The College of Engineering’s brick buildings stand a vivid red against the rain-washed football fields. In a darkened hall at the Alumni Centre, the 1857-founded Photographic Society of Madras screens ‘The Art of Seeing’, a pictorial talk by 72-year-old John Isaac, former chief photographer, United Nations. The parade of Isaac’s award-winning photographs ends with a YouTube video of him in an Elvis pompadour yodelling on a 1970-American TV show with Ted Mack.
Before Isaac travelled to nearly 100 countries across the globe, capturing for posterity the triumphs and disasters of our times, he spent his early years in a village near Tiruchi. After his father’s death, he moved to Madras to study at Madras Christian College and New College. “I spent my evenings learning watercolours at the Government College of Fine Arts, playing the guitar and singing for a band named VIPs ( Vellai Illatha Pasanga ),” he laughs, watching the rain come down in gusts.
“I performed for All India Radio and at clubs. Working at Air India earned me a free pass. I landed in New York with seven dollars that was quickly depleted on whiskey and cigarettes. When I was down to my last 75 cents I started singing in clubs. When I was singing in bohemian Greenwich, I was offered a place in the United Nations choir,” says Isaac who joined the organisation as a messenger when he was 25.
In a couple of years, he moved on to become a darkroom technician, which was when fate intervened — twice. “I worked in a lab — it taught me about colour, composition and the play of light. I married Jeannette, a reporter, who was working there. And then, on a holiday, I took a picture of buffaloes being bathed on Marina beach.”
The black-and-white picture won the Photokina Gold Medal. It also won Isaac a Leica M5 camera and the respect of his bosses. “I didn’t tell a soul I’d won. But when they found out, the U.N. made me apprentice at their photo department, and more importantly, sent me off to study documentation under Ansel Adams, the iconic American photographer. I was then assigned to photograph the Lebanon-Israel Conflict and had my first experience of war,” he says.
For the next two decades, Isaac journeyed far afield, from the Horn of Africa to the South China Sea, capturing death, destruction and human pathos. Pol Pot’s pyramids of skulls in Cambodia’s killing fields, the force of the Iranian Revolution, the wretchedness of the Vietnamese Boat People, the misery of Afghan refugees existing in Peshawar, the daily trauma of living in Gaza… Isaac and his camera, captured them all. “War photography is the sharp end of the journalistic spear,” he says. “Being a U.N. photographer meant recording life from both sides of the conflict. But it also meant that there was no need for sensationalism. I have worked under five Secretaries-General, beginning with U Thant. When you travel with them, you also realise the power and the energy the organisation has.”
His work also brought him close to U.N. goodwill ambassadors such as actress Audrey Hepburn and singers Harry Belafonte and Luciano Pavarotti. “Pavarotti once cooked a seven-course meal for me. Hepburn hosted my wife and me on our twentieth wedding anniversary. Hepburn, Mother Teresa and my mother taught me the importance of highlighting the plight of women, and to never take away someone’s dignity for the sake of a prize-winning picture,” — he was almost beaten up by a TV crew filming the Ethiopian famine because he covered a skin-and-bones woman giving birth.
There were jubilant notes too — his pictures to mark the birth of Namibia found their way into the nation’s stamps, and those of a Serbian boy being bandaged for his burns led France to offer free skin grafting. But the machete-driven horror of the Rwandan genocide pushed him over the edge. “There was an orphan who said I resembled his father and I could do nothing to help him. Suddenly, all those years of working in conflict zones added up, and I had a breakdown. I needed therapy… and closed the shutters on that part of my life.”
But photography also redeemed Isaac. “One day, I saw a butterfly resting on a sunflower… and I picked up my camera again,” he says of the time he began photographing kings and commoners. “Michael Jackson gave me the exclusive rights to photograph his first born. He said, ‘Be my eyes and show me what I cannot see.’ I followed him for two years on the History tour.”
Then Isaac turned his attention East. The resilient horsemen of Mongolia, the resigned widows of Vrindavan, the ephemeral beauty of Kashmir… “Photographing the Valley was like stumbling into a dream. My focus was the people, their lives no different from those in safer zones,” he says of his pictures in Vale of Kashmir . “Then I journeyed to Varanasi — city of life and death. Its dalliance with spirituality taught me that all wasn’t black or white. I lived with the Naga sadhus, smoking a chillum, recording the dead and the dying.”
Isaac hopes to do a book on the tribes of India. “In another decade, their way of life would’ve vanished forever.” For now, he has his Olympus trained on tigers. In Ranathambore, Bandhavgarh, Pench and Nagarahole, the magnificent cats seem to talk to him. “My work brings me joy,” says Isaac. “I’m a one-man band — I shoot, process and take my pictures to galleries. It’s a love affair that has lasted half a century. I’m yet to shoot my best picture.”
