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Bearing witness

By Ian Bartholomew
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Mar 29, 2008, Page 16

A self-portrait by John Stanmeyer. PHOTO: JOHN STANMEYER-VII

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.

"For me it (photography) is all about communication, communicating something that is important to me. In that process, whether it is black-and-white or color, whether it's film or digital, whatever, I don't care," Stanmeyer said. He embraces the advantages of digital photography for situations like night photography, where he said the use of digital camera makes shooting "more feasible and less constraining." But he also cautioned that the digital revolution has loaded photographers with a much heavier responsibility for managing their photography.

"On the negative side, it requires a massive amount of management. It put a 5,000-tonne gorilla on my back ... of learning things that I didn't want to learn and going into conflicts or disaster areas and no longer being just a photographer, but also being a satellite engineer for the satellite Internet connection and a digital manager and an editor, ... this thing became so big on me that it started to take me away from being a photographer and being a human," he said. "One of the reasons I'm here is to help photographers get this 5,000-tonne gorilla off their backs. ... Digital photography up until a year ago meant you didn't have a life."

Photojournalists have also found the need to protect their work more carefully than before. This was one of the reasons behind the formation of the VII photo agency in 2001, which is described on its Web site as "designed from the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub for some of the world's finest photojournalism."

"We started VII because we were seven very independent photographers coming from different agencies ... We wanted to control our photography ... we wanted to make sure we could follow the entire process from our camera all the way to the client and nothing being altered or changed. ... In 2001, the Internet was becoming real, and we started talking about empowering ourselves. The Internet allowed us to empower ourselves," Stanmeyer said.

For your information: The photography of John Stanmeyer and the other members of the VII photo agency can be found on the agency's Web site at www.viiphoto.com
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