NOVEMBER 2012 BACK ISSUE by Chris Rainier One's destiny is never certain-but for me, it was close to inevitable. A forebear of mine, Peter William Rainier, was an Admiral of the Blue in the British Royal Navy who explored the outer edges of the known world by ship in the 1700s. My grandfather, born into the dawn of the 20th century in South Africa, fought in the last of the great Zulu Wars, and at the age of 19 he walked across Africa with an elephant rifle slung across his shoulder. My father was raised in the wild jungles of South America on an emerald mine in Colombia. Barefoot until he was 10, he spoke the local Indian language first, before he learned Spanish and English. The ancient forest was his home, the Indian his closest friend.   Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, my father was evacuated with his two sisters to Cairo, and then shortly thereafter to Cape Town, South Africa. Comfortable with the ways of nature, he would scramble up the craggy cliffs of Table Mountain or camp in the wild with the sound of lions nearby. With the war raging far to the north in Europe and his father serving in the North African theater, he forged his father's signature, joined the Royal Rhodesian Air Force as a teenager, and fulfilled a young boy's dream: to be a Spitfire pilot above the sands of the Sahara and the shores of Italy.   After the war, having immigrated to Canada, my father became a geologist and joined the oil industry. Now with a wife and two young children, he took up the nomadic lifestyle of an oil executive. My brother and I grew up moving every few years, falling into the rhythms of an international lifestyle. We touched down on the shores of Australia in 1962. As my childhood years unfolded we traveled the world from Australia to Africa, Canada to Europe.   My youth was profoundly influenced by my father's stories of his early years of growing up to the primordial pulse of the wilds of South America and Africa, by his romantic tales of aerial dogfights as a Spitfire pilot over North Africa, and by the Rainier heritage of exploration and intellectual curiosity-the constant search for the wonderment of the world. My imagination was well nurtured, and life's gravity pulled me to the inevitable: a lifetime mission to see and to understand my planet, with all of its beauty and raw, painful edges.   My mother, Joan, was an artist. Her influence on me was strong, and I began to see the world through the lens of artistic interpretation. I searched for a medium that could allow me to express emotions felt and internal visions deeply held. Combining my love of travel with the passion of art, I quickly discovered photography. This visual medium allowed me an avenue of expression deeply based in reality yet open to my own vision of life.   Growing up in London in my teens, I steeped myself in art, music, and the humanities. I lived in Kensington, and my weekends were filled with visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum for knowledge, the Royal Albert Hall for music, and the Royal Geographic Society for visions of adventure to distant shores. Eventually, some 40 years later, I would be invited to join the Royal Geographic Society as a fellow in honor of my photographic documentation of many of the places I then only dreamed of seeing.   While living in London, I fell under the spell of my great aunt, Priaulx Rainier, a highly respected concert composer of avant-garde music. She was an erudite woman with a wonderful circle of friends-Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Benjamin Britten-and their words and artistic creations had a profound influence on the direction that my photography would take. Their music, sculpture, and prose were weighed down with haunting life experiences of having survived the Blitz bombing of London during the Second World War. With civilization close to ending and an impending sense of foreboding darkness, the expressions of these important artists revealed the fragility of mankind and a sense of vulnerable wonder tinged with uncertainty about the world's survival.   I discovered that the common thread running through their philosophies was a deep sense of primordial energy-an energy I would spend the rest of my life searching for and discovering in the ancient landscapes and tribal cultures beyond the edge of the world map. This newly found way of looking at the world allowed me to be still-and eventually to hear the actual heartbeat of life itself.   After I graduated from photography school in California, I was fortunate enough to become the last photographic assistant of the great photography master, Ansel Adams. More than giving me the opportunity to refine my photographic skills and technique, he allowed me to understand deeply that all of life is art. Within the medium of black-and-white photography, using the power of the shades of black, white, and gray, together with design, I could express personal emotions that lie below the surface-to connect my photography to that elemental energy of life, to the heartbeat of existence. Ansel's potent black-and-white images of the American West also spoke to me of the use of photography as a social tool. It can be argued that his photographs of the American landscape did more to help preserve the national parks of America than any articles written on behalf of the Sierra Club or pleas before Congress by the Wilderness Society. I began to understand how the art of photography, with its highly personal process, could be used to preserve a moment. Whether it is a glimpse of a haunting landscape or a millisecond of time taken to catch a portrait of a person etched on film for eternity, each image is made within fleeting moments in a transient world. I discovered that photography could be a testament of preservation-a chance for future generations to look back at what was lost.   One of the great learning experiences of working closely with Ansel Adams in the darkroom was the chance to proof and review all of his 50,000 negatives made over a lifetime of photography. This was a project that would take most of the five years I worked for him. It started with the first negative of a photo he took as a boy in Yosemite and ended with the very last roll he shot on a foggy afternoon at Point Lobos, a few weeks before he passed away. What I discovered was his refined degree of patience and experimentation in the creative process. Adams would visualize an image in his mind's eye and patiently wait, sometimes years, until the light, the shadows, and the season would come together in a perfect alchemy, creating an image that became a universal moment captured on film. Ansel's true talents came forth in the darkroom, where dramatic moments with the light of the West  became iconic, as if he had photographed the day of Creation.   A core value of Ansel's was teaching: the importance of possessing no photographic secrets, a deeply felt need to pass information on to the next generation. Indeed, for me, as the years have passed, mentoring others and sharing knowledge of the photographic experience has become as important as the very act of creating an image.   Within a year of Ansel Adams's passing away in 1984, the urge to journey and discover new worlds beyond my horizon began tugging at me. I began to search for the sacred-a vision of the spiritual. I wanted to photograph cultures that danced to the same rhythms that had influenced me as a child in the outback of Australia; in the savannas of Africa; or in the desert canyons of the Hopi, the Navajo, and the Ute of the American Southwest.   Using my camera as my passport, pushing myself to the edge of human experience, I journeyed to the four corners of the world. I traveled to the North Pole, to Antarctica, and to every continent in between. My desire was to use the privilege of being a photographer to bear witness to the spectrum of the human experience, not only stepping into the horror, pathos, and Dante's inferno of war and famine in the late 20th and 21st centuries, but also documenting the complex ways of being to be found in cultures living beyond the modern world: peoples living under the canopy of the jungle forest, where tribes still linger with one foot in the Garden of Eden. I made my living documenting the dark forces of human suffering in places like Somalia, Cambodia, Sarajevo/Bosnia, and Rwanda. I worked for the United Nations, the International Red Cross, the International Medical Corps, and then eventually for Time magazine, the New York Times, and other leading publications of the day. Always searching for the light of human dignity, I would stay for months and photograph into the darkness of the human soul.   I remember well a moment in the desert of Somalia during the famine and civil war taking place there in 1991-a moment that would change my life. I was traveling in the back of a Red Cross pickup truck with a group of doctors and nurses. Off in the distance, a lone tin shack was shimmering in the desert heat. As we approached, I noticed an old man holding his last dying son. He sat in the dirt beside the corpses of his wife and their three young children, each wrapped in the ceremonial white cloth of the dead. My photographic instincts came into play. I had been trained well, and I knew that chance favors the prepared mind. I set my camera: f-stop, speed, focus. I set my emotions to the side. By this time I had been in the field for months, and I was seeing death and unnecessary destruction on a daily basis. Indeed, as a trained photojournalist, I had been schooled in objectivity: There was no such thing as a biased perspective. In fact, if it did not unfold within the frame of my camera, it did not exist. Such was my acute focus then. We stopped in front of the shack. As I jumped out of the truck, the camera came to my eye. The old man, seeing me then, reached out from the darkness of the shade into the light and stretched his hand toward hope. My shutter clicked, and I continued to document the moment. Leaving behind his family, who all had died as a result of the famine gripping the country, I helped him and his fragile son into the back of the truck so we could rush them to the nearest hospital, 20 miles away. Searching for the image that would speak of the sadness, I continued to photograph. Objectivity was paramount. As we began the journey, however, I noticed that the man clutching onto his only remaining son was thirsty. I stopped- the need to photograph had passed-and I remember well putting the camera down beside me. I offered to hold his son as I gave him my bottle of water. Suddenly my professional distance had dissolved. I had slipped from observing to becoming a part of the event. We rode in silence as he drank the cool water. I held his son, and after about 10 minutes I felt his fragile body slowly go limp. The young boy died in my arms.   At that moment, my world shattered. My professional context seemed meaningless-even vulgar. How could I be objective in a land of overwhelming human loss? How could I stay objective when we were visiting villages where every day, 300 people were dying from lack of food? From my pain, in that decisive moment, came a clarity of awareness. There is no such thing as objectivity. In fact, I discovered that I needed to search for a true point of view. I needed to embrace the wild passion of the experience and to understand it for its truth. I needed to dive fully into the event-to roll around in it, to taste it in my soul, to be outraged by it, to be in love with it-to step away from the coldness of objectivity. Within my passion for getting to the true essence of the photographic story, I needed to search for compassion. As a professional photographer, yes, I had to be a balanced storyteller, but to take my audience deeply into the moment, I needed to be a conduit for the total spectrum of emotions, from the light to the dark, from the beauty of the human experience to the darkness that exists in the human soul.   I have come to realize that the further I evolve as a photographer, regardless of where I point my camera, I am taking a self-portrait-a reflection of my own story, my own beliefs, my own point of view. Nothing more. Nor do I presume that where I point my camera and take a picture is a reflection of the absolute truth. There is no such thing as an absolute visual truth. All images merely reflect the emotion of the photographer and the opinion of the viewer. As it is stated in photography, there always exist two individuals in every image-the artist and the observer-and their sets of beliefs and cultural biases.   I have infused this philosophy of personal vision into the photographic documentation of the cultures I have visited around the planet. My life's passion is to put on film cultures living on the edge-the edge of massive changes taking place globally. From the Inuit peoples hidden under the northern lights of the Arctic night to the Tuareg sand navigators of the Sahara Desert, there are peoples still living their ancient ways. My focus has been to record their visions, traditions, and sounds-the ancient rhythms existing at this moment in time. I am attempting to put on film cultures from the past, living in the present, for future generations. It is my hope that this documentation can linger as "postcards to the future"-visual reminders of a world once laden with the tapestry of rich cultural diversity. It would be affirming to me if one day a young man from the Highlands of New Guinea saw the documentation of his grandfathers' sacred initiation dance, or if a man from the Bwa tribe in Burkina Faso paused on the photograph of his ancient relative completing the Dance of the Butterfly Mask-and if, by seeing, both were inspired to partake again in the traditions of their ancestors. Photography can serve as a catalyst for cultural revitalization and an inspiration for preservation.   Just as we are losing immense biological diversity on our planet, so too, at alarming rates, are we losing cultural and intellectual diversity. Every two weeks on average we lose an elder who speaks the ancient tongue of an oral language. Within these elders' understanding are vast amounts of knowledge, complex understandings of ecosystems and traditions, and an awareness of unwritten languages. What will we lose if the Plains Indian no longer dances the Sun Dance, or if the Polynesian sailor no longer relies on his complex understanding of the ocean and night stars to Wayfind his journey home, or if the young Huli Wigman from New Guinea no longer finds value in the meaning of his secret forest initiation? What is gained and what is lost as we arrive at this crossroads of human evolution in the early part of the 21st century?   It was late in 1994, and I was completing the last of many expeditions into the deepest part of Irian Jaya in western New Guinea. We had found a tribe that Westerners had never contacted. Honored by this rare opportunity to be close to the ways of people completely untouched by the modern world, we had lingered for days. On the afternoon of the day before we left, having completed my photographs, I was perched on a hill above a valley and writing in my journal. Children were playing all around me. A few adults, curious about this white person from another world, sat beside me. Suddenly, in the late afternoon light, some 30,000 feet above me, was a jet with a long tail of white vapor arcing behind it, probably traveling toward Tokyo, Bangkok, or Kuala Lumpur. For a moment all of us paused to ponder this metallic visitor from the 20th century. In that poignant moment it struck me what a privilege it was to be alive at this moment in the human journey, when there are still cultures following the ancient pulse born of the primordial heartbeat of ancient lands. Yet we also live on a planet connected by the wonders of jet travel and the World Wide Web. Indeed, there are cybercafes in Timbuktu and smart phones in isolated Tibetan monasteries. We are living in a dual world of the ancient and the modern.   It remains to be seen if the two worlds can be woven into one fabric of human existence. I am optimistic. I have seen many tribal cultures embracing the role of technology and using modern tools to help them document and maintain their ancient ways. Around the planet there are grassroots organizations using websites to archive the knowledge and stories of the elders before they pass, photographing and maintaining the rituals that make up the fabric of cultural bloodlines before they are forgotten. In New Guinea, tribal elders are using smart-phone apps for language documentation, educational programs, and emergency medical assistance. Through programs that we have created both within and outside the National Geographic Society, I am passionately focused on empowering the voices of storytellers-filmmakers, photographers, and writers from around the globe, poetic voices from the edge who traditionally have not been heard-to gather together to share their human story. The traditional media model of the 20th-century world historically defined the global news of the day. The stereotypes of ancient civilizations that were created within old definitions of culture are quickly falling by the wayside. Modern technology is allowing the world to begin to become flat. What now emerges is a more balanced theater, where all of us gather around the fireplace of humanity and tell the story of being human.   It is time to speak of my son Skylar, who is young, and whose big brown eyes stare into mine as I start each trip-a yearning gaze, reflecting eagerness to climb aboard and come with me on the next adventure! As a baby, he traveled to distant lands-twice to Australia, to Indonesia, to Hong Kong, and to Turkey. He soon will travel again and experience the ancient ways of cultures living on the edge, as his family has done for generations before him. I think about how quickly the world is changing in his lifetime. Will he be the last to see the Kayapo Dance around the sacred fire under the Amazon night sky, or to pause in the land of the Australian Aborigine and sense that there was once a Dreamtime Songline performed there? Will he be the last of his generation to glimpse the wild elephant's walk across the savannas of the Masai Mara? I wonder if his children will wake up in a new world, where they are not even aware that there once were lands that existed beyond their imaginations.     Ouagadougou, West Africa, 2012   Back to current issue