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UNDERSTANDING HER PURPOSE

Saturday, November 13, 2021

In today’s newsletter, Lynsey Addario on covering flood-stricken South Sudan; photographing Annie Leibovitz; a wildebeest traffic jam; 21 hours of volcanic eruption

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIANA MARKOSIAN

By Whitney Johnson, Executive Editor, Photography

“Writing never came naturally to me,” photographer Diana Markosian recalled. But as a graduate student at Columbia Journalism School, another type of storyteller shared her work with the class. “And I remember thinking, ‘Wow … I want to disappear and be where no one else is and create.”

I recall meeting Diana around this time, when I was co-teaching a class with the photographer whose work inspired her. Photography came to her, naturally.

Following a terrorist bombing in Moscow, Diana got her first break. She made a portrait of the mother of the bomber–and Reuters picked it as the Photo of the Month. “I understood I had to be where nobody else was,” Diana told our podcast, Overheard at National Geographic. “And that became kind of my guide to where I needed to go to make work.”

It certainly has.

Her career has taken her from documenting the war in Chechnya to photographing teens graduating amid COVID-19 and illustrating the legacy of the Virgin Mary. She has tracked down survivors of the mass slaughter and deportation of Armenians in 1915, called genocide by President Biden, and searched for—and found—her long-lost biological father. (Pictured above, a cutout of her father in her mother's photo album; below, a representation of the Virgin Mary at a Mass in Poland; below that, a 105-year-old Armenian looking at a life-size photograph of the village he fled 98 years earlier.)

“For me, understanding why I'm here—my purpose, my interaction with people—takes time,” says Diana in this week's podcast. “And I think to me with photography, when I understood that it took time to make images, that's when I became attracted to it. Because that's when I understood that I had the patience for it.”

Diana recalls her mother waking her up in the middle of the night to board a plane from Moscow to California, to begin a new life with a man she’d never met before. Only years after Diana’s arrival in Santa Barbara would she learn that her mother had become a mail-order bride to help them escape life in Russia. This real-life drama became the foundation for her latest work, Santa Barbara, a fictionalized drama–in the form of an exhibition, a book, and a film–that helps Diana make sense of her own history and the sacrifices of the American dream.

“And that's what so many of my projects are. It's this feeling of this ability to go back in time, to understand something for yourself and bring it back to the present,” says Diana. “I think that has been the biggest gift photography has given me, is a second chance to really understand my place in the world and how I relate to it—and how I can do that for those I photograph as well.”

Graduation 2020: Amid waves of COVID-19, Diana captured 18-year-old twins Anaste (right) and Zakiria Berry getting ready for their high school graduation. Because of the pandemic, the Berrys' senior year at St. Francis High in Wisconsin ended abruptly on March 13. That morning, they overslept and skipped their classes. Weeks later, they realized it had been their final day of high school.

Not forgotten: Yepraksia Gevorgyan, 110, escaped Turkey by crossing the river to what is now present-day Armenia. She said she watched Ottomans kill Armenians, throwing their bodies into the water. Here she holds an image of the location from which she recalls escaping with her family. It is the first time she has seen the place in a hundred years.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO

Fleeing the floods: Photographer Lynsey Addario found herself wading through waist-deep floodwaters in one of the world’s newest nations, trying to capture the latest calamity to befall South Sudan. “This was one of the hardest assignments I’ve done in years—the temperature hovered around 100 degrees every day, we had no electricity, no running water, we slept in tents for the week,” Lynsey tells my colleague David Beard. In the image above, the Nat Geo Explorer captured men using buckets to extract floodwaters following the latest night of rainfall in the worst floods in 60 years. Lynsey understood her inconveniences were minuscule compared to the malnutrition, malaria, and other waterborne diseases suffered so many displaced people. And yet she was heartened by those “so grateful someone with a camera had arrived to document the hardship,” she says. “It really made me believe in the importance and power of this work.” Here’s more from Lynsey on South Sudan’s struggle.

Photographing the photographer: How in the world do you photograph Annie Leibovitz? “I think she knew how intimidating it is for somebody to photograph her,” Gillian Laub told the New York Times. The photographers worked together to improve the light in Leibovitz’s kitchen for this lead image. (Related: Looking back on Leibovitz’s iconic images)

Lunch break: Most of us might grab a sandwich or run a quick errand during weekday lunchtime. Dave Newman’s stunning wildlife shots at the river close to his office exploded to a hobby that has won him thousands of fans. Take a look.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLIE HAMILTON JAMES, @CHAMILTONJAMES

Traffic jam: Photographer Charlie Hamilton James captured an image of wildebeest along the banks of the Mara River in Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve (pictured above). The animals nervously jostle and march toward the edge of the river before crossing. It's dangerous—they face ambush from lions, leopards, and hyenas on the banks and from Nile crocodiles in the river itself, the Nat Geo Explorer writes. Yet the urge to follow the herd in search of fresh graze is strong, as about 1.3 million wildebeest migrate annually around the Serengeti ecosystem. As a result, crossing the river can take hours.

IN A FEW WORDS

QUOTE

Historically, Indigenous people have always been stewards of the land and that’s why in the present they’re still fighting for land rights and fighting to restore and protect resources.

Documentary photographer, founder of Indigenous Photograph, National Geographic Explorer

LAST GLIMPSE

COMPOSITE IMAGE BY STEPHEN WILKES

A day in a volcano eruption: Photographer Stephen Wilkes documented an eruption at the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland for 21 hours straight, making images of the fiery scene as day turned to night. The Nat Geo Explorer merged 70 photos of the 1,123 he shot into the composite above.

This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Rita Spinks, Alec Egamov, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Have an idea or a link? We’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!

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