Professor Steve Raymer, a National Geographic magazine staff photographer for more than two decades, teaches photojournalism, media ethics, and international newsgathering at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is also on the faculty of the university’s India Studies Program.
Raymer earned B.S. and M.A. degrees at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and studied Soviet and Russian affairs at Stanford University as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow. After service as a lieutenant in the United States Army, he joined the staff of National Geographic in 1972, launching a career that has taken him to more than 85 countries. From famines in Bangladesh and Ethiopia to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Raymer’s photographs have illustrated some 30 National Geographic articles. From 1991 to 1995, Raymer was the director of the National Geographic Society News Service, a joint venture with the New York Times and the Associated Press.
Raymer is author and photographer of St. Petersburg, a 1994 illustrated book about the imperial Russian capital; Living Faith: Inside the Muslim World of Southeast Asia, published in 2001, and Images of a Journey: India in Diaspora, published by Indiana University Press in September 2007. He also is photographer of Land of the Ascending Dragon: Rediscovering Vietnam (1997) and The Vietnamese Cookbook (1999).
In 1976, the National Press Photographers Association named Raymer “Magazine Photographer of the Year”—one of photojournalism’s most coveted awards. He has received a citation for excellence in foreign reporting from the Overseas Press Club of America and is winner of numerous awards from the White House News Photographers’ Association, as well as a Fulbright Research Fellowship from the U.S. State Department.
Raymer has lectured on photojournalism, international newsgathering, and war correspondence in the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Poland, China, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. He also has appeared on the “Today Show” and as a panelist and lecturer on war correspondence at The Freedom Forum Newseum in Washington, D.C.
