It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I were alone.
    It was around that time, when I was thirteen, on one of my rare weekend visits to his house, that my father gave me my first camera. It was a Nikon FG, which had been given to him by a client. The gift happened by chance: I saw it, I asked about it, and he casually handed it over. I was fascinated by the science of the camera, the way light and the shutter could freeze a moment in time. I taught myself the basics from an old “how to photograph in black-and-white” manual with an Ansel Adams picture of Yosemite National Park on the cover. With rolls of black-and-white film, long exposures, and no tripod, I sat on the roof and tried to shoot the moon. I was too shy to turn my camera on people, so I photographed flowers, cemeteries, peopleless landscapes. One day a friend of my mother’s, a professional photographer, invited me to her darkroom and taught me how to develop and print film. I watched with wonder as the still lifes of tulips and tombstones twinkled onto the page. It was like magic.
      
    Bruce and Phillip.
    I photographed obsessively, continuing when I went off to the University of Wisconsin−Madison, where I majored in international relations. Still, I never dreamed of making photography a career. I thought photographers were flaky, trust-fund kids without ambition, and I didn’t want to be one of those people.
    Then I spent a year abroad, studying economics and political science at the University of Bologna. Free from the academic and social demands of Wisconsin, I embraced street photography. Between lectures I photographed Bologna’s arches and ancient nooks with my Nikon. During holiday breaks, I teamed up with new, instantly intimate friends, the kind who typified a college year abroad, and went backpacking around Europe, photographing the ruddy cheeks of Prague and the nude thermal baths of Budapest, the coast of Spain and the crowded streets of Sicily. I soaked up the architecture and the art I had read about my entire life, went to museums and photo exhibitions. I saw a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, from when he first began photographing until his death, and for hours I sat and studied his composition and use of light. I was inspired to photograph more.
    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