I started «taking pictures» at age six. My Dad liked to do it, and loving my Dad, I borrowed his camera to be like him. After doing the photography for the high school yearbook, I pursued my «real interest» and studied Physics at MIT, narrowly escaping a career as an astrophysicist, turning down MIT Graduate School to travel the world as a photographer - much to the total panic of my parents. Four years later, these same parents, now impoverished, watched my brother graduate something cum laude from Harvard and immediately head to LA to try his talents as a stand up comic. They never quite recovered, although his first appearance on Saturday NIght Live and later his royalty checks from Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot certainly helped.
For my part, my Mother still worries. Once, when I called her from Africa to tell her «Mom, I'm going into the jungle,» she reponded, «I'll be happier when you tell me you're coming out of the jungle!» Three weeks later I sent my brother a post card from Ghana: «Dear Al, I have malaria, don't tell Mom.» (Somehow, these adventures never worried Dad.)
So, I had figured out a way to visit 103 countries and counting and get paid for it. After working for a number of years as a photojournalist - Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Paris Match, Stern, the United Nations... - covering wars, natural and man-made catastrophies, too many political campaigns (my first day in the White House was Nixon's last), economic reforms in China, water irrigation and maternity care in Java and Sumatra for the Ford Foundation, Palestine refugees for the UN , the fall of the Berlin Wall, I moved to Paris in 1989, for the oysters. The greatest dangers facing me now as a photographer come from botulism, salmonella, and an occasional mad cow or chef.
I discovered the joy of food on my early travels, and whenever I am on a non-food assignment, I still go off on my own to discover the markets (my first visit in a new place), food producers, harvests, and everything edible, such as rat, bat and dog in the same meal in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia, and sharing roasted pooch with my 17-month old son in Vietnam, the perfect male bonding «moment». «The mountains of Northern Vietnam - straddling the Laos border, -dodging old bomb craters in a rickety Soviet Jeep twenty-two miles from Dien Bien Phu - savory dog sausage and Huda beer. It doesn't get better than this!» )
My Dutch wife, Annemiek, is a psychologist specializing in autism. We have two children, Manui, eight, and Tunui, thirteen (the dog eater). Manui shared «wild cat» (probably snow leopard) with me in Burma, so she is no food slouch, either. They are both adorable (I am objective at all times) and I exploit them and their beautiful mother mercilessly as «child development» models (all released)
Owen Franken
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