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What first got you interested in photography?
Back in high school I was hanging out with some guys who rode dirt bikes. I couldn’t afford one. So I would sit on back of the dirt bikes on the way to the track. I would take my Kodak Instamatic camera and start taking pictures. Then I started getting the photos back and I thought they were so cool looking. My dad bought me a basic 35mm camera. I was blown away by that, it was so cool. I got more and more into it. In college I was an English literature major. I wanted to get my Ph.D. But I was doing more and more photography on the side. It eventually came down to decision time…which one did I want to do? I was loving the whole photographic end of it, so I decided to go that route. That’s where I am now.
What did you do to win the Pulitzer Prize and what was it like?
I won the Pulitzer for a series of work on the war in El Salvador in the early 1980s. I put together a 13-picture series and entered it in the Pulitzer competition. It was an overview of what was going on in the war — the death squads, the refugee camps. We did a three-part look at what was going on there. Covering the war was amazing, terrifying, and even horrible at times. I thought I could make a difference. That’s one of the great powers of photography. You can change things. Still photography is very, very, very personal. You can pick it up, look at it, absorb it, let your mind wrap around it, put it down, and pick it up again.
What was your favorite assignment?
I loved being in Iceland, but it was the same for Venezuela or Africa or Papua New Guinea, or Australia. I loved Iceland for its remoteness and beauty. One of the treats of this business is going to parts of the world where there are cultures that are quickly disappearing. Photography allows you to go to places and see these things before they are gone forever.
What’s involved in traveling all over the world shooting pictures?
There’s the mental preparation. With a National Geographic assignment, I get paid to do research. I have to know what’s going on and know something about the area I’m going to photograph. I have to figure out how many rolls of film, how much digital, and of course a laptop. I actually have a checklist...and then I eliminate half of it. I try to travel as light as I can but I’m forced to take a huge amount of stuff. I have to prepare mentally, knowing I have to leave my family for a while. It’s tough; you gotta have a family who supports you.
How does shooting in foreign countries compare to shooting in your hometown?
Foreign cultures can be very different from ours. And then there’s the language issue. The camera is a huge passport into these people’s lives. I’ve been in foreign countries, and I usually try to work with someone who speaks the language. But I don’t always have that luxury. A lot can be done with sign language. I point to the camera and gesture toward the person.
You have to be interested in what those people are doing…be interested in their life. You’re in a small village in India, and a guy is giving haircuts. He’s terribly interesting. A lot of tourists travel in packs, or they have the mental state of being far way from their subjects. Photographers have to be able to walk up to people and establish that relationship with them very quickly so they trust you. It’s amazing to me how many people allow me to do that. You go up to someone in the middle of nowhere and 90 percent of the time people are excited to share what they do. A few people turn you away but the vast majority of people say, “This is me, this is my life.”
What’s your funniest story from your photography career?
I did a story on the B-52 bomber. It takes several months to go through the security clearances and the physiological training, high altitude chambers and all. The Air Force arranged several flights in the bombers, including a special flight that was scheduled to take off at 4 AM, leaving from Texas and flying over Alabama, where a KC 135 tanker would refuel a second B-52 with the sunrise in the background. The Air Force was really working to make this a special flight for me. Four of us were going on this flight. I had to be at the airbase so early. And of course I overslept. I ended up waking up at 7 a.m. I thought, “Holy cow, there’s way too much light for 3 AM!” Well, I made up an excuse that my car broke down — yeah, right. Thankfully, they ended up accommodating me.
What do you like about digital photography?
A few years ago, I would have told you digital is 15 years away. The technology in this business is coming so far so fast. My first real step was a Day in the Life of Africa. Olympus Camera was one of the companies sponsoring us. They provided everyone with a state-of-the-art camera. All of a sudden I saw this as a very viable, realistic technology.
Once I was gone for almost 3 months, staying in a stone-age village in Papua, New Guinea. I had no way to get film shipped back to National Geographic. I just had to hope everything was going well. I had to wait until I came back and then wait a couple more weeks after that for an editor to look at the film.
With digital, the beauty is if you’re photographing on location you can look at images that night or at the time you’re shooting. You can check right when you’re at the assignment and know if you need to continue working on a particular piece or move on to something else. I remember years ago on assignment I had to carry a darkroom with me. Sometimes I had to use a third world hotel bathroom and try to get incredibly precise temperatures for the chemistry and try to make a print. It took me nine hours to transmit one picture because the phone lines were so bad. There were some photographers working in Iraq recently, and they were able to download their photos onto a computer, get an uplink and do it all in almost real time.
What advice would you give to someone who wants a career in photography?
I tell my kids, "There is no way you should do what I do, it’s so tough to make a living. But if you decide to do it, understand this is the most amazing business on the face of the earth. There’s nothing else like it. Make sure you carry a huge passion for it. If you don’t have that passion, its’ not going to be a success because it’s going to show in your work. You’ve got to care enough to devote that time, to wait for that perfect moment, that one picture. And you have to educate yourself as thoroughly as you possibly can."
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