When Stephen McNulty, curator at the Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography in Canton and an accomplished conservation photographer in his own right, enrolled in New Zealand’s University of Canterbury to study biology last February, he was hoping for an earth-shattering educational and cultural experience.
Then, when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake devastated Christchurch, the university’s city, two days into the classes, that expectation became chillingly literal.
“I got in on Thursday, Monday I paid a ridiculous amount for tuition, on Tuesday went to one class and the earthquake hit,” said McNulty.
With the city in a state of emergency and classes immediately canceled, in the days that followed, McNulty began to take photos of the disaster. It was an exercise fraught with uncertainty and sometimes, sudden destruction. “There was never really a transition or a buildup where you could feel danger and fear, just, ‘Oh shit, that building is falling down!’” said McNulty, who believes that his position as curator, which fostered an interest for conflict photography, helped him approach the task with diligence and passion. “I’ve never been put in that situation before, so it was a trial by fire.” Photos from the first few days of the disaster depict firefighters at the sites of demolished buildings, helicopters entering the city and pedestrians in the streets skirting falling debris.
The unique circumstance of being part of the disaster as it happened also gave way to a unique set of challenges — not the least of which was a very real physical danger. “The response team was very quick to set up a perimeter around the buildings that were crashing, to protect things from looters in the days following,” said McNulty — a practice that also made it challenging to take photos. “Anyone caught behind the cordons was immediately jailed.”
Also difficult to approach was the emotional element of the disaster — in particular, the responses of those affected. “It can be tough. People get angry; people definitely get angry,” said McNulty. “You just have to approach it with compassion and sincerity, and you really have to throw all ego aside and be in that moment. You can’t be a photographer photographing the affected; you have to BE one of the affected.”
After a week of photographing the city, McNulty began to take stock of what his next move should be. “I was just kind of floundering in New Zealand. I didn’t have a job until July, and my return ticket was for July,” he said. “I had nowhere to live, nowhere to go to school, nothing to do. I was praying for guidance, trying to figure it all out.”
Then, on March 11, the coast of Japan was struck by the effects of a 9.0-magnitude undersea earthquake — and McNulty got his answer. “I wake up and Japan is all over the news, and I knew that that was where I was supposed to be,” he said. “It was about 9 a.m. when I heard about it, by noon I had my ticket and by 3 p.m. I was gone. I bought a one-way ticket to Japan, and I didn’t come back for four months.”
McNulty spent those four months roaming around Asia, visiting Japan and taking photographs of the earthquake’s devastating effects before moving on to Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia and French Polynesia. (“I may have accidentally gone into Laos one day,” he said.) “In Japan, the American consulate ‘strongly urged’ me to leave and were going to send me to Korea, but the way it went was, they would evacuate you and then you would have to pay them back,” said McNulty. “I thought, well, if I have to pay you back I’m going to go somewhere I want to go, and I went to Borneo instead.”
Having planned to be at the university in Christchurch for four months, McNulty wasn’t prepared for international travel. “I had no backpack, no jacket, no necessities,” he said. “I almost left my camera at home.”
Instead, he made do with what he had, sleeping in hostels and at friends’ homes and couch-surfing. “I slept in a lot of airports and train stations,” he said. “I bought one-way tickets all over Asia. I had no plan, I just kind of had a loose guideline of what country I wanted to be in what month.” He even took a field course from the University of Akron, which they were holding in Asia in the spring.
In those countries, McNulty moved from the tense conflict photography of New Zealand and Japan to a series of cultural portraits, mostly concentrating on the indigenous people of Asia. Though he had taken some portraits a few years earlier in Samoa, “This was the first shoot where I really tried to get into cultural portraits. I usually do wildlife, landscapes, the non-animated stuff,” he said. Many of those portraits focus on children and older adults in the poorer, more rural areas — a young boy fishing at sunrise in Cambodia, a woman frying rice in Malaysia. “With portraits it’s tough, and awkward at first, but when you break through the barrier and the awkwardness and you’re able to develop a rapport with them and spend time with them, you can get truly candid photographs,” said McNulty. “I wanted to find people who were truly indigenous versus people in cities and tourist locales.”
Though McNulty, currently a University of Akron student, has never had any formal training in photography — “I’ve never been able to take photography classes because of the way my schedule plays out” — his studies in biology have led him to places around the world that bring him into contact with high-profile photographers. In 2005, as a college freshman, his research sent him to Tarapoto, Peru on a World Bank Special Project, studying the Amazon’s vanishing poison frogs. “I was going a lot of places that photographers from National Geographic and BBC Cinema were going, and I would just ask a lot of questions,” said McNulty. Art Wolfe, Neil Rettig, Mark Emery and Rick Rosenthal are among the artists he’s gotten tips from.
For McNulty, biology and photography aren’t disparate hobbies or even mutually exclusive career objectives — they’re two sides of the same coin. “A lot of the photographers I admire were actually biologists first; they would just work their asses off as biologists so they could make time in the field to take pictures,” he said. “They wanted to convey what they were doing. To show the public the issues you need a strong photo. And photos, specifically, because of the way it can be proliferated. Photos can grab you in a way text cannot, and video is still very limited. Photography can be a very powerful tool for grabbing public attention.”
Having returned from his international sojourn in mid-June, McNulty is content now to focus on his responsibilities at the Saxton gallery. A private exhibition of the photos from that trip was held in July at the gallery, and McNulty plans to schedule more showings in 2012.
In the meantime, he’ll continue his biology studies at Akron, and continue taking photographs that capture the intensity of his studies. “I haven’t decided if I’m going after photography or biology, but they do dovetail quite seamlessly,” he said. “I have access to places as a biologist that allow me to photograph things that I wouldn’t normally be able to — like the Fiordland Crested Penguin of New Zealand — and photography brings its own benefits to the table. It allows people to see what I’m studying, and to understand why it’s important. I’m interested in both. Which one I have as my day job is kind of up in the air.”
Gallery photos by Stephen McNulty. Photo of Stephen McNulty by Jeremy Aronhalt, A Studio
