SJMC Alum Steve Raymer (BA’67, MA’71) Donates Archive to Wisconsin Historical Society

Documenting the sacrifices of U.S. airmen during World War II, Steve Raymer (BA’67, MA’71) notes an inscription on the wall of the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial outside the English university city. Raymer recently donated an archive of his life’s work to the Wisconsin Historical Society, including images from a long career as a National Geographic photographer and as the author of five books. © Brian Harris

When Steve Raymer first picked up a camera while working for his high school newspaper in small-town Beloit, Wisconsin, he never would have expected that a little over 60 years later, he’d be donating his photographs to his home state.

A sampan sails Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam, 1993. © Steve Raymer.

This past October, School of Journalism and Mass Communication alum Steve Raymer (BA’67, MA’71) delivered the archive of his life’s work to the Wisconsin Historical Society, including over 2,000 digital files, nearly 200 archival color prints and over 7,000 color transparencies from his decades-long career as a photojournalist for National Geographic. Now an emeritus professor of journalism at Indiana University, Raymer’s career took him to over 100 countries – including two-dozen trips to Vietnam – a country where he served and fought as an Army first lieutenant in 1968-1969. But of all of his travels, including five years in the former Soviet Union and globe-circling stories on the opium poppy and the trade in endangered animals, Raymer never lost his affection for Madison and the SJMC.

“I feel this incredible debt to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and UW–Madison in general,” Raymer said. “Giving the archive of my life’s work is a start toward paying it forward. But it’s a debt that I personally feel can never really be repaid.”

The Wisconsin Historical Society maintains one of the United States’ premier collections of records not only documenting Wisconsin history but also “major events and movements which have shaped the twentieth century.”

Rickshaw drivers in Kolkata, India. © Steve Raymer

Raymer’s career as a National Geographic photographer covering the world hunger crisis and the aftermath of the Vietnam and Cold Wars certainly made him a great archival donation candidate. With so many physical prints in Raymer’s collection, WHS hopes to display his work in one of the temporary exhibit spaces in their new history center being built at the top of State Street.

“I think [Raymer’s collection] would be a good candidate because it’s so visual,” said Jennifer Skarbek, WHS Collection Development Archivist. “UW is a big social action and activist campus so we focus a lot on that area as well. We have a lot of Vietnam War-related collections so I could see his getting a lot of use.”

As a journalism student during the turbulent 1960s, Raymer honed his photography skills covering the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations for the Daily Cardinal and as a “stringer” for the Wisconsin State Journal, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and The New York Times.

Ration card clutched in her left hand, a mother waits with her three hungry children for powdered milk donated by the U.S. and Canada during the 1974 famine in Bangladesh. © Steve Raymer.

“Madison was a great laboratory for student journalists in the ‘60s,” Raymer said. “There were so many opportunities for a young journalist or photojournalist to get real practical experience.”

After mustering out of the Army, Raymer enrolled in the SJMC for his master’s degree and graduated in 1971. Raymer began his decades-long career at National Geographic Magazine in 1972, admitting during a job interview at the magazine’s Washington, D.C. headquarters that he had never taken a color photograph for publication. Director of Photography Robert E. Gilka, himself a Wisconsin native, brushed aside his concerns, saying the Geographic wanted Raymer for “how you think and how you see the world. The rest you can learn on the job.”

After covering the Menominee Indian tribe of Wisconsin and the Amana Colonies of Iowa, Raymer finally got his big break when Gilka wrote him a simple, one-sentence memorandum to “Please do the photography for the world hunger crisis story,” a project that spanned more than 20 countries across four continents. As Raymer explains, this was the so-called “Golden Age of Photojournalism” when photojournalists were encouraged to dive deeply into a story and expenses and deadlines were rarely discussed.

“[Editors] really gave you this tremendous amount of latitude to research your own story, plot your own course and make your own way,” Raymer said. “It was the photographer and the picture editor who drove the story. There was a famine in Bangladesh and the writer couldn’t go, so I went and covered the famine myself.”

An angry Soviet Army colonel confronts a pro-democracy demonstrator at a May Day parade on Red Square in Moscow 1990. © Steve Raymer.

To get the perfect photograph, Raymer did not shy away from risks. Over the years, Raymer suffered broken bones, parasitic infections, animal bites, trichinosis from eating wild black bear meat with Native Americans, typhoid fever, and post trumatic stress after nearly being killed in a terrorist bombing at the Kabul, Afghanistan, airport.

Perhaps his closest brush with death came in 1974 while covering the hunger crisis in Cambodia, which was starting because of a civil war. Raymer followed an American relief shipment to a refugee camp miles from the capital Phenom Penh, where the international press corps was encamped. Forewarned by American embassy officials of the risks, Raymer was caught in a mortar and rocket attack by Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas on the Buddhist temple where American rice was being distributed. Struck in the back by white-hot shrapnel, Raymer was ultimately evacuated to an American Air Force hospital in Thailand. Many journalists might have called it quits after an experience such as this, but Raymer’s ROTC mission-first training and resilience drove him to continue his photography in several other Asian countries after he recovered.

A Vietnamese child with hydracephalus is cared for at Tu Du Hospital, a research center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam studying the effects of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, which was widely sprayed by the United States during the Vietnam War. © Steve Raymer

“Character traits of the best journalists I’ve met are persistence and resilience and to say ‘I’m not going to take no for an answer,’” Raymer said. “Your mission comes first. Whatever your job is, you’ve got to get it done – quitting isn’t an option.”

Raymer would return to Southeast Asia many times over his lifetime, photographing the aftermath of the Vietnam War in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, the opium poppy fields and religiously persecuted minorities of Myanmar, the beauty of Laos and the rainforests of the Malay Peninsula ¾ today unrecognizable as the economic powerhouses of Malaysia and Singapore.

“First I was a soldier, then a photojournalist, finally a professor,” Raymer said. “But I am constantly drawn back to Southeast Asia, where as a young man I saw tragedy, intoxicating beauty, and the sheer energy of people who would turn this into one of the world’s most vital regions.” He calls himself a “lucky guy.”

Many of the photographs in Raymer’s archive were from his 24 trips to Southeast Asia as well as collections from Russia and the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Raymer hopes that they can be put to good use by the university and enjoyed by the public.

A elderly Vietnamese man tips his hat in a gesture of respect to Buddhist monks in a remote Mekong Delta village. © Steve Raymer

“I think the Southeast Asia studies people will find plenty of good material that could help illustrate histories of the Vietnam War in the larger sense of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos,” Raymer said. “I hope that the prints are just something that aesthetically people will enjoy. I hope that people will really enjoy the prints because I put every bit of aesthetic curveball on making the prints that I could.”

While Raymer’s passion has taken him around the world, he credits his success to the lessons he learned and the community he found at the UW–Madison SJMC.

“I mean it when I say that nothing in my life, as a modest scholarship kid from Beloit, would have been possible without the astonishing good luck of coming to UW-Madison and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Twice over,” Raymer said. “Professors Ralph Nafziger, Bill Hachten, Scott Cutlip, John McNelly and of course Wilmott (Rags) Ragsdale opened the world to me. And I never looked back.”