It’s been a great week — with my work with Human Rights Watch off the ground and getting some news images in print — and, on this Friday the 13th, I can’t help but think about good luck. I really do feel like good luck has come my way recently, and that my life and work are starting to blend in special, unexpected ways — ways that I have wanted, but ways that did not happen when I was more desperate, more anxious, trying harder to make something happen that I was not yet ready to handle.
What the heck am I talking about?
What I’m talking about is that when I moved to Argentina more than four years ago I had big dreams about learning Spanish and traveling all over South America and making great images and telling even greater stories. But that didn’t happen. For one thing, learning Spanish — I mean really learning to live with the stuff — has proved far more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have have ever imagined. For another thing, I got focused a lot more on the “simple” aspects of daily living that I had never focused on so well in the United States.
BEFORE: Christmas Eve in Villa 31 -- when being an outsider gave me an in.
In short, you could say I moved to Buenos Aires to escape the more mundane aspects of life that I wasn’t handling too well back in the USA and, very much to my surprise, what has happened is that I have come to cherish the mundane more than anything else. Family. Friends. Living in the moment. Taking care of body and mind.
Then this Human Rights Watch gig seems to fall in my lap, and that’s really exciting. But what’s particularly nice I don’t feel manic excited or super lucky or all revved up, like I’ve won the lottery or something. I just feel mellow lucky and, more than anything, I feel really lucky that it was the circuitous, couldn’t-have-predicted-that route that has brought me here. I did not get here, as so many successful people proclaim, by keeping my eye clearly on the prize. How the hell could I? I didn’t know what the prize was. I was stumbling and I still am, but this week the stumbling feels like it has a bit more grace to it.
I am writing all this by way of sharing that it is not my photography skills nor my desire to work with multimedia nor my great business skills that created this opportunity with Human Rights Watch. What really allowed me to get this job is the fact that I live in Buenos Aires, that I learned the language and that, more than anything, I can see the cultural as both an insider and an outsider. This is not only allows me to get access to Continue reading “Taking Culture, Not Pictures”
