LITMIR.BIZ

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across the scanner would send me bounding off into the darkness.

      I lived for hard news and loved the lawless feeling of hurtling down unlit country roads at batshit speeds, rolling up at a scene amid flashing cop lights and blaring sirens. Nikon in hand, it felt like the rules did not apply.

      After eighteen months at the factory, I hadn’t managed to save more than a week of take-home pay. All the same, it was a mercy the day I quit and returned to school. I had learned one thing for certain: it would take something other than honest labor to make my way in the world. My first day back on campus, I headed straight to the college paper’s newsroom.

      The paper published five days a week and offered no wage, just ten dollars per photo published, plus darkroom access and all the film you could steal. I was hooked. For two years those cinderblock newsroom walls were home, and the band of writers, photographers, and crackpots became my family, my fraternity, my world. I knew I should be going to my classes, but I spent nearly all my time shooting pictures instead. Hell, this was a chance to do the job that I was studying for anyway. I missed most of my lectures and barely skimmed the textbooks, doing just enough work to avoid getting booted off campus.

      Word got around that one of the suburban daily newspapers was looking for a lab tech, someone to sit in the darkroom processing film, making prints, and breathing poison, all for ten bucks an hour. I needed the money more than the sleep, so I jumped at the chance. When a full-time staff shooting job opened up six months later, my pursuit of higher learning reached its long-overdue conclusion.

      I happily worked fifty and sixty hours a week for the princely sum of $15,000 a year. I was getting paid to take pictures. Truth be told, I’d have paid them, just to get my foot in the door. I started my first day on the job with dreams of journalistic glory. War, famine, and mayhem all sounded like one big adventure—even if our coverage area was limited to the cosseted and prosperous suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. There, at least, strict zoning covenants held war, famine, and anarchy largely at bay.

      Some days, it felt like every photograph held a flattering mirror up to our community: a boy with his prize cow, the winning touchdown, the Fourth of July parade. Hard news—the stuff I was drawn to—was a darker matter. I continued trawling the police scanners in hope of finding some car wreck or house fire to get the adrenaline pumping. At the sound of the radio’s emergency tones, I’d scribble down the address, then sprint toward the parking lot, cameras clattering, eyes agleam at the prospect of some fresh mayhem. Getting manhandled by cops, firefighters, or angry family members was sometimes part of the deal, and made the story’s beer-fueled retelling after work all the better. When I look back on it, the act of eagerly photographing some poor soul’s mangled car or burning home feels like monetizing the misfortune of others. If you think too hard about my small corner of the news business, it starts to sound like schadenfreude dressed up in a nice suit.

      At the time, though, I didn’t dwell too much on journalistic ethics or moral questions. I was too busy plotting to head overseas and find myself an affordable and picturesque war, then start taking some real pictures. Even in the pre-9/11 world of the 1980s, dozens of bushfire conflicts and civil wars scorched various corners of the Third World. I devoured stories and images created by my heroes, the war photographers who covered conflicts from Northern Ireland to East Timor, the Western Sahara to South Africa. They recorded the worst that humanity had on offer, and made it look compelling, artistic—even beautiful.

      I got my chance, but only after I was canned from my day job. I’d like to say it was because my creative flame burned too brightly, or my artistic passions ran too wild. But the sad truth was that, in our small but professional newsroom, I behaved like a drunken frat boy at Mardi Gras. I crossed the paper’s editor one time too many, and he wearily called me into his office. He conceded that I was a not-untalented photographer who one day, sometime in the distant future, might grow up to become a decent employee. Then he sent me packing. I cleaned out my locker, and crammed all the film and unattended equipment I could into my little hatchback. The rear axle was almost dragging under the weight of pilfered photo gear when I peeled rubber out of the parking lot one last time.

      Voters’ shadows on election day, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1987

      CHAPTER 3

      ZONES OF CONFLICT

      At the time, thankfully, Washington, DC, offered an abundance of freelance photography work, so only briefly did I have to subsist on unemployment checks, cheap beer, and self-pity.

      I read about presidential elections scheduled in Haiti after dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s abrupt retirement to the French Riviera. Along with the promise of political mayhem and potential bloodshed, all within a cheap two-hour plane ride of Miami, there was a firm date for the events. Of course, I had no business in Haiti: no assignment, no prospective client, not even a valid press pass. I was just one more self-styled, self-appointed photojournalist with the zealous conviction that the world needed to see events through my eyes, my lens. I had a little room left on my credit cards, so I headed to the airport with a bag stuffed with forty rolls of Kodachrome, some cameras and lenses, and, looking back, a black hole where my soul was supposed to be.

      Church bells rang as the sun rose on election day, November 29, 1987. Hundreds of men and women had lined up before dawn to cast their ballots in Haiti’s first free elections in thirty years. The mood seemed determined and solemn. For a fleeting moment, I imagined I could capture the bravery and dignity of these people, who’d shrugged off a brutal dictatorship and now clung to hopes and dreams of a less blighted future.

      But what the hell did I know? Before the sun had cleared the central cathedral’s towers, gunfire echoed through the city. I was riding in some reporter’s rented Toyota, crammed into the middle back seat between a couple other photographers. We were looking for the source of the shooting when an identical Toyota with government plates sped toward us. Just as it passed, four loud shots rang out and the three of us instinctively cowered, trying to duck into the same tiny space. The gunmen either had truly awful aim or, more likely, simply wanted to scare the hell out of a carload of blancs. The car sped down a side street and emerged a few blocks up the hill. We saw the shadow of a machine gun appear out the car window as they closed in on the line of voters outside a polling station. We watched as people scattered and bodies fell in the seconds before the sound of shots reached us.

      We drove up and shot them, too, photographing the wounded and the terrified as they huddled behind church walls. We heard sustained gunfire not far away, and set off to follow that sirens’ call. We sped all the way to Ecole Nationale Argentine Bellegarde, a small school that for this one day served as a polling station. It was more than three decades ago, but I can still see soldiers milling around the small courtyard, and the scattered fire trucks and ambulances. A man lay crumpled in the dust, blood running freely from a machete wound slashed deep into his skull. Did he turn over and reach up, or am I just imagining that now? I can still hear myself yelling—in English, of course—for someone to get a fucking ambulance.

      There were bodies everywhere. I tried to keep track of how many, but I kept losing count. A young girl was curled up in a corner, head resting in her arms over a basket, almost like she was sleeping. A soldier walked past with a machine gun in one hand, and with the other picked her up by her hair. Her face was missing, shot away. In a large, open-air classroom, the dead lay scattered across the floor. There was so much blood.

      This was everything I’d come for: the real deal. But my hands were shaky and my head buzzed with static. The ambulances drove off, and soon the policemen and troops began to drift away. A strange quiet settled over the school. My crew was ready to head back, and maybe I had seen enough for one day, too. We left minutes before another wave of gunmen arrived to spray the courtyard with small arms fire, killing one cameraman and wounding several others.

      For a day or two, we stood at the center of the world’s attention. I was still young enough and dumb enough to believe we were going to shove this barbarism, this unreasoning violence, right in the world’s face. The

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