Lessons from John Isaac
Lessons from John Issac : “A journey into the darkness of human degradation, then back into the light of Mother Earth.”
I met Issac at a time I had been beaten down by the ugliness, death and despair in the world. I wanted to make a difference, to find a purpose that can make me feel better about my place in the world. I had decided the only way to do that is to go right into the heart of the conflict - I wanted to be a war photographer. (Context : I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I was there through the 90s up until early 2000. Yes, during the gulf war as well. I took a particular interest in the conflict in the middle east through my school and college years.) I’d already finished a major in Journalism and was on my way to getting trained in photography. The path was literally unfolding in front of me. And then on that path, I met Issac.
Issac was well over 60 years old, with at least 40 of those 60 years spent working with the U.N; over 20 of which he spent as a photographer covering conflict zones. He had traveled to more than 100 countries over two decades to document the death and destruction associated with human conflict and natural disasters. He bore witness to Pol Pot’s Cambodian Killing Fields, the Iranian Revolution, and the Ethiopian famine of 1984 among many others.
His stories painted ghastly images of human despair, government indifferences, outright brutality in the name of peace and security, horrid truths about how ultimately it’s all about man’s disgusting need to control, exercise power and of course, money!
“At first, I felt like I had a purpose. I would make the journey to these brutal realities and inform the world of what injustices are going on. But after a while, I realised, the injustices continue. Wars don’t end, they just get relocated and the brutalities are committed by fresh hands. What you see in the media is what they want you to see, it’s never an actual representation of the whole reality. Everyone knows this, but they don’t care.”
“How did you continue to work in these circumstances? Didn’t your purpose start getting shaky?” I asked him.
“I told myself, I’ll shut my eyes to the larger issues I cannot fix and focus on what little change I can bring about. Little steps in the form of help for the people I photograph. Funds to restart societies in the conflict zones I cover. To have helped even one person, would be enough I thought. It worked for a while, I’ll be honest. I helped many individual families. But soon after, I started asking myself, “Who am I kidding but myself? The emptiness I experienced was not going to be filled by these supposed acts of change. The wars keep continuing, man keeps hurting man, it never ends.”
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 pushed him over the edge—into an emotional abyss that made him realize he just couldn’t do that kind of work anymore.
“I am first human, before I am all the other layers added on to by society. As long as I pretend I’m a photographer before I am human, I will always feel empty.”
Issac goes on to describe a tough journey then on for him. Coming to terms with the fact that his mental health had suffered greatly during these years, as a result of his choices and the traumas it brought with. Coming face to face with the truth that these very traumas and choices brought him to the brink of death, as he spoke morosely about a brief time where he was driven to contemplate suicide, after which he decided to say no more. If there was anything he saw and learned from all these conflicts zone was man’s desire, will and resilience to survive, no matter what the circumstances. He recognised this within himself and thus began his climb back from the depths of darkness. A slow journey to changing another man’s inherent nature is not within our control. The world will do what the world wants, you alone are responsible for the quality of life you want to embrace during your brief time here.
“Wow, you’ve given me a lot to think about”, I say, my head spinning with all this experience and insight he had been sharing with me in the three brief days we hung out.
“Look, I don’t mean to demotivate you. You seem like a good kid, and clearly you’ve already been through some stuff which has gotten you to a point where you want to explore this. And frankly, it’s very noble and brave work. There needs to be people who do all kinds of things. Covering these conflicts is indeed a very important job, one that deserves a lot of respect. But before you make that choice for yourself, you need to understand, is it out of a need to prove something to yourself or the world or due to some sense of obligation, some purpose you feel you have to fullfill? Be honest with yourself. Why do you want to do this? Is it because you feel it will fill some void that you see within you? Some darkness that will get less dark? Because that’s not going to work. There will always be darkness in the world, because it comes not from the systems man creates, but from man himself. It has always existed, and it will always exist probably. There is no fixing it, there is only learning to fix yourself. Learning to embrace the beauty within you just the way you recognise and fear the darkness, and work from there. Then you will see beauty in the world too and realise, it’s always existed. Even amidst the darkness. It was always you. You just couldn’t see beyond the darkness. If you ask me, after all my years, this is the lesson I have taken back.”
After he resigned from the U.N., Isaac had a reawakening triggered by his lifelong love of the natural world. He showed me his pictures of Kashmir, from an upcoming book he was working on.
“Would you believe it? All these years, I travelled multiple times to Kashmir, covering the conflict. My stomach would knot up each time I had to go back there again. But the first time I went to cover the land, I was blown away at what I had been overlooking during all those previous visits as a war photographer” , he says.
I observed two things that day in his demeanor. The conflict of living with the despair and helplessness of the human existence when he spoke about his stint as a war photographer and the child like gleam and joy of life as he began to show me his pictures of a breathtaking Kashmir.
That day, my decision was made by a sense of ‘choiceless awareness’, as a known philosopher, writer and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti once coined. A journey that was inching towards life as a war photographer and journalist took a sharp turn and instead I decided to delve deeper into understanding & love in families and began a beautiful chapter capturing expecting mums, newborns and families through my photography instead. I am forever grateful to the utmost honesty and kindness that Issac showed me while speaking of his truth that allowed me to discover a journey of beauty, love and family - moments of order that also exist in this world of chaos.
Years later, with the onset of the covid hysteria and pandemic, I found myself, back in a similar space, with a very similar decision to make. With Issac’s words still ringing true in my ears, I had to make the choice again - to seek the beauty or get engulfed in the darkness. But that’s another story for another time.
Sam enjoys looking for wonder in the synchronised dance between inward and outward experiences of life. She weaves stories about how that which is termed as ‘the other’ or the ‘outward experience’ seamlessly comes to merge with that which is termed as ‘the self” or the ‘inward experience’