Renowned National Geographic photographer John Stanmeyer illuminates the world through his lens on the front pages of leading global media outlets. He has visited more than 100 countries and covered hunger, war and the consequences of natural disasters. 
 

Together with his colleague Paul Salopek, he partook in the ambitious Out of Eden Walk, retracing our ancestors’ migration out of Africa and across the globe on foot. John has won countless awards and his images have adorned covers of Time magazine, but Stanmeyer has no superiority complex: he rolls up his sleeves to help his protagonists toiling away on African plantations and doesn’t think his work is over once his photos go to press. We caught up with John in Yerevan and asked about his trip to Western Armenia, measuring the power of photography and what happens when he clicks his shutter. 

G.M.: Your work tells of tragedies and disasters, but at the same time, your images are extraordinarily beautiful. Is making them aesthetically pleasing a conscious choice on your part?  

J.S.: I can show you everything in a completely different light – one so harsh that you’ll be too stunned to cry. But I’ve realized that such images can be too intense and difficult to process, too impactful in a negative, “knock-out” way. 

I try to approach visual communication from a different angle, one that would truly captivate people by tapping deeply into their consciousness, forcing them to think and to question. 

I am not just looking to attract people’s attention – my goal is to tap their consciousness. I am giving you food for thought not just so you can smell it, but so you can digest it. I hope that this has such a great impact on you that you will, in turn, become a catalyst for social change. Thus I make a conscious effort to push my art as far as it can go and I keep growing as a photographer. 

G.M.: You have won countless prestigious awards, including World Press Photo’s. What is the most coveted, ultimate prize you dream of receiving? 

J.S.: I don’t have much of an interest in competitions and contests, but I am thankful for having received all the main ones that are worth mentioning on my resume. I was very surprised to have been nominated for an Emmy in the “documentary film” category. For me, awards are not a way to boost my ego, but a way to prove to people, including potential sponsors and employers, that I know what I am doing and that together we can do even more, we can do something magical. I use them to open doors a little bit, but only for that purpose. 

G.M.: Do you feel any responsibility for what happens after you take a photo? 

J.S.: I always try to find a venue to introduce the public not so much to my work (that doesn’t matter that much to me), but to the ideas and problems that I became a witness to. I don’t want all this to gather dust in some boxes or on hard drives where nobody will ever be able to access it. 

It’s much better to bring some 300 people together and share your passion, your thoughts, your vision of the future with them. 

It’s a motion of the soul that leads to an exchange of ideas, that is how world-changing discussions start. That is what I hope for and I am sure I will be successful in changing the world. 

G.M.: Has your family’s history affected your work?

J.S.: My mother survived World War II, she was from Vienna and she had to face German occupation of Austria. She had a very difficult childhood. I grew up listening to her stories, which are in many ways universal. Today we see the tragic events in South Sudan, learn about the issues that national minorities face in Rwanda, about the war in Myanmar, in Syria…It took my mother a long time to work up the nerve to talk about what she’d witnessed, about how she stood in her parents’ doorway while a deep ditch was dug not 300 meters away where all the local men, including her father, were pushed and buried alive. She heard them screaming. Imagine hearing the screams of your dying father – she couldn’t talk about it. 

My father was pilot; he partook in two wars – World War II and the war in Korea. I don’t know what kind of weight he bore on his shoulders. He was a happy person and didn’t want to talk about it. I think that after World War II, everyone just wanted to turn that page, to move on. I suppose that even now, 100 years after the Armenian Genocide, you don’t want to let go of the past, but the time has come to move on. People have done horrible things to each other and we will continue to do so. 

G.M.: What conclusions did you arrive at after visiting Turkey and Armenia? Do you see any changes in the two countries’ relationship? 

J.S.: When I say that it is time to move on, I am not saying that the past should be forgotten. It’s important. There is no need to forget, but there is a need to move forward. You cannot go back in time and that is why you have to keep moving forward, you have to find the inner strength to build bridges, to become, as I hope, peaceful neighbors. But this process forces you to come face to face with the ghost of the past, and I understand that it’s difficult. 

G.M.: One of the images you took during your trip to Turkey, to Western Armenia, told the story of people who protected Armenians.

J.S.: I heard about a group of ethnic Armenians who still live in the mountains of Sassoon, in a remote region of Anatolia. We found them and they welcomed us warmly. Many years ago, the grandfather of the man portrayed in the photo, a Muslim, vowed to defend these Armenians’ ancestors. Even today his children, the descendants in his family, continue to protect their Armenian friends. 

G.M.: The second image that really impressed me during your presentation in Yerevan was the photo of an ancient bridge on the border of Armenia and Turkey.

J.S.: It was very symbolic. I went all the way down to the fencing on the border. There were no warning signs around, so I didn’t break any rules, I didn’t cross over. 

I sat there for a few days, even while it rained, waiting for proper lighting conditions. I thought about ways in which this bridge could be reconstructed. 

I believe that it will be possible if we remember the things that unite us, our humanity, and forget about our tribal and ethnic differences. 

G.M. How does one measure the power of photography? Is there anything that can be used as a unit to measure its impact? 

J.S.: I don’t know if there is anything that can be used as a unit for this kind of evaluation, but the communication potential that photography holds is just as great as that of ancient, 8,000-year-old petroglyphs. This power can be monumental, especially where photo journalism is concerned. For example, American-Vietnamese photo correspondent Nick Ut’s photograph of a little Vietnamese girl fleeing a village bombed with napalm lead to the American troops’ withdrawal from Vietnam. 

We can put an end to massacres with just an image of a woman crying over the body of a student. 

Photographs that my colleagues and I have taken have sparked and advanced discussions about various ills in our society. Unfortunately, these problems didn’t disappear completely, but in many cases they were alleviated. For example, I made a series of reports that forced the government to allocate additional resources for mental healthcare. 

G.M.: Are there any lessons that you derived from communicating with people from all corners of the world? 

J.S.: Good question. I learned humility from my mother and from other people. We don’t respect each other, we control each other, we limit each other. 

Kindness and respect for others are very simple things, but I think their absence is one of the biggest problems in the world today. 

I have learned that we are all exactly the same, but we have learned to throw our differences at each other to no good end.