© Chris Rainier
Monks at the Bayon, a Khmer temple in Angkor, Cambodia. Click photo for more images by Chris Rainier and others.
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When most people think about conservation they think about preserving native plants and animals. But what about native cultures? In the eyes of National Geographic fellow Chris Rainier, the two go hand in hand. Under his philosophy of conservation, local people need to be empowered to protect their own land -- and photography can be one of their most powerful tools.
Rainier advances this initiative with the National Geographic Society's All Roads Program, which he directs along with its Cultural Ethnosphere and Enduring Voices projects. The All Roads Program, which is going into its fourth year, supports indigenous photographers who are working in their own communities, showering them with resources and connecting them with media and art people who can help them get their work seen on a global scale. "If you preserve a culture, you end up preserving its land too," Rainier explains.
With his newest project, Rainier is documenting both lands and cultures, as well as the way they converge in "sacred places." His book, titled simply Sacred, will be released by Assouline in fall 2008. In it Rainier captures those locations held most holy by various peoples: the source of the Ganges river for the Hindu or the Potala Palace for Tibetans. He shoots these locations in black and white with several cameras -- a Hasselblad with and without a Lensbaby, a plastic Diana -- deciding afterward which captures the look he is most interested in. "What might be the most sacred thing to you, may look like nothing to me," he says. But he believes that photography plays an important role in reconciling those differences. "Photography has the power of galvanizing and serving as a catalyst for change," he says, "because it is a universal language."
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