Like many Indians who leave India, his relationship with the mother country is not always an easy one. He recounts the recent confrontation he had with an Indian general in Kashmir who questioned his nationality, when he came to find that Isaac doesn't speak Hindi. Isaac asked the general if he spoke Tamil. (He doesn't speak Hindi because as a student, anti-Hindi demonstrators at Madras University beat him up after he left his first lesson and broke his hand, a story he once recounted to Indira Gandhi after she addressed him in Hindi.)
He laments too the ever growing population of India, and the fears that minority groups and small tribes will lose their fight with modernity. He worries that overpopulation, pollution and poachers will cause India to lose more of the great Indian animals like the cheetah, now lost to all of us forever. He worries especially for Indian tigers, who are illegally killed and sold for use in Chinese medicine. His interest in animal life, so rapidly losing out to humans in the drive for resources and habitat, can be seen in photographs from the regal Yellowstone elk in a field of grass to a pelican holding its silvery catch in its mouth.
Isaac's photographs are being exhibited in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's Banana Factory, in the Binney & Smith Gallery through June 29. The exhibit showcases an array of Isaac's work from his days in the UN, and on through his more recent work showing his concern for the environment, endangered animals and peoples in crisis. Overall, the exhibit suggests a photographer whose concerns are deeply humanitarian and profoundly concerned with all of this planet's endangered inhabitants, human and otherwise. Joy figures in his photographs too: a Hindu sadhu smiles mischievously at the camera; Moroccan horsemen showcase their equestrian skills in a startlingly lush picture that looks, even upon close inspection, like a painting.
One of Isaac's greatest achievements is his ability to take pictures that are revealing without being exploitative. One photograph shows a tearful young Ethiopian girl whose brother has died, after she carried him on her back for miles to a UN relief clinic. Her grief is palpable in her dark eyes, and yet the photograph never seems invasive. A group of school girls in Karachi sit on a bench, revising, their dusty feet a few inches from the floor; only one seems to notice Isaac with a shy, obscured smile, a naughty glint in her eyes.
An image by John Isaac: In Ethiopia, a young girl's tears are the epitaph for her baby brother.
Also see: An evening with a legend
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