That evening I pleaded with the security guards at the perimeter of the Casa Rosada for access, explaining that my entire career and future as a photojournalist depended on their allowing me onto the set. “I will be famous someday,” I told them, “if you just let me in.”
I must have looked sufficiently pathetic, because the guard smiled and cracked open the gate just enough to let me sneak through. I walked over to the press riser, about three hundred yards from the balcony where Madonna was due to appear, climbed up the stairs, raised my tiny little Nikon FG with a 50mm lens that my father had given me years before, and peered through the viewfinder. The balcony was nothing more than a microscopic speck.
I lowered my camera and just stood there, looking out at the balcony in the distance, convinced my career was over before it had even begun. And then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Hey, kid. Give me your camera body.”
I had no idea what this stranger was talking about. I stared at him blankly.
“Take your lens off your camera,” he said, “and give me your camera.”
I did as instructed. He latched my minuscule camera onto a heavy 500mm lens—I hadn’t even known that all Nikon bodies could be used with all Nikon lenses—and said, “OK, now look.”
I squealed. Madonna was right there, huge in my frame. Everyone on the riser paused to look at me and rolled their eyes.
My image of Madonna at the Casa Rosada made the front page of the newspaper that morning, and I got a job at the paper, where I was paid $10 a picture.
While I was working for the Herald, I went to see an exhibition of Sebasti?o Salgado’s work: enormous images of impoverished workers around the world who toiled under harrowing conditions. The photos were an enigma to me: How had he captured his subjects’ dignity?
Until I saw Salgado’s exhibition, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a street photographer or a news photographer or whether I could make it as a photographer at all. But when I entered the exhibition space, I was so overcome by his images—the passion, the details, the texture—that I decided to devote myself to photojournalism and documentary photography. Something I had perceived until that moment as a simple means of capturing pretty scenes became something altogether different: It was a way to tell a story. It was the marriage of travel and foreign cultures and curiosity and photography. It was photojournalism.
Until that exhibit I hadn’t quite known what that was or could be. I hadn’t thought of photography as both art and a kind of journalism. I hadn’t known that my hobby could be my life. I knew then that I wanted to tell people’s stories through photos; to do justice to their humanity, as Salgado had done; to provoke the kind of empathy for the subjects that I was feeling in that moment. I doubted I would ever be able to capture such pain and beauty in a single frame, but I was impassioned. I walked through the exhibition and cried.
I never felt the uncertainty that typically plagues people in their twenties. I was lucky enough to discover something that made me happy and ambitious at an age when I couldn’t conceive of fear or failure, when I had very little to lose. But when I began working for the Herald, Miguel gave me possibly the best advice I ever got in my career.
“Stay in Latin America, learn photography, and make all your professional mistakes in Argentina,” he said, “because if you make one mistake in New York, no one will give you a second chance.”
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WHEN WE FINALLY RETURNED to the States, in 1996, I was ready. I carried my mediocre clips from the Buenos Aires Herald around to the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and the Associated Press (AP), marching into photo editors’ offices with groundless confidence that they should hire me. I was an overzealous twenty-two-year-old, dressed in 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.