Alexander Tsiaras

Alexander Tsiaras is an American photographer, entrepreneur, technology innovator, and journalist whose work has appeared on the cover of over 150 magazines. He is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of TheVisualMD and StoryMD.

Tsiaras’ awards include the World Press Photo of the Year, Webby Award, and the Satava Award for his work on improving medicine through advanced technology, and his work has been featured on the covers of Time, the New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Life magazine, and the London Sunday Times Magazine.

Some of his most notable publications include From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, Architecture and Design of Man and Woman, and the InVision Guides to Healthy Heart, Sexual Health and Life Blood. His latest releases include Conception to Birth and TheVisualMD Wellness Program, A Scientific Approach to Losing Weight, Preventing Illness and Reversing Chronic Diseases.

Early life and career

The son of Greek immigrants who emigrated via Ellis Island to the US after the conclusion of the Second World War, Tsiaras was raised on the stories of his parents’ homeland. His father would seasonally bring the goats south from Northern Macedonia to a small village near Mount Olympus where he met Tsiaras’ mother.

At the age of 19, Tsiaras travelled to his parents' villages in rural Greece to spend a year herding goats. It was here that he was exposed to the extraordinary centuries-old funeral and exhumation rituals that inspired him to record the local practices and independently kickstart his journalism career. Tsiaras co-authored his first book, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton University Press), in 1982. "Greeks don't celebrate life, they celebrate death," according to Tsiaras. "We don't celebrate birthdays, we celebrate name days, based on the deaths of saints. In these remote Greek villages, they believe that the soul's transcendence to heaven is directly related to the decomposition of the flesh: the more flesh on the bones exposed at the time of the exhumation, the more sins; the less flesh, the less sins," he added.

1980s In the early 1980s, Tsiaras’ work in Greece attracted the attention of the German/US monthly magazine, Geo, who assigned him to travel to his parents' villages to document them through photography. These works, “My Father's Greece”, were published in Geo in 1982. Geo later collaborated with Tsiaras to help them launch as an international presence using his visual prowess.

Tsiaras’ next move was to teach himself mathematics and physics, and he used this knowledge to start developing his own lenses, including one for a microscope that was used to photograph the first images of human eggs in an in vitro fertilization program. Another lens, designed for use with an endoscope, is capable of photographing a fetus from outside the amniotic sac. Images developed using this lens became cover stories for Life Magazine.