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.