Photography can make a difference in the world, especially in going beyond stereotypes found in other cultures, according to Chris Rainier.
Rainier, a National Geographic photographer, spoke about the democratization of storytelling during a Must See Monday event at the Walter Cronkite School Monday night.
“I thought everything revolved around the written word, as an editor I had to be much more aware of what was going on in the digital side,” said Rick Rodriguez, Southwest Borderlands Initiative professor at the Cronkite School. “Photography can save forests, save cultures, save lives. The images frozen in time are amazing, they make you wonder about the world around you.”
Rainier said he visits indigenous cultures and communities that want to learn about digital media so they don’t get caught on the wrong side of that divide. They set up programs that provide them with cameras, video cameras, computers and a connection to the web and give them their own opportunities to be storytellers. They do this by creating a private website for certain cultures so they can communicate using Google translation and a partnership with YouTube to create the channel “Disappearing Languages.”
Rainier’s responsibilities as a photojournalist take him to places a vast majority of the world doesn’t want or can’t go to, he said, but he goes in order to tell the stories of what it means to be human.
“It is my passion to spend the rest of my life documenting cultures that have traditional knowledge, and to be able to preserve it and put it in a context where we can look at it, compare it to contemporary modern science and come up with solutions,” Rainier said.
As someone who worked with landscape photographer Ansel Adams in 1980, Rainier said he learned he could use his art photography and put it in a social context and be part of creating solutions around some of the pressing issues with photography.
Since 1985, Rainier has traveled to India, Indonesia, Tibet, Egypt, New Guinea and West Africa, among other countries, to shoot and record cultures.
“I never left college,” Rainier said, “I am always putting myself in situations where I am out of my comfort zone, I reserve judgment and I’m inquisitive.”
Through his travels, he has studied tribal ink and tattoos through Polynesian culture and how it supports their spiritual beliefs for almost 20 years. Some of the traditions in other cultures include celestial navigation, initiation processes, scarification- in which some believe the body is the canvas on which a person’s story is told. Rainier said the more experience someone gets, they are more scarred or tattooed, and it’s a form of honor, recognition and from one step to the next part or stage in their life.
Rainier said having a young boy die in his arms while he was covering a tribe for Time Magazine taught him to be passionate and compassionate at the same time.
“I decided if I was going to be a true storyteller, I needed to set objectivity aside and I had to be passionate,” Rainier said. “I had to fall in love with the story and become a part of it, have a point of view.”
Rainier will be teaching at the Cronkite School and ASU’s School of Sustainability in the spring 2015 semester.
Sophomore journalism student Giselle Vasquez said she would enjoy taking Rainier’s classes and liked the presentation.
“It showed me photography definitely makes a difference,” Vasquez said. “I really like the idea of indigenous cultures losing their traditional beliefs and I never heard anything about that before, so I learned something.”
She said she thought having photos helped her understand what Rainier was referencing as well.
Rainier described it like a weave- if one part of the thread is not there, the culture falls apart.
“History has proven that iconic photographs make a difference,” Rainier said. “I have to do it, I can’t sit back and be complacent, and say ‘Well that’s the way it is.’ I am privileged to have a tool that can be apart of the solution.”
Contact the reporter at Alyssa.Tufts@asu.edu.
