( applause )
Good evening.
Working for the National Geographic
has been the best experience that I can imagine.
It’s hard to translate that into emotion
to something other people can understand.
When I was growing up, I was not the guy
that people would have expected
to have the career of his dreams.
First, I was born in Hays, Kansas.
Which is not the intersection of art, culture, and science.
( audience laughter )
And on top of that
school was really difficult.
Not just hard, but I was dyslexic.
And I had a hard time reading, writing,
anything that had to do with school, except for art,
was difficult for me.
And I have to think back to a family trip
in 1975, in Grand Lake, Colorado.
I took my parents’ camera, I ran down to the lake
and I shot a picture of a sailboat.
But for me it’s ironic that I am essentially doing something
to fill my time, that I was hooked.
So I was lucky. I got to work at Kansas State
at this great newspaper, The Collegian.
And then I got an internship atThe Philadelphia Inquirer.
So, I did a story about Greg Tutt, a boxer
who trained in Joe Frazier’s gym and worked really hard.
I admired his dedication and his hard work.
I remember the article really well.
It ran in the Sunday magazine.
It was written by a well-known writer, Steve Lopez.
And the opening line of the story was
“Greg Tutt is walking through a neighborhood
that’s going nowhere and taking everybody with it.”
And, to me, you know I had to
in a sense compete on the same page
as people who could write like that.
So, it was very important to me to work as hard as I could
to deserve a place at that table.
And working in Philadelphia led me
to another amazing opportunity.
I’d always wanted to work forSports Illustrated.
I’d done a lot of my college work in sports.
A guy named Buzz Bissinger
who was a writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer
won a Pulitzer, and I had heard that
he was leaving the newspaper to go do a book
about high school football in Texas.
And I went up and showed him the work and I said, you know
“You should hire me to go do that work for you.”
And it worked out.
I moved to Odessa, Texas for a while and
shot pictures for a book,Friday Night Lights,
which is, you know, turned into the TV show and the movie
and all these things.
We were looking at race, at the boom-bust cycle of oil,
parents living through their kids.
This is the quarterback of the team, Mike Winchell
who is always kind of a loner
because of all the pressure on him.
And this is still one of my favorite pictures.
Not just from that book but you know
I really enjoyed this picture.
They had 5:30 AM call for football
five days a week, double practices.
They worked harder than most people do.
And then they lost.
They lost to Midland Lee, their archrivals,
which for me, a lot of my sports photography
I enjoy the winning and the losing photos.
I like action pictures, but I was kind of
always more drawn to the emotion in the pictures.
But also there is a serious side to some of the work I was doing.
I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
and I was getting ready to leave the country on the 12th
for a trip to Thailand for…
for a story for the magazine.
And, you know, I got a call from my fiancée
and she said, “a plane hit the World Trade Center.”
And I looked at the building, and I could–
I actually had a view of that.
So I ran to the roof of my building.
I got to the roof at like, 8:58 or so.
And, you know, I was just composing the picture
with the smoke going downtown.
These are…
pictures I shot that ran inTIMEmagazine.
I am very conflicted about these images
but it is a very big part of my career.
I’m glad that I did my job correctly.
This horrible situation, it’s a horrible thing to watch.
But I do realize they’re important pictures
and I’m happy that I’ve done work
that is now in history books.
And… I had some pictures in a book about war photography
and exhibited at the Corcoran, there’s a film and there’s a…
military historian talking about my pictures and he said
and I hadn’t thought about it this way at all, he said that
“it’s very rare that you have a picture of a war starting.”
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