When John Isaac arrived at New York’s JFK airport in 1968 from Madras, India, it wasn’t obvious he was going to become a distinguished photojournalist. Isaac was armed with a twelve-string guitar, Elvis sideburns, and 75 cents in his pocket. While singing in Greenwich Village, he met a woman who worked for the United Nations: she asked him to audition with the UN singers and got him a job in the organization’s mailroom. Six months later, having been given a camera by his brother, Isaac won a prestigious photography award and started working in the UN’s darkroom. Though he could have made a career in music (in 1970, his cowboy yodling baritone landed him on CBS’s Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour, where he was a sensation) Isaac stuck with his day job, embarking on a photography career with the UN that would last for 30 years.

At the UN, Isaac learned photography on the job and on the fly – literally – as he jetted to Lebanon, Yemen, India, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and China under UN, UNICEF and UNHCR auspices. He had a close collaboration with Audrey Hepburn when she was special UN Ambassador for UNICEF: she said that his 1992 portrait of her surrounded by children in Somalia was her all-time favorite. (When American Photo ran an issue on celebrity photography, they asked Isaac to ask Hepburn if they could airbrush her facial wrinkles. She told him, “Johnny, tell them not to mess with that picture. I’ve earned every one of those wrinkles.”)

For thirty years, until he retired as Head of Photography in 1998, Isaac covered wars, famines, and human interest stories for the UN. He studied briefly with both George Tice and Ansel Adams, and won awards from Time, Photokina, Graphis and elsewhere for his reportage. But after particularly harrowing photo shoots in Bosnia and Rwanda, Isaac had to step back and re-evaluate his life. “I didn’t know what happened to me. I packed up my cameras. I was crying in my sleep.” Three months later, he says, “I went out and shot this butterfly in my neighbor’s back yard.” It was his first digital picture, shot on an Olympus E-10. Since then, Isaac has spent much of his time on wildlife photography.

Isaac’s story has some other strange twists. Enter Michael Jackson, who saw a poster Isaac had done of children’s faces for UNICEF. “He called me out of the blue in 1995 or '96. His manager rang me up and said Michael wanted to meet me. I said, ‘Get out of here.’” Jackson persisted, however, and the two met in New York, after which Jackson invited Isaac to Brazil to photograph children in the favelas. Isaac also shot on the stage of the Moonwalk videos for Sony Records, and Jackson was so impressed that he gave Isaac the exclusive opportunity to photograph the birth of his first child, Prince. “Till today, I cannot say anything bad about him,” Isaac says.

Increasingly, though, he has been returning to his native India to photograph in the disputed area of Kashmir. “I have been to Kashmir six times now, and I have photographed life by Srinigar on Dal Lake, the most beautiful lake — the birds, grebes and kingfishers, and the floating gardens and vegetable markets. I have also photographed the villagers with their sheep and the harvest of saffron, the crafts, and so on.” In one picture, he caught two swallows in flight fighting over a dragonfly. “I call it India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir,” he says with a smile.

Sometimes he ran into difficulties in closed military areas in northern Kashmir. “I went to places that even Kashmiris don’t go. My driver was afraid, but my translator was very good. One time I was nearly blown up. They missed me by fifteen minutes.” On another visit, he photographed in a village where the Indian army was profiling local men in the hope of finding separatists, and they asked him not to take pictures. “I told them I was photographing the men, not the army, but I wasn’t going to leave. They got really annoyed but finally packed up and left.”

When it comes to his wildlife photography, Isaac says that his recent study of Sufism has benefited him greatly, as it “helps me previsualize and learn about movement.” This allows him to anticipate what birds and animals will do, and lets him work with the digital technology in his cameras. “I am principally using the E-1 and the EVOLT with all the lenses. The 4/3 chip also produces a wonderful file that seems twice as big as a 35mm negative.” He likes the fact that digital cameras allow him to shoot many more pictures. “Lexar gave me two 4 gigabyte cards, and one day I shot 16 gigs of pictures. I went crazy and kept shooting birds. I had to download them, of course, at night into my laptop. Kashmir was tricky because the electricity was not consistent. I carried all of it on mule back with batteries and other stuff.”

Isaac’s image of hummingbirds from Nashville, Tennessee, is a testament to the strength of his philosophy. “Do you know how hard this is? I had a hat made with flowers hanging down from it, and I sat there all day waiting for these guys to fly by. You can actually see the tongue of the bird here. It’s that sharp, and the EVOLT has a great color processor in it.”

Whether he’s shooting hummingbirds or Kashmiri villagers, Isaac says that the most important thing he’s learned is to “stop, look, and listen” – a key teaching of Sufism. “I am seeing better now. It put in place for me how everything repeats. I was taught in photography that if you miss a shot, that was a once in a lifetime thing. That is bull----. When I photographed that grebe on Dal Lake, I saw it earlier and couldn’t get it. I thought about what it would do and imagined what would happen next time I saw it. Sufism let me do that.”

In addition to Sufi mystics, he credits another wise person – his mother – with developing his vision. “When I was a child she told me, ‘everything is not black and white. You should see with both your eyes, but there will come a time when, with your own intelligence, you will close one eye and you will get a fifty degree angle of seeing.” Isaac smiles in fond memory. “She said, ‘That’s what you will see, and you will be a better human being.’”