Creativity Jijiji

The Pilgrimage of Sight: Jon Ortner and the Sacred Art of Seeing

• Episode 14

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What pulls someone towards art? It's rarely a straight line. It begins with a flicker, a strange obsession, a moment that seizes you and doesn't let go.

Photographer John Ortner's creative journey began with a casual suggestion from a hippie on a houseboat in Kashmir: "There's this cave not too far from here where holy men go." Without preparation, Ortner and friends trekked into the Himalaya, surrounded by thousands of sadhus—wandering mystics who've spent lifetimes seeking truth. Their question to him was profound: "Do you know why you're here?" When he admitted his ignorance, they told him he'd come for "Darshan"—holy sight

For anyone feeling the pull of creativity, Ortner's story reminds us that the most potent work emerges not from chasing recognition but from following beauty with an open heart. What's calling you to see with new eyes today?

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Chris:

What pulls someone towards art? It's rarely a straight line. It begins with a flicker, a strange obsession, a moment that seizes you, sometimes quietly, doesn't let go. For some it's a song, could be a poem, a photographer's frame, a story. For others, it's a voice that says Go. And so the artist walks, without knowing why. Only that there is something to find. Maybe it's not about finding anything, maybe it's about learning to see differently. Darshan, holy sight. That's where this story begins, in the misty lakes of Kashmir, when someone says, casually, there's a cave, the rest? The rest is the call answering itself.

Jon:

What propels you to be an artist, and for me, that has to do with passion and falling in love with something, and I don't think that any art is produced without this passion and the passion for making the art, and what does it give you? So me and my friends, right out of high school, we go to India.

Chris:

What happens when you show up with no agenda, no camera, no idea, no plan? That's when the doors open. These wandering mystics saw something in John Ortner Not status, not skill, but sincerity. You didn't come here by accident, they said. And isn't that how creativity works? You follow a path blindly and suddenly it speaks back. A voice, a look, a truth, not from a textbook, but from the mountain, from the fire, from people who lived the answers you didn't yet know how to ask.

Jon:

There was a hippie who came to our houseboat on the lakes of Kashmir and he said you know, there's this cave not too far from here and all the holy men go up to the cave and you should go and check out this cave. So, without knowing anything, we hired a porter and we took a trek for a week up into the Himalaya. We trekked and we made it to this cave and in the cave were thousands of the Shiva holy men. Now, when I, of course, started studying this and became more versed in this, I found out that there are five million of these sadhus, and the sadhus are the ascetics and they are the ones that invented yoga, meditation, and there's five million of them wandering on pilgrimage in India and were surrounded by all these holy men, many of who spoke English, and for the first time, they told me about the pilgrimages and what was the purpose of going on pilgrimage. And the sadhus said to me do you know why you're here? And I'd say, no, we just walked up here.

Jon:

I know nothing. To me, do you know why you're here? And I'd say, no, we just walked up here, I know nothing. Art doesn't always come from comfort.

Chris:

Sometimes it's forged on the edge, where cold meets heat, where the air thins and the silence grows thick with presence. To walk 500 miles in the Himalaya isn't just physical. It's a stripping away. Each mile, another layer falls off, until what's left is just wonder. A gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon, a river louder than thought. The artist goes where the ordinary ends, because that's where the images live, Not for spectacle but for understanding they said you are here for Darshan.

Jon:

You were brought here for a purpose. I said what is Darshan? He said Darshan is sight, not just regular sight, holy sight. They turned to me and said you didn't come here by accident, you came here because you were brought here for a reason. Everyone knows that the highest mountain on earth is Everest and of course that's on the border of Nepal and Tibet. But few people know where the deepest gorge in the world is, and in central Nepal, chris, is a gorge that is three and a half times as deep as the Grand Canyon. It's called the Kali Gorge, and Martha and I did an expedition in the Kali Gorge 65 days in a tent. We walked over 500 miles. So we started doing these incredible expeditions through the Himalaya, not only to the highest mountains but to the deepest gorges and the three deepest gorges in the world the Kali, the Marziandi and the Buri Gandaki. Those three gorges are mind-blowing because in the bottoms of the gorges they're tropical and the tops of the gorges go into Tibet, where it snows even in July and August.

Chris:

Few places guard their spirit, like Bhutan no billboards, no killing, no rush. A kingdom that has resisted the crush of modernity by holding tight to the soul. Modernity by holding tight to the soul. In this last Buddhist kingdom, the camera becomes a passport only if your heart is in the right place. And when it is, animals will walk up to you, snow leopards will sing in the night. It's as if the earth itself gives you permission to see. It's as if the earth itself gives you permission to see. What the artist captures here isn't just beauty.

Chris:

It's the sacred still alive.

Jon:

So I went to Bhutan and again, most people don't even know where Bhutan is or have ever heard of it.

Jon:

It's the last Buddhist kingdom on earth. It is in between China and India and the king owns everything, including the airlines, and in Bhutan, because it's a strict Buddhist society, there is no killing whatsoever. So fishing is illegal, hunting is illegal, and Martha and I went to Bhutan, and you have to have permission from the Bhutanese government to enter the country. At first they only left a few hundred people a year in. Now it's up to about 7,000 a year that they allow in. When Martha and I went in there, they only allowed about 5,000 people a year, and we trekked across Bhutan a 30-day hike in which we walked about 300 miles, and because there's been no hunting, we had herds of blue sheep that had never been hunted and literally walked to within 10 feet of us, and at night in our tent we heard snow leopards up into the mountains echoing through the high peak, and I never really wanted to photograph in America until I happened to open a magazine and in that magazine I saw pictures of a place that looked like Mars.

Chris:

Sometimes the path leads home not to comfort but to rediscovery. A photograph in a magazine, an alien landscape, and suddenly the American West can look like Mars After Asia. The desert whispers in a new dialect, still sacred, still strange, and the artist begins again. The pilgrimage doesn't end, it shifts terrain because the holy is everywhere, if you're paying attention.

Jon:

Now I know that that is the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. So for the first time I stopped going to Asia and I started going to the American wilderness. So my books are all a combination of fine art, photography and scholarship, because I try to explain well. Why is this important, how did this come to be, why is it worthy of taking pictures of it and why should we be interested either in the Asian cultures or in the deserts and canyons of the American West? It's the oldest crematorium in the world.

Jon:

The goal of most Hindus in India is to be burned on the Ganges in Benares. So I knew that I wanted to photograph the crematoriums and how they burn the bodies on the Ganges River. Well, when I got there, I found out that it's illegal to photograph the cremations and I was there for a month and I was trying to figure out. And even National Geographic when they did a story on Benares, they snuck the photographs illegally. They went at night and took a boat out on the Ganges and then shot back to the burning cremation fires. I decided, no, that's not what I want. I want to do intimate close-ups of the sadhus who are officiating at the crematorium and who are burning the bodies and I happen to be walking through there without my camera.

Chris:

Some stories are not meant to be stolen. They have to be given. In Benares, by the fires of the Ganges, the camera must wait, and the man who owns the burning guts doesn't care about prestige. He looks at the artist's work and he sees, sees the reverence, the intention, the longing to understand, not exploit. So the door opens, the lens lifts and the sacred ritual becomes visible, not to the world, but to you, the witness, because trust is the final key and humility is what it unlocks.

Jon:

And I had a little guide, a young boy, 12 years old, that I paid to take me around, buy me oranges, etc. And he brought me to this guy. And the guy said to him why don't you come back have tea with me? Don't bring your camera, I want to talk to you. So Martha said don't go, they're going to rip you off. This is a trap, or whatever.

Jon:

I go back and the guy explains to me that his father and his family owned the burning guts and that he was in control of the burning guts. Well, I had a blad of the book that I was working on, where Every Breath is a Prayer. The book hadn't come out yet but I had pictures from it where I had taken pictures of all the holy men. I showed it to him and he said okay, I see that this is going to be an incredibly important book and that you're delving into the importance of Shiva worship and you're delving into the importance of Benares. And I'll tell you what. You can come up into my room above the crematorium and I'll let you take pictures of the burning bodies.

Jon:

They bring the body down to the river and first it is dipped into the holy ganges to purify it and sanctify it. Then the body is put on a pile of wood and the fire is started. And the body is put on a pile of wood and the fire is started and the body is burned. If you're wealthy enough, you can afford sandalwood and the bodies are burned on this fragrant sandalwood. Once the body is burned, special holy men who are allowed to touch the defiled dead bodies then take the ashes, and the ashes are then pushed into the Ganges.

Jon:

Throughout my career, I feel that I've been blessed, that because my aim was so pure, because I was not trying to make money with it, I wasn't trying to do anything other than show the beauty of these ancient traditions and the importance of these ancient traditions that I was given access, over and over again, to things that most people had never even seen. So, even though I don't really believe in fate, when I look back I have to think that my career has been just magical and I seem to have made the right choices all along.

Chris:

Looking back it doesn't feel like chance. A camera, a cave, a whisper, a fire. The road unfolds one step at a time and maybe that's the truest creativity to follow beauty without demanding outcome, to let the work be bigger than the artist and to know somehow that you were never walking alone.

Jon:

So I go to Monument Valley for Canyon wilderness. I've got this contract and I'm doing this huge book on the Colorado Plateau, the canyons, deserts and slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau. So I go to Monument Valley, I hire a guy to come and pick me up at four in the morning so that I can get to these prime places before sunrise. And don't forget, I'm using a view camera, the way Ansel Adams did. So I have to assemble my camera and I have to put sheet film and a 120 roll film. So I have to do all of this in the dark. So I hire a guide and he shows up, and he shows up late. I miss the sunrise. I smell alcohol on his breath. I'm very disappointed. I pay him the $300 anyway because I felt so guilty and so bad. So then two days go by, I said I got to get a different guy. I hire another guy who was going to take me up to Hunts Mesa, a very remote part of Monument Valley. Well, he shows up three o'clock. We get in his car. We get halfway to Hunts Mesa, his car breaks down and, same thing, I pay him $300. I feel bad. He needs to fix his car. So now I've been there five days I haven't gotten anything unusual, nothing. I'm staying at a Marriott hotel or something and I see the manager and I tell him that I'm a pro photographer, I'm working on a book, and I say I've hired two guys, I spent $600. I haven't gotten a single good picture yet. He says well, that's because you don't have the right guy. I said oh really, who's the right guy? He said Harold Simpson. I said well, that doesn't really sound like a Navajo name. He said, au contraire, he's the great grandson of Gray Whiskers, a famous Dine chief. So I call up Harold Simpson and Harold says to me well, you know, I've worked on Hollywood movies, I know all the locations, I have a new truck. Why don't you meet me at the 7-Eleven? I'll go over your shoot list and then we'll arrange to shoot. So I said OK, great, how am I going to recognize you? He said oh, you won't have any trouble recognizing me. I'm 6'3", I weigh about 300 pounds and I'm an albino. I said you're an albino Navajo. He said yes, I go to the 7-Eleven. There is a mountain of a man with Johnny Winter white hair down to his shoulders. That was Harold Simpson, the great grandson of Gray Whiskers.

Jon:

Harold started taking me around day after day. He took me to all the sacred places of the Dina and the first day he took me to Mystery Valley and on and on and on. And I'll never forget. I asked Harold. I said well, I've seen these photographs where the dunes are orange. There's a place in Monument Valley with bright orange dunes. He said yeah, I know where that is, I'll take you there.

Jon:

So another day he shows up at three o'clock with his new truck. We go, we're driving for an hour. He pulls over on the side of the road and he and this is again in the dark, okay, and way off in the distance. He gets out of the truck. He says do you see that rise? About two miles away, that way, way over there. I said yeah. He says start walking. That's where you're going. I said really. He said get going or you're going to miss sunrise.

Jon:

So I leave Harold at the truck and I start walking in the dark. I'm walking, and walking, and walking. I get to the base of this giant sand dune. I'm wearing a 40 pound pack with film tripods and large format cameras. I go up the dune, I make it to the top of the dune. The sun rises, the dunes are orange for as far as the eye can see and I get this incredible shoot After a couple of hours of shooting. And of course, it was the spring, and all the great pictures of the dunes of Monument Valley are in the spring. The wind makes ripples and patterns in the fine sand, and this is not regular sand. This is sand that is almost like talcum powder. It is so soft and so even very hard to walk through and absolutely stunningly beautiful. So I climb this giant dune, I get my shots with the orange dunes, with the wind patterns all over them, and I start walking back.

Jon:

The sun is now coming up and I smell the sage. The sage is heating up from the sun and it's like perfume. And as I'm coming back on the wind, I hear these notes and I'm walking and I'm going. What Is that? The wind, or is that some kind of music that I'm hearing? As I'm walking, I'm hearing. Well, it's kind of like a flute sound. I keep walking off in the distance, three quarters of a mile away, I see a giant boulder. There is Harold with his white hair sitting on the boulder playing the Navajo flute. And at that moment, the smell of the sage, the sound of the Navajo flute and miles of colored sand dunes, and I realized this is the sacred land of the Native Americans. This is the sacred land of the Native.

Chris:

Americans. This has been Creativity to Gigi, with Chris McHale featuring photographer and soul explorer John Ordner. John's breathtaking books are available on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold. Thank you for listening and stay curious. The mystery of creativity continues.

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