How is it that you became interested in photojournalism? How did you begin this career and why have you continued to pursue it?

I’ve been a photojournalist since I was a high-school student. I grew up in a newspaper family: my father was editor of a medium-sized newspaper in the state of Wisconsin. I worked in my high-school newspaper and I went to the University of Wisconsin, which has a big journalism program but no photojournalism program. So I was more or less self-taught.

Later I was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and escorted correspondents covering the Vietnam War. Afterwards I went back to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did a Master’s degree in journalism and political science and journalism. I also worked for the Associated Press and The Wisconsin State Journal, the morning newspaper in Madison.

Then at the age of 25, after winning a several national awards and, oddly enough, never having taken a color photograph for publication, National Geographic offered me a job. There, of course, I received a lot of on-the-job training. So my background in photojournalism is really very much about learning techniques on the job as a tool for telling stories.

This is also the approach I take with the students at Indiana University School of Journalism. We can teach people the mechanics pretty easily, but it is much harder to teach people to see and to have the initiative to find stories and pursue them through this medium. The mechanics of photography are not really hard these days; what is much more challenging is telling a compelling story.

I often tell this story to my students: there is a gorilla named “Koko” at Stanford University, who weighs 2,000 pounds and has a fairly extensive vocabulary in American sign language, who has been the subject of two National Geographic covers. She actually took the photos to go along with the articles. She is a very intelligent gorilla and she has taken photographs for two National Geographic cover stories. The fact that a gorilla, who is reasonably literate, can do photos for National Geographic, says something about the mechanics of photography. It really is not all that difficult.

Also I think taking time off from shooting to teach has kept me fresh as a photojournalist. Teaching young people for the last six years probably made me a better photographer because some of my students -- the best ones -- have a fairly interesting way of seeing the world. It’s refreshing. I think if I were just around my former colleagues at National Geographic, it would be very different.

What sorts of issues do you tend to address in your photojournalism ethics and practice course at Indiana University?

At Indiana University, all journalism students have to take a basic "ethics and values of the media" class and I have had to teach that a couple of times. In all our skills classes, we are required to have some ethical component. So I always have an ethical component to the picture-editing and picture-shooting classes I teach.

Often when you’re asked to give a visiting lecture -- I have had to give a number in Asia and eastern Europe in the last couple of years -- this is one of the main things people want you to talk about: ethics in photojournalism. People all over the world see these hard, tough pictures coming out of wars, famines, airplane and car crashes, etc., and they want to know how these photographs are taken and what choices lie behind printing some and not others.

There has been a lot of debate about such things, particularly in the wake of September 11th. When the World Trade Center towers were collapsing, the networks decided straight away not to show images of people jumping. I knew photographers who were there, who said that if you weren’t looking up all the time, you could get hurt by the people jumping who could fall on you (apparently at least one fireman died this way). The networks decided not to show any of this, but the New York Times ran a really big picture of somebody jumping from the building. Time magazine also ran a double-page image by Richard Drew of The Associated Press of someone jumping from the North Tower -- and that image humanized the tragedy for me. Drew caught the jumper in mid-air, as if the person were skydiving instead of jumping to his death, and it’s an image that is so powerful in its design, composition, and pathos.

So we have these debates about how much reality people need or will accept, how much is enough, what they should see. I think with print media you make more of a choice to see the images; with television I can understand the argument for showing more restraint. This is what the U.S. courts have decided as well (for instance, there are certain obscenities allowed in print media which are not permissible on television). The courts have held that television is so pervasive in our homes that children are exposed to it all the time, so there needs to be greater care in determining what images and language are used.

I am personally not in favor of protecting people in this way. I think as much reality as we can show people, the better. There is a bigger good to be served by personalizing something like the World Trade Center collapse even though someone might recognize a relative, so that one family might be hurt, but then we all have a sense of how horrible it must have been to make a choice between dying by jumping off the building or by being burnt alive. The image of the airliners crashing into the buildings is a really easy one to run; it is virtually like a computer game. It shows you what happened but it doesn’t make you feel what happened.

The problem with photojournalism is also not entirely the tough picture, but also the balance. If you go to Europe, the shocking image is very much in vogue today (the French in particular lead the way in this). How gruesome the picture is somehow makes it’s a more compelling image. I completely support the intimacy and the human element in such photography, but having a little balance is really necessary.

A number of people have asked me about my own book, Living Faith, and how representative some of the pictures are, in particular, those of the Muslim militias in Indonesia. They are not representative at all; in a country of 210 million, how relevant is a demonstration with 2,000 people? What does that really mean, what does it really signify? Still, these Muslim thugs have killed Christians, bombed churches, etc., and the world needs to know about them -- and who supports and finances them.

So it is not only about the tough pictures, but also the balance that one can achieve as well as the context one can provide to the photographs.

You mentioned Edward Said’s Covering Islam yesterday. Could you briefly talk about what your perceptions are of the way in which Islam is covered in the American media and what ought to be done to rectify this?

I think Said has a great point: we toss around words like "terrorist" and "fundamentalist" without any thought at all. We’ve perpetuated this idea of "us" as the "good guys" and the "bad guys" as Muslims, brandishing AK-47s, hijacking planes, demonstrating in front of American embassies, etc. I think we have been insensitive to how Islam has been portrayed and that’s part of the reason that I ask my students to read sections from Said’s book, Covering Islam.

I think one of the byproducts of September 11th is that it forced the media to recognize that a problem exists. People in the media have been forced to inform themselves about Islam, Muslims around the world, their practices, their differences, the seven million Muslim-Americans in this country, etc. Some network television news shows have since done specials on Islam, providing very basic information; this was impressive, but at the same time, long overdue. There have been too many negative and hurtful stereotypes. The media has been guilty in perpetuating these stereotypes.

So part of the reason I decided to do this book, Living Faith is that I wanted to try and put a "human face" on ordinary Muslims: the 99 per cent of Muslims who are not rioting in front of American embassies or trying to burn down churches. This majority never gets on television, they do not figure in books, they are not newsworthy, because they are not actively involved in politics or any kind of violence.

I also wanted to learn more about Islam and spend more time in Southeast Asia and find a new way of looking at Southeast Asia. When I was in Malaysia in May 1998, I had noticed dramatic changes in attire: more young women wearing the baju kurung -- a knee-length blouse of silk printed in bold colors with lively geometric patterns -- and the tudung, etc. I wanted to find out what was behind this apparent turn towards religion. There was certainly an Islamization of sorts going on in Malaysia at this time.

Part of the problem seems to be that Muslim elites in Malaysia are so secular, so globalized, that they have ignored what was going on with the the poor in villages and in cities, those who can scarcely survive in either place. Islam has really been hijacked in some ways by these people. People who feel dispossessed, especially after the economic crisis, have nowhere else to turn.

So there was a lot going on in Malaysia that made me very curious. Also, I had just read V.S. Naipaul’s Beyond Belief, in which Naipaul argues that Malaysia and Pakistan were "on the boil". So I thought I would find out for myself.

I started by looking at religious schools: this huge variety of Muslim schools from ones that have excellent academic standards (like the pesantren, an Indonesian word for a boarding school with an Islamic focus) to these small, one-room schools in villages where students do nothing but memorize the Qu’ran and talk about jihad.

There were so many things in Malaysia and Indonesia that got me interested in Islam that eventually, after several trips to the region in 1998 and 1999, I decided to do a book on it. I thought there were lots of interesting questions there and that the theme was as good as any for a book at that time. And it made sense as well since more than 20 per cent of the world’s Muslim population is in Southeast Asia (a fact which most Americans are not aware of).

The book was very difficult to sell though. It is not a theme booksellers in America are interested in. Everyone just seemed to think I was writing a book about "the bad guys" and no one would want to buy it. Again, it was this same stereotype propagated by the media…

Let me just take you to a related topic: you have said elsewhere that the best traditions of journalism are impartiality, judiciousness, fairness and balance. Don’t you think, particularly given all the things you’ve been saying, that impartiality is on the one hand extremely difficult to achieve, and on the other, not always desirable? That is, wouldn’t it make sense for reporters to try to emphasize issues that are neglected in mainstream journalism, even if that means compromising objectivity?

That is why journalists do books because when you do a book, you can say whatever you want. The difference between reportage and an essay is that with reportage you are obligated to be as fair as you can, and as balanced as you can.

I said "impartial" rather than objective since I don’t think the latter can be achieved because in the end you still form an opinion. But if you are being impartial, at least you approach the question with an open mind. I cannot define the word objectivity; I don’t think such a thing is possible. At least with "impartiality" all you are required to do is confront a situation with an open mind, and then whatever opinion you come to will be a result of that openness.

You’re absolutely right though: we are highly constrained by a set of professional values, by the publishing world, the business world, etc. in our daily practice of journalism.

In fact, after twenty-four years at National Geographic, I felt like I was in a rut -- you had to have a certain mix of images that show what the place looks like, how the people live, and that give a sense of intimacy, of "being there". It is a bit of a formula. In the end, it is still their magazine, and they’re going to publish whatever images they want regardless of what an individual journalist produces. This is why journalists find other places to publish (books, the web, wherever); they are much freer to say what they think in those contexts.

With this book Living Faith in particular, I really had to try to be as fair as possible, especially as a non-Muslim working on Muslims. I had to come at it from as impartial a point of view as I could simply to maintain the trust of the people I was working with.

You said in one of your previous interviews that the mosque is a "great equalizer", which becomes all the more important in a world with such huge inequalities between and within states. You also suggested that there are large numbers of people with "no stake in the global system" as it is currently constituted. Given this, do you think it might not be more useful to think of the appeal of Islam in political rather than religious terms?

Absolutely. In America, we talk constantly of globalization, which is such a lopsided system. We benefit but a great many people do not.

In fact, I went to Aceh expecting to see a civil war for an Islamic state, but what I found were a lot of people who had political and economic grievances. Exxon Mobil has one of the largest natural gas fields in the world. For the people of Aceh, this is the ultimate in Reagonomics -- the trickle-down effect. They pump this gas in Aceh, but the revenues all go to Jakarta, and less than 5 per cent of the profits return to Aceh. This whole idea of an Islamic state and an Islamic rebellion is a smokescreen for a series of political and economic grievances that should be seen for what they are. They have little to do with religion. It just happens to be that the separatists have used religion as an attention-getting device to rally people behind their cause (and I’m not even sure they’ve succeeded there).

That said, I think there is some value to looking at Southeast Asia through the lens of religion, just in order to understand better the history and the culture, and perhaps some politics, if nothing else. I think the whole debate about whether Islam can adapt to ideas of modernity, or whether Islam can have its own Reformation is very interesting. Is someone willing to stand up and say that the Qu’ran can be reinterpreted in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts and scriptures have been reinterpreted?

I think there’s a good argument to be made that Islam was stopped in its tracks several hundred years ago. The New York Times had an interesting article a few weeks ago about science in Islam, about the great advances that were made in science by Muslims, and then all of a sudden, there was a rupture. For various reasons, some of them political, some economic, some cultural, it just stopped.

You said during your talk [at the Asia Society] that you try to find something redeeming, something beautiful when you take photographs. Is this the role of photojournalism?

It is not the point of photojournalism, but it ought to be the point of a book. In 1992, while I was on the staff of National Geographic, CNN and Turner publishing asked me to do a book on St Petersburg, Russia. I just jumped at the chance. I was advised by a scholar friend of mine to learn everything I could about Peter the Great and his vision for the city and then go to St Petersburg and see what I could find of his vision. He advised me that this approach would allow me to see beyond the dirt and decrepitude the city initially confronted me with. He told me that I should try to find what is lasting, what is redeeming, and not to make apologies for finding something beautiful, because there is a lot of beauty there. For people to actually buy a book, people have to find something appealing in it. And there is always beauty to be found in the most unlikely places.

That is the key to doing a book: on the one hand you have to be true to your journalistic ideals, and on the other hand, there has to be some commercial acceptance of your idea or nobody will buy your book. In terms of pacing a photo book, you really have to have some material that people will respond positively to, to which they can say, "Wow, that’s really beautiful"; something they can look at for a while. Then you can work in some of the other stuff you think is important, which you can do without clobbering people over the head with it.

I think if you can find something that’s going to be lasting, long-term, even something that is beautiful, that is ideal. Not many journalists are looking for that, but if you are interested in being more of an essayist, then you are looking for something that has lasting value, something that can be looked at five or ten years from now and still have appeal.

Also for me it’s probably just a reaction to all these wars and famines. I have been to enough wars, I have seen enough dead people, I have witnessed three famines (which is in a way worse than witnessing a war). It is just too much to bear which is probably why I am interested in finding something different now.

It is very important for me now to try and find some beauty in ritual, in ceremony, in family. Some of this I think is also related to my training at National Geographic where we were all taught to paint with light and color and film. And of course you do want something slightly different in a book than what you can get in a newspaper or magazine article.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource