Chiiz Volume 23 Pushkar Photography | Page 27

What sparked your interest in photography? My father, who worked in the radio and television field, was always documenting our family road trips around the United States with a 35mm film still camera and an 8mm movie camera. I was his unofficial assistant. I would keep a written diary of our trips as well. So even back then I was unknowingly doing documentary work and was fascinated with the concept of freezing moments in time. But it was a darkroom class at California State University, Northridge where I was a History major that put me on the road to being a professional photographer. The minute I saw an image start to appear on a piece of sensitized paper in a tray full of developer, I was hooked by the magic of the photographic medium. That feeling has never left me. You are essentially a travel and documentary photographer. What made you explore the genre of wildlife, especially with your series “Eyes Are The Window To The Soul”? In my latest book “The Travel Photo Essay: Describing a Journey Through Images” I explain that photographers working in the travel field have to wear many “hats” – we just can’t be food photographers, music photographers, portrait photographers, wildlife photographers and all the other genres of photography. Travel encompasses all types of experiences. In any given story, let’s say a bicycle trip around the Noto Peninsula I just did in Japan for the tour operator Backroads, I had to shoot dramatic landscape shots with bikes in the scene, architectural shots of some of the locations visited, food shots to show off the local cuisine and so on to tell the whole story. On my recent trip to Bhopal to do a presentation on travel photography for the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), I first did an amazing excursion across Madhya Pradesh with Purequest Adventures to visit the Kanha, Bandhavgarh and Satpura tiger reserves, so I had to put my wildlife photographer “hat” on. I brought my new Nikon 500mm f/5.6 lens with me specifically for the incredible photo ops I hoped to encounter. The trip ended up far exceeding my expectations. It’s hard to beat the experience of looking into the eyes of a magnificent Bengal tiger in the jungle from the relative safety of an open-air jeep. Swamp Deer, Kanha National Park Nikon D850 F/5.6 1/1000 ISO200 The orangutan series which I’ve named “Eyes Are The Window To The Soul” started with a visit to Indianapolis, timed to the opening of The International Orangutan Center there at the Indianapolis Zoo. I was in the city to do a more general travel story but became fascinated by the orangutans and the cognitive research studies being conducted there by Dr. Rob Shumaker and his colleagues. I became fascinated by the awareness and intelligence of the orangutans and that fact that we share 96.4 percent of the same DNA. I also became concerned that because of habitat loss in their native Borneo and Sumatra, they could soon become extinct in the wild. This has led me to photograph the orangutans in other controlled environments where I could do portraits. I will be traveling to Borneo this year for the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF) to photograph orangutans in rehabilitation centers there as well as in the wild. Hopefully my images can help bring attention to the very serious issues the orangutans face as well as the solutions that are possible to protect their habitats while offering their human neighbors viable alternatives to deforestation in order to also survive and prosper. A holistic approach is needed. What is your approach regarding visual communication and how do you inculcate that in your photography? It’s only in the last two centuries that through the camera, we have the ability to freeze a moment in time. Before then, we had to rely on other art forms – painting, drawing, sculpting, writing in a more abstract sense – to see human history before then. We can of course use the camera for fine art pursuits and change reality but for me I prefer to document the world around me. I have many photographic heroes but if I had to pick one, it would be W. Gene Smith. He was truly the master of the photo essay. How much of an impact did your Master of Arts in Pictorial/ Documentary History have on your photography and how you shoot pictures? I think the research techniques I learned and put into practice for that major which I created from several disciplines at California, State University, Los Angeles gave me the tools to find and then develop photo essays with a certain amount