At thirteen years old, Alex Atack visited the Getty Museum and encountered an exhibition of photographs by James Nachtwey from Afghanistan (EP 15).
The photographs were wall-to-wall. War, suffering, the human cost of conflict — rendered with the precision and intentionality of someone who believed photography was not just documentation but storytelling. Nachtwey's work did not simply record what happened. It made the viewer understand what it meant to be there.
Alex was thirteen. He had grown up in the Dubai expat bubble — a world of comfort and distance from the region that surrounded it. He had no framework for what he was seeing. But he understood, immediately, that photography could do something he had not previously considered.
"You can use photography to tell stories."
The sentence is simple. The shift it describes is not. Before the Getty, photography was images. After the Getty, photography was a language — a way of making invisible people visible, of collapsing the distance between a viewer in a museum and a person in a war zone.
Everything. The photojournalism. The mentorship under Guy Martin. The career in visual storytelling. The eventual transition to audio — which Alex would later describe as an even more intimate medium than photography. The through-line from the Getty Museum to Kerning Cultures is direct: the belief that stories, told with care and specificity, can change how people see each other.
Origin stories in creative careers are often retrospective constructions — neat narratives imposed on messy processes. Alex's Getty Museum encounter has the quality of something real: specific enough (Nachtwey, Afghanistan, wall-to-wall), young enough (thirteen), and consequential enough (it redirected his life) to function as a genuine turning point rather than a convenient anecdote.