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The photographer,who’s the global brand ambassador of Olympus,was in Mumbai for the camera company’s store opening at Fort on Tuesday. Many of his photographs will be displayed at the store.

Born in Chennai,Isaac arrived at the JFK airport in New York in 1968 with a 12-string guitar,Elvis sideburns and 75 cents in his pocket. He wanted to become a folk singer. A woman,hearing him sing at Greenwich Village,offered him a job at the United Nations.

While at UN,Isaac worked his way up and became a photographer in 1978. In his 20 years there,he’s been to over 100 countries covering the famine in Ethiopia,wars in Kuwait,Bosnia,Iran and Afghanistan. In many instances,death was only a Kalashnikov away. Once,while travelling alone,some Palestinian children blindfolded him,stripped him and started shooting at the ground. “The irony was that I was there to do a story on these children,” recounts the 66-year-old in the gruff baritone that won him a slot in CBS’s The Original Amateur Hour in his folk singing days.

The New York-based photographer has won 13 awards at Nikon international photo contests. In 2000,the International Photographic Council named him the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998,he retired from UN as its chief photographer. “That’s when I took to wildlife photography,” says Isaac.

From 2003 to 2008,he worked on a book on Kashmir,The Vale of Kashmir. “Did you know that 80 per cent of Kashmiris want to be a part of India?” says Isaac with an almost childlike enthusiasm. Once,he was summoned by 12 Kashmiri mullahs. He asked them how they wanted to be portrayed in his book. “Just show us as we are,” they told him. “Not from the Indian or Pakistani government’s point of view. Just from our point of view.”

And that’s exactly what he did because,as the ace photographer says,he believes in

humanity and not politics or governments. But then,what else can you expect from a photographer who once saw a naked Ethiopian woman who had just delivered a baby lying on the pavement with the umbilical cord still attached and covered her up instead of clicking photographs that might have won him a Pulitzer.