It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (5 page)

The more I traveled, the more I craved a life of travel. I could wake up on any given morning and go to almost any destination; the countries of Europe were accessible by train and inaccessible only because of my own inhibitions or fear. This was such an unfamiliar luxury to me, an American who grew up on an isolated continent. I imagined a life overseas—as a diplomat, maybe, or a translator.

But one day as I was leaving the darkroom with a stack of prints, an Italian man approached and asked to see them. After flipping through them for a few minutes, he offered to turn them into a line of postcards. I was so excited that I happily handed them over without signing a thing. They were sold in Rimini, an Italian resort near Bologna, but I never saw a dime. It was the first time I realized photos could be published and seen by hundreds of people, maybe more.

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York City for the summer and waited tables at night at Poppolini’s restaurant in Greenwich Village. During the day I got an internship assisting a fashion photographer who shot for catalogues. I hated it. It was too predictable. So once I’d made about $4,000 from waitressing, I moved to Buenos Aires to learn Spanish and to travel around South America, as I had in Europe. Taking pictures became a way for me to travel with a purpose.

I rented a room from an arrogant Argentinean man in his late twenties who spent a good portion of his time looking in the mirror, getting ready to go out partying, or sleeping off his hangover. To support myself, I taught English at Andersen Consulting for $18 an hour. It afforded me free afternoons, when I could wander through the alleys of the city, photographing tango dancers on narrow streets or ancient men in smoke-filled cafés. I often ended up at the Plaza de Mayo, where every Thursday Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Argentinean mothers, marched in protest of their children’s disappearances during Argentina’s Dirty War.

When I started photographing the mothers, I didn’t know what ingredients produced a powerful photograph. No one had taught me about composition, or how to read light. I knew that the mothers’ expressions spoke to me, but I wasn’t sure how to capture the scene I was experiencing. Each Thursday I went back to the plaza, unsatisfied with the images I had composed the week before. I sensed I was too removed from the women, so I got a little closer to them as they circled the plaza. I tried to frame their pain and unresolved sadness in my viewfinder. Sometimes their expressions were shielded by dark shadows on their faces, because they were in the wrong place in relation to the sunlight. Sometimes I was simply too tentative and insecure to get close enough to them. Sometimes I missed a perfect moment, unsure of my instincts. I was untrained, but I began to teach myself, studying photography in books and newspapers, to see how powerful scenes could make a tired old story new again. I kept going back to try.

A month after I arrived in Argentina, my boyfriend, Miguel, a writer ten years my senior, joined me in Buenos Aires. Miguel and I rented a room for $500 a month, and for little, we received little. The bathroom was across a cement courtyard. When a cold rain descended on the city in the winter, we had to run from the nest of our bedroom into the brisk evening air, down a set of wet stairs, and around the corner to the tiny toilet. I all but stopped drinking water during the day.

Every few weeks I traveled around Latin America to photograph. I went from seaside villages in Uruguay to Pablo Neruda’s houses along the Chilean coast to Machu Picchu in Peru; I photographed volcanoes, mountains, lakes, plush green fields, towns propped on hillsides, craft fairs, fish markets; I took long bus journeys around hairpin turns marked by crosses where others had fallen and died, and searched for beautiful light at dawn and dusk. My quest was simple: to travel and photograph everything I could with what little I had.

Miguel had recently completed a master’s degree in journalism. We were both curious and cared deeply about what was happening in the world; it was our bond. But Miguel was a very private man. In me he recognized an extrovert, someone who loved to meet people and ask questions. He suggested I go to the local English daily newspaper, the
Buenos Aires Herald,
to see if I could freelance for them as a photojournalist. I had no experience in newspaper photography, but I was convinced they should offer me work because of my determination. The first time I approached the two editors in the photo department—two middle-aged men who smoked cigarettes all day while pulling pictures off the AP wire—they told me to come back after learning to speak the language. I thought I was already fluent, so I went away, brushed up on my Spanish, and went back to the paper a few weeks later.

Annoyed by my persistence, they finally gave me work—assignments I was convinced were fabricated just to keep me out of their hair. They’d write down the address of some location outside Buenos Aires, and I would have to find my way there, take a photo, and return and show them. None of these ever got published.

One day they told me that Madonna was filming the movie
Evita
that night at the Casa Rosada, the president’s house in the city’s main square. I already knew that, because I’d read in the paper that she was staying in a hotel suite for $2,500 a night and had set up her own gym in the room. I’d thought about her personal gym all morning as I went for a jog in tired shoes and sidestepped piles of dog shit.

The photo editors made me a proposal: If I could sneak onto the set of
Evita
and get a photo of Madonna filming, they would offer me a job.

That evening I pleaded with the security guards at the perimeter of the Casa Rosada for access, explaining that my entire career and future as a photojournalist depended on their allowing me onto the set. “I will be famous someday,” I told them, “if you just let me in.”

I must have looked sufficiently pathetic, because the guard smiled and cracked open the gate just enough to let me sneak through. I walked over to the press riser, about three hundred yards from the balcony where Madonna was due to appear, climbed up the stairs, raised my tiny little Nikon FG with a 50mm lens that my father had given me years before, and peered through the viewfinder. The balcony was nothing more than a microscopic speck.

I lowered my camera and just stood there, looking out at the balcony in the distance, convinced my career was over before it had even begun. And then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Hey, kid. Give me your camera body.”

I had no idea what this stranger was talking about. I stared at him blankly.

“Take your lens off your camera,” he said, “and give me your camera.”

I did as instructed. He latched my minuscule camera onto a heavy 500mm lens—I hadn’t even known that all Nikon bodies could be used with all Nikon lenses—and said, “OK, now look.”

I squealed. Madonna was right there, huge in my frame. Everyone on the riser paused to look at me and rolled their eyes.

My image of Madonna at the Casa Rosada made the front page of the newspaper that morning, and I got a job at the paper, where I was paid $10 a picture.

While I was working for the
Herald
, I went to see an exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s work: enormous images of impoverished workers around the world who toiled under harrowing conditions. The photos were an enigma to me: How had he captured his subjects’ dignity?

Until I saw Salgado’s exhibition, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a street photographer or a news photographer or whether I could make it as a photographer at all. But when I entered the exhibition space, I was so overcome by his images—the passion, the details, the texture—that I decided to devote myself to photojournalism and documentary photography. Something I had perceived until that moment as a simple means of capturing pretty scenes became something altogether different: It was a way to tell a story. It was the marriage of travel and foreign cultures and curiosity and photography. It was photojournalism.

Until that exhibit I hadn’t quite known what that was or could be. I hadn’t thought of photography as both art
and
a kind of journalism. I hadn’t known that my hobby could be my life. I knew then that I wanted to tell people’s stories through photos; to do justice to their humanity, as Salgado had done; to provoke the kind of empathy for the subjects that I was feeling in that moment. I doubted I would ever be able to capture such pain and beauty in a single frame, but I was impassioned. I walked through the exhibition and cried.

I never felt the uncertainty that typically plagues people in their twenties. I was lucky enough to discover something that made me happy and ambitious at an age when I couldn’t conceive of fear or failure, when I had very little to lose. But when I began working for the
Herald
, Miguel gave me possibly the best advice I ever got in my career.

“Stay in Latin America, learn photography, and make all your professional mistakes in Argentina,” he said, “because if you make one mistake in New York, no one will give you a second chance.”

 • • • 

W
HEN WE FINALLY RETURNED
to the States, in 1996, I was ready. I carried my mediocre clips from the
Buenos Aires Herald
around to the
New York Post
, the
New York Daily News
, and the Associated Press (AP), marching into photo editors’ offices with groundless confidence that they should hire me. I was an overzealous twenty-two-year-old, dressed in stylish jeans, a crisp button-down shirt, and black rubber-soled platform shoes. (At five foot one, I hated flat shoes.) The newspapers put me on their “stringers” list, which they consulted when they needed to call a photographer for an assignment. No photographer on that list would ever say no to an assignment, even if it meant ditching a romantic dinner, or waking up at 5 a.m. to stand outside a courthouse on a freezing New York morning for a perp walk, or taking lame photographs of a kid playing in a leaking fire hydrant on a hot summer’s day. In the early days the assignments were grim, but I took them—happily.

The AP gave me steady work almost immediately. During my years there I covered protests, press conferences, city hall, accidents. I shot Monica Lewinsky making one of her first public appearances, on the
Today
show. I photographed people watching the big screens in Times Square as the Dow Jones soared past 10,000. I covered the Yankees’ ticker tape parade, which seemed like an annual event, because the Yankees always won the World Series. I never came back empty-handed or without a compelling image. Wire services, like the AP or Reuters, supplied news articles and photographs to newspapers, magazines, and television. They had freelance photographers in every country around the world and didn’t accept excuses.

My mentor was an AP staff photographer named Bebeto, who worked as an editor on weekends. He called me almost every Saturday morning for three years: “You ready?” he would say in his slight Jamaican lilt. Bebeto was in his midforties and towered over me. He was intensely focused, but when he was unguarded, laughter would rush out of him like a lightly rumbling drum. He decided early on that he was going to take me under his wing and school me in photography. When I returned to the fifth floor of the AP offices with film canisters in hand, he stood over the rolls of negatives with a magnifying eyepiece called a loupe and went over each image with me, frame by frame, on multiple negative strips of thirty-six images per roll. He articulated what I had been trying to intuit. He taught me how to read light. He taught me the power of the sun at a low angle in the sky just after sunrise or before sunset to illuminate the world in that golden, magical way with long, dancing shadows. He talked of how a shaft of light fell onto a street corner in between buildings. He explained how to enter a room and look for the light by a window, or from a door slightly ajar. He taught me about composition. He showed me how to fill the frame of my viewfinder with the subject and important contextual information—something that lent the image a sense of place.

More than anything, he taught me the art of patience. Cameras introduce tension. People are aware of the power of a camera, and this instinctively makes most subjects uncomfortable and stiff. But Bebeto taught me to linger in a place long enough, without photographing, so that people grew comfortable with me and the camera’s presence. A perfect photograph is almost impossible; a good one is hard enough. Sometimes the light is there, but the subject is in the wrong place, and the composition doesn’t work. Sometimes the light is perfect, but the subject is uncomfortable, and his awkwardness shows. I learned how difficult it is to put all the elements in place.

While I was working, all my faculties were attuned to the scene in front of me. Everything else in the world, in my life, in my mind, fell away. He taught me to stand on a street corner or in a room for an hour—or two or three—waiting for that great epiphany of a moment, the wondrous combination of subject, light, and composition. And something else: the inexplicable magic that made the image dive right into your heart.

As Bebeto reviewed my work, I learned. He looked over the negatives, image by image, drawing a giant red, waxy X over the frames he thought were below average. I worked to meet his standards.

Seven days a week I ran around New York with a pager and a cell phone and waited for the photo desk to call with an assignment. In my downtime I worked at Craig Taylor, a high-end shirt company, running errands and stuffing envelopes. I had barely $75 in the bank on a good week, scraped by for rent, and scrounged to pay the bills for the phone and pager—my two most crucial possessions, aside from my cameras. Photography required thousands of dollars in initial investment to amass the proper equipment: two professional camera bodies, then $1,500 each (it was predigital); fast professional lenses with an aperture of 2.8, which ran from $300 to $2,500; a long zoom lens, about $2,000; a flash, $200; and a Domke camera bag, $100. I needed about $10,000 in total. I spent days walking around B&H and Adorama camera stores, dreaming of the gear I would purchase one day when I had money.