I turned off half the lights at the United Nations

This week I flew to New York to document my friend Lisa Kristine at the United Nations.

Not watch.

Document.

I had a camera in my hands and a front row seat to something I’ll never forget.

The morning started early. I was at the UN before most of the staff, setting up, trying to figure out how to make a fluorescent-lit conference room look like it deserved the woman who was about to speak in it.

Lisa’s daughter was there volunteering.

We grabbed coffee and she told me what it felt like growing up with a mother whose camera had been inside illegal gold mines and brick kilns and fishing villages where children are enslaved. What it meant to her to be here, at the United Nations, watching her mom take this stage.

That conversation hit me harder than I expected.

When Lisa arrived, we walked the room together. The light was wrong. Flat. Institutional. The kind of light that makes everyone look like they’re giving a deposition.

So I started turning off lights.

Half the room went dark. The UN staff looked at me like I’d lost my mind. But Lisa understood. She’s spent forty years understanding that how you see something changes what you feel about it. Light matters. Shape matters. Perspective matters.

When she took the stage, I was 24 inches away.

I watched diplomats lean in. I watched people who negotiate treaties and broker international agreements go quiet as Lisa talked about a boy named Kofi, five years old, pulling fishing nets at 1AM, thrown into water he couldn’t swim in to untangle lines from submerged trees.

She showed them a photograph of him. Soaking wet. Just rescued. Eyes that had seen things no child should see.

And then she told them: six months later, Kofi was reunited with his parents. The abolitionists taught his family how to recognize traffickers.

One photograph.

One rescue.

One family who learned to protect themselves.

The room was silent.

I’ve filmed CEOs and athletes and celebrities. I’ve been in rooms with people whose faces you’d recognize instantly.

But I’ve never seen a room held like that.

Not by force.

By truth.

Here’s what I realized sitting in that front row:

I thought I understood story. I’ve spent my career teaching it, selling it, building a company around it. But watching Lisa work, watching her show images so unflinching that world leaders can’t look away…

I understood something deeper.

Lisa didn’t become the woman whose photographs hang in the Vatican and wrap the airports at Davos because she’s talented. She’s talented, but that’s not it.

She became that woman because she refused to make her perspective smaller.

When the world said “that’s too heavy,“ she made the images bigger. When institutions ignored her, she found bigger institutions. When people looked away, she put her photographs where they couldn’t.

At eighteen, she left home with a camera and a backpack and didn’t come back for five years. She spent thirty days in silence, the last ten in a cave. She graduated from fashion school and immediately abandoned the industry. She wasn’t trying to save the world, she was trying to find herself.

And what she found was a lens that wouldn’t lie.

For forty years, she’s pointed that lens at humanity, 150 countries, six continents, the most beautiful and most brutal things human beings do to each other.

The Dalai Lama. Pope Francis. Theresa May. Princess Eugenie.

They don’t sit on stages with Lisa because she’s a good photographer.

They sit with her because her perspective is so strong, the world bends to it instead of the other way around.

That’s why we’re making a film about her.

Not about slavery.

Not about humanitarian photography.

About Lisa.

The eighteen-year-old who wandered. The woman who wouldn’t soften her message. The mother whose daughter volunteers at the UN. The friend who let me turn off half the lights because she trusted me to find the right shape.

Muse Originals is producing a feature documentary on Lisa Kristine, and our goal is to bring it to millions by the end of 2026.

The world knows her photographs. They’ve seen her TED talk three million times. They’ve walked past her images at Davos and the Vatican.

But they don’t know her.

They don’t know the journey. The choices. The forty years of refusing to look away.

That’s the story we’re telling. And I got a front row seat to why it matters.

More soon.

• Patrick