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.
Sometime around my twenty-fifth birthday, the last of my three sisters got married, and I had an epiphany. My father and Bruce had given each of my sisters $15,000 to spend toward their wedding costs. Miguel and I had broken up when we moved back to New York, and I knew I would never get married in my twenties; in fact, I wasn’t sure I would ever love anything as much as photography. So I made my father and Bruce a proposition: “If you advance me my wedding money now, I can use it to invest in my career, and I will one day have enough money to fund my own wedding.” They agreed. I bought new cameras and lenses and put the rest of the money in the bank.
? ? ?
AFTER LESS THAN A YEAR back in New York, I was desperate to travel and looked to Latin America once again. One country intrigued me most, perhaps because it was off-limits: Cuba. In 1997, Communist Cuba was embargoed, and Americans rarely visited. Being a foreign journalist in Cuba was also risky; the government monitored foreigners they suspected would publish negative stories about the ailing Communist system. I didn’t know anyone who had been there; at the time I didn’t know one foreign correspondent and knew few other journalists. But I was bursting with curiosity and the daring of youth. I was fascinated by the steady rise of capitalism in such a steadfastly Communist country.