Random Happens

It has been brought to my attention, again, that this post is a little confusing. Who is the woman in the picture and why has she been blogged? These are reasonable questions which I will finally answer.

Some of you know that about this time four years ago I had to turn down an offer of internship at a small but very well respected New England newspaper, The Concord Monitor. It was one of the most difficult calls I’ve had to make, but there it was. I couldn’t get a visa, the Monitor had to move on and I’ve been leaving toe nail clippings on hotel room floors ever since.

The last four years have proved to be an adventure nonetheless, and I while I would make the same choices again given the same circumstances, I sometimes find myself wondering what if things had been different. The truth is, however, I’ll never know and it’s too exhausting to speculate.

My job has taken me from Aruba to Amsterdam and from Boston to a beach on Kauai, and after four years it dropped me in Concord, New Hampshire, one place I never expected to end up. This experience just goes to show that what comes around ends up in the morning paper, and that’s where I found the girl in the picture. I spent my afternoon in Concord tending my laundry and a stack of receipts in a truck stop wondering about calling the photo editor. I decided to pass. Instinctively I understood that the experience was different for the Monitor than it was for me. For me it was a singular opportunity and I have always regarded it as such but the photo department at the Monitor has seen 15 interns since then.

I found the perfect opportunity to impose myself the morning I left Concord. At a main street bakery for breakfast I sat with my coffee and the paper and on the first page I turned to was a brief about a presentation that night by former Monitor staffer Andrea Bruce. I read and reread the brief and by the time I stuffed the last of my pain au chocolate into my mouth the wheels had been set in motion. I was going to see the inside of the Monitor building after all.

In addition to being a former Monitor staffer, Bruce is a current staffer at the Washington Post, a three time White House Photographer of the Year, and sometime war correspondent. Bruce presented work from India, Afghanistan and Iraq, some of it was tragic, some of it was breathtaking but all of it reflective of a skilled and intuitive eye. It was a hard reminder for me about what I set out to do six years ago. This, however, is the nature of travel. Travel is random and revelatory.

I sat in the front row transfixed by the images while Bruce stood in the shadows narrating her work. While I was moved by her photos I was also forced to consider how different our travel experiences have been over the past four years and how random it was that there we were in a conference room at the Concord Monitor. No matter how subject I am to schedules and responsibilities while traveling for work there is always that element of randomness that is impossible to plan for.

That night I was reminded why photography is important to me and how that has changed over the past six years. About 30 minutes before the presentation began I introduced my self to Dan Habib, the Monitor’s Photo Editor and he introduced me to Andrea Bruce. The three of us chatted for a few minutes as photographers about work, the industry and making the most of opportunity. A journalism instructor once said to me that I would never save the world as a photographer, and I responded that it might just save me. I am still here, so what’s next?