Stories behind the stories...

Karen Kasmauski
Driving from Virginia to Michigan for a summer vacation with her husband and children, Karen Kasmauski’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Marla Salmon from Emory University, seeking a photographer to illustrate a book she envisioned about nursing’s contribution to humanity.

While Kasmauski’s husband Bill Douhitt, who became the book’s project director, entertained their children, Salmon and Kasmauski on that drive began the outline of what would become Nurse: A World of Care.

“I think Marla and I talked most of the way through Ohio,” Kasmauski said.

Those miles were a drop in the ocean compared to the miles Kasmauski traveled to photograph the nurses and environs that appeared in Nurse: A World of Care. Upon securing funding from Emory University and Johnson & Johnson’s Campaign for Nursing’s Future, Kasmauski hit the skies, shooting in 15 countries over eight months.

Kasmauski joined with Salmon and Emory nursing faculty to brainstorm images and settings that would best illustrate nursing’s role in creating and maintaining healthy communities across the globe. Transcontinental partnerships were cultivated for Kasmauski to gain access to intimate care settings. Kasmauski corresponded with contacts she made over her photography career around the world to set up photo shoots.

Kasmauski said one of the greatest challenges in developing the book was avoiding redundancy. “Photo after photo of one person caring for another would make a boring book,” she said. “We had to develop varied and diverse backdrops under the large topic of nursing to make the project vibrant.”

More than once, the story she intended to photograph was not the one with which she left.

“You think everything is set up — until you get there. Then you find out nothing is set up,” Kasmauski said. “And in my line of work you can’t come back and say, ‘I don’t have the photos.’ You have to be able to find another story mid-stream.”

For example, Kasmauski traveled to Japan to photograph nurses in Kyushu, but the contact and story fell through. Turning on a dime, Kasmauski changed the story to how Japan is using robotics during the nursing shortage to care for a rapidly growing aging population. She contacted National Geographic’s Nikkei office, with whom she had worked. “They were happy to help. They made phone calls, set up appointments and wrote letters of introduction, in Japanese. The Japan segment could not have happened without them.”  

Timing was everything in her shooting schedule. One month after Kasmauski photographed in the slums of Kenya, riots broke out during an election. “The slums exploded. If I had been there one month later I would not have been able to move,” she said.

In Ethiopia, traveling to photograph a traditional birth attendant in a remote village, a flood wiped out the road and much of the village before she arrived. “Five hundred people were killed,” she said.

Kasmauski’s admiration for nurses is bottomless. “These nurses are working under very stressful conditions, always at some sort of low-level risk, especially in developing countries,” she related.

Now that the book is published, Kasmauski feels sad the project is over. “At the end of the assignment I asked myself why I didn’t become a nurse?,” she said.