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

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