|
|||||||||||||
Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Chris Johns: Out of Africa, into Rappahannock
Rappahannock's Chris Johns is the editor-in-chief of the most recognized magazine in the world – National Geographic - and if you ask Johns how he got there, he’ll tell you that he never had a plan to end up where he did.“I’m not one of these people who’ve mapped out their life,” said Johns in an interview over the weekend.
Map or no map, Johns was named “Editor of the Year” earlier this month by Advertising Age magazine – the magazine industry's premier trade publication.
“I’ve been blessed,” said Johns. “Every day I’ve come to work I’ve enjoyed it.”
Johns is the first photographer to have worked up through the ranks to lead the magazine.
Johns lives with his wife Elizabeth, son Tim, 12, daughter Louise, 16, (their other daughter Noel, 18, is at James Madison University) and four dogs on a small knoll surrounded by several acres of cleared pasture just outside of Sperryville.
The house – which looks directly at Old Rag Mountain through a cleft between two smaller hills – has expanded as their family has grown, enclosing porches and arched terraces, and has a sense of modest prosperity.
There are images that come to be associated with people, and the one often associated with Johns is the image of a camel caravan in the desert of Djibouti, taken from above so that the shadows appear to be walking across the barren desert wasteland.
Africa – more than any other place – has defined Johns' career and his life. It was in Africa that he met his wife. He wrote two books about Africa. The people who told him about Rappahannock County he met in Africa: Paul and Marti Henze who live in Rock Mills met Johns by chance in Ethiopia. And the experiences he had, the stories he told and the photographs he made about Africa are all what brought him to where he is today.
On a cool fall evening, with the sun setting over Old Rag, far, far from the blistering heat of Africa – “Take your hottest day in August in Rappahannock and dial it up 15 degrees and you have some idea,” said Johns – he sat down to talk about his career as a photographer and journalist.
Johns, 57, looking fit and relaxed, and his four energetic dogs met this reporter at the top of his gravel drive which wound around his hill from the highway, to talk about his life and experiences. As the sun set, and an October chill fell over the beautiful view, Johns recalled the experiences that led him to being recognized by his peers, editing a world famous magazine, and living the country life in Rappahannock.
Dressed in jeans, fleece vest, western shirt and belt, and hiking shoes – granola western – Johns talked about his early career, his family, the importance of documenting disappearing cultures, and his dogs, but most of the time he talked about Africa.
Africa
Johns, a native of Medford, Ore., – a former railroad town now regional center sitting at the foot of the Cascades and within sight of Mt. McCloughlin, a 9,500 foot long dormant shield volcano – went to school to become a vet. One semester he took a journalism class and wrote a story on plant pathology. He borrowed a camera to do the story, but pathological plants are not where Johns ended up.
His junior year he started to work for the school newspaper. Johns went on to the University of Minnesota to get a journalism degree and began working for small newspapers.
After years of covering everything from high school football to the World Series, working for Time, Life, Newsweek and the National Geographic – for which he collaborated on his “breakthrough story” on the famous western sculptor Frederick Remington – Johns got the assignment of a lifetime in 1985: To photograph and document Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
The Rift is a geological trough of diverging continental plates, which runs from the Lebanon/Syria border in the north, through Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania to Mozambique in the south – a distance of over 3,700 miles. Along its course are some of the deepest and hottest places on the planet passing through hostile environments, past wars, bandits and the occasional lost Frenchman.
It is the birthplace of man, and contains the deepest and hottest places on the Earth, and cultures untouched until recently by modernization. Johns had read about these places as a youth – Hemingway and British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger – and had always dreamed of going there.
“That camel picture,” as he called it was one of the first pictures he took in Africa, in a tiny country on the Gulf of Aden wedged between Ethiopia and Somalia called Djibouti.
Johns met his wife there – who worked for the USIA in Ethiopia – and both she and her boss (the late John Burns of the U.S. Embassy in Addis Abbaba) were instrumental in getting him access to places like the Danakil Depression, and the Rift Valley Lakes where the salt caravans would cross the desert and dunes to ply their trade. The depression – which is 450 feet below the sea level – is filled by water seeping through fissures and cracks from the Red Sea and spreading out on the valley floor to become literally lakes of salt.
Johns – and his two “minders” Mohamed and Mohamed – would spend weeks in the desert with the Afar people, desert pastoralists who traded salt and herded goats. “They were tall, thin and very handsome people,” said Johns who also remarked that they were very fierce and, “really good shots” with their AK-47s.
Did he ever feel uncomfortable? “Well, you know, there were a couple of times,” begins Johns and one might expect a tale of bandits and daring escape. “You know it's really hot,” he said nonchalantly referring to the local climate. Where were the bandits? “I was mugged once outside my rental house in Johannesburg,” said Johns.
Johns then explained about the short-cut across the salt lake with Mohamed and Mohamed. There is actual water in these lakes – very salty water – which are covered over by a thick crust of salt. As he tells it, they decided that if camels could cross over the crust – as they had seen the Afar do – then so could their two ton Land Cruisers. Besides, it was an extra two days hot driving if they went around the lake instead of across it.
One of the Land Cruisers fell through the crust.
They did, of course, eventually pull it out, but it illustrated how perilous the desert can be. Most of the time, they wouldn’t travel during the day, but would dig pits over which they parked the Land Cruisers and would spend the heat of the day reading books, playing chess or practicing bad French for the occasion of having to rescue “some French guy” who crashed his motorcycle in the desert (they did).
Johns also spent time with the Afar, lived with them in their portable huts, ate their food. It was some of the most delicious goat he ever tasted, he said, as it was slow cooked in sealed earthen ovens and rubbed with Berber spice – a mixture of red pepper, saffron, salt and other spices.
Johns eventually traveled the length of the rift in East Africa from Djibouti to Malawi – spending two years in Kenya – and also into South Africa where he met Nelson Mandela and covered the transition from Apartheid.
Rappahannock County
In 1989, Johns married Elizabeth in Nairobi, Kenya. Later that year, they moved to Rappahannock County where they have lived since. Their children have been born and raised here, and Johns has settled in to the more measured pace of life in the country.
Asked why he chose to leave the adventure and excitement of field journalism and become editor – especially at a magazine like National Geographic – he said it was the separation from family that was the primary reason he could give that up. “The reality,” said Johns, “was that the carefree life of covering stories was difficult to sustain.” There is a rootlessness and separation that is incompatible with family, he said.
You don’t ever get the sense that Johns' career has been some well-intentioned and deliberate arc of success. He’s just done what he found he had a passion for, and that passion was cradled by his family.
Both of Johns' parents were educators – his father was an elementary school principal – and his father encouraged him to be as good as he could at whatever he chose to do. He speaks with a soft reverence when talking about his parents – they both passed away withing the last three years – and he realized that he needed to give to his children what his parents had given to him, and that is why – when he was approached to come in from the road to be picture editor in 2001 – he said yes.
By 2003, Johns was responsible for the visual layout of the entire magazine, and when in 2005 then-editor Bill Allen asked if Johns would be interested in leading the magazine he again said yes.
Of the three-and-a-half years he has been editor-in-chief, Johns said he loves it. He sees the National Geographic as a bridge between cultures and as an opportunity to address the great issues of our time.
Never did Johns dream of being recognized for his work as editor, but he is still pleased and honored by the award.
Elizabeth, a graduate of the University of Virginia, and whose father and grandfather were both in the foreign service was asked if they ever planned to go back to Africa.
"Oh yes," she said, "I'm sure we'll go back...we both love Africa.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.