photograph. I'm doing nothing, I'm just a witness, I'm just there. They are allowing me into their world. They are doing everything, the fellow human beings who are playing the reality in the frame. All I am doing is capturing it and if that becomes iconic, it is not because of what I do, but because of the enormity and the simplicity of being a human in that moment."
The purpose of Stanmeyer's visit to Taiwan was to give a seminar on the use of photo management software, which raises the question of how digital photography - and by extension the Internet - has affected the way he works.
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