A dead journalist does nobody any good. I'm not going to die with a camera in my hand. That's the last thing I want on my tombstone. "He died doing what he loved." No, you know, dead journalists are no good to anybody, so you have to be smart.
You have to be smart.
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Well, I'm enroute. I'm on I-5 South just passing Eighth Street in National City. Oh good, cool. Okay.
So we should hit the parking lot in, what, about ten minutes or so? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, and then we'll walk across and meet you in front of your house.
Cool. I'm here. Okay, Jim, loo forward to it. Yeah.
Okay, bye-bye. See you soon. Well, I envy you for knowing this town like, you know, it's your own, which it is. Most people say I know Tijuana better than they do, and they've lived here all their life, so yeah.
There's an element of truth there. Well, you know, photographers are always out there, always looking, you know, whereas locals go to work, they come home, you know, go to the market, that's it. Well, it looks like somebody has tried to cut through the fence already. Oh my God.
Look at that. So yeah, they're checking it out. So I'm going to go through there and check it out myself. All right.
Forty years ago, there was no fence here. It was only a little cable smashed into the ground. And God, right out there, Jim, right out there is where this Catholic priest, on Friday, would say mass, give benediction for those are gathered to walk those little foot paths into San Ysidro. Vendors would sell blankets and hot food, maybe shoes.
And the law enforcement was on the ridge. This was a gathering of humanity, people who were hoping to escape the situation of Southern Mexico. And here we have a brand-new fence and a brand-new ladder. I did an assignment down on the border when there were a tremendous number of assaults on migrants by gangs that came from Tijuana.
And there were also these embryonic barrios emerging in the hills and canyons in between suburban towns. So all of those things I became aware of all at once. So I would request assignments at the border. I would just keep moving closer.
I like to be in there where I can hear the people, I can feel them, I can sense them, I can speak with them. So when I'm close, I always explain what I'm doing. "I understand about what you're doing and who you are, and my only reason to be here as a representative of the newspaper is to make you appreciated. I want people in my country to appreciate you because you have a face, you have a background, you have a name.
You have dreams. Will you tell me a little about yourself?" And people appreciate being appreciated.
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To be on the border, it was like theater. It was like something you can't even imagine in a movie, and I was astonished at how many people I saw up against the fence on both sides trying to find their way through.
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The series of pictures I took of immigrants running across San Diego County freeways through eight lanes of high-speed traffic was used by Caltrans in a desperate attempt to cut down on the horrible carnage that was happening.
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As a photojournalist, you have to be there. You have to see it, record history, and I'm so glad I did it because much of that has changed. There aren't thousands of people a day passing through that semi-permeable membrane. It's pretty much sealed now.
And, of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is what's pushing people out of their failed countries.
Speaking in Foreign Language
Remember me?
Foreign Language
Okay.
Speaking in Foreign Language
Yeah,
Speaking in Foreign Language
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaking in Foreign Language
Laughter
I purchased my first 35-millimeter cameras in Vietnam, and I beat the draft by joining the army. So I volunteered to be an infantry officer, and it was quite an experience. It was all confusion. I mean, there were jungles.
There were mountains. There were rivers, canyons, defoliated areas. So what I learned was I had to concentrate on what mattered. I had to find the signs of the enemy.
I had to cover my tracks. I had to know where I was going at all times with a compass and a radio. That's what you do in photography. You organize confusion.
Photojournalism is going anywhere and finding what really matters, what tells the story, the essence of what's happening, but the magic about shooting a camera in Vietnam was everyone I shot lived forever.
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My career advanced in the old-fashioned traditional way from the hometown newspaper, the Vista Press, to the Oceanside Blade Tribune a little bit bigger, and then I went to the San Diego Union and I had pretty much the whole county. But when I went to Los Angeles Times, the world was my beat.
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Well, I was with the San Diego Union Tribune in 1980 when the editors came to me and said, "We'd like you to go to Central America and photograph post-revolutionary Nicaragua and the current civil war in El Salvador and Guatemala." And the theme of that entire three-month photo essay was Revolution on Our Doorstep.
Screaming
I saw dead bodies all over the place. Took me into the jungles, learning how to work with the police and the army. So I had to learn my skills in Spanish. I had to improve them.
I had to learn how to spend money and stay within budget. I had to learn how to try to get these images back to the newspaper. So nothing you can learn in school in that regard.
Speaking in Foreign Language
When I'm working in Mexico or Latin America, I'm very comfortable. I'm not a policeman. I'm not, you know. However, in Afghanistan and Iraq and in some parts of Africa, I would hire what's called a fixer, and a fixer is somebody who knows politics, knows how to drive, knows the terrain and, in Afghanistan and Iraq, knows how to shoot.
So that's how you diminish the danger because the danger, like I learned in Vietnam, is right there, but you did not expect it.
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When I was in Iraq, I was approached by somebody in a restaurant that was twirling a grenade on the table, which was a signal just to vacate the premises. So, yeah, the danger was all around me all the time. I was very emotionally fatigued.
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It bothered me at first to see dead bodies, to see injured people, to see suffering. Then I learned that, you know, I can hide behind the camera only so long before I can't see through the viewfinder because tears are coming down my eyes, but if I couldn't stand to do that, I would do something else. I shouldn't do it. It's not for everybody.
The goal here is to teach viewers, this is what happened behind the scenes. The struggle of people in failing countries.
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So I take it as my responsibility, and I'm not numb to it, but I can tell you, I'm surprised how much ugliness I can look at.
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In the year 2000, the editors of the Los Angeles Times brought to my attention that there was this phenomenon of children from Central America riding freight trains through Mexico to find their mothers in the United States.
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So this was an extraordinary new and underreported phenomenon of migration and an assignment that changed my career. The first task was to find a child under the age of 18 who had ridden the freight trains through Mexico, and that's when I found Enrique in Nuevo Laredo in Northern Mexico on the Texas border. And Enrique told me that, you know, his grandmother, who raised him in the absence of his mother, gave him all the money that she had, $17, which he used to jump on a bus and ride to the Guatemala-Mexico border, where he became a stowaway on La Bestia, The Beast, that hopefully would take him through Mexico.
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I was afraid every minute, every hour of being robbed, of falling off the train, of losing my cameras. There was the danger of getting on and off. There was the fear of the low-hanging branches that would graze across the top of the train and knock your head off, the need for food and water. If I'm telling a story of immigration, I want people to see something they never, ever knew before.
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I didn't travel with Enrique, but we went back and retraced his steps from Tegucigalpa, Honduras through Mexico. So I would take many, many trips on a freight line 200 miles from south to north, get on a bus, come back, and do it again.
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And we put together this story kind of like a Hollywood movie, not necessarily captured in order, but presented and laid out in a fashion from south to north.
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The food throwers of Vera Cruz were a subject I spent several days doing. This was what I title Gift for a Northbound Migrant. The substance is the gift for this northbound migrant, and the style is where I was standing, the slow shutter speed that has meaning because the two other hands are touching as if to say, "Go safely and thank you." One of my all-time favorite images of my career is titled Chiapas Racers. You see this noble boy with his bronze torso and his dirty shorts holding a frayed green rein, and he's just got perfect control of that horse.
But you know it's his dad's horse because his boots don't reach the stirrups, and probably his sister in the back along for the ride just flying off the rump of the horse, and her curly hair suspended in midair. So I set my shutter to a slow speed, and it was maybe a 30th of a second with a 200-millimeter lens. So it's a beautiful picture of humanity, but editorially, it was magic. It was incredible because all around me, behind me, those other stowaways on the train were whistling and shouting and clapping.
So it was ten, 15, 20 seconds maybe of joy and happiness on this terrible journey where most people were so worried that they could never smile. But in this few seconds, they did.
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A picture that I titled, I think appropriately, Agony. I was laying on top of a boxcar, and the train was slowing down for a Mexican immigration checkpoint. Were going to try to capture as many illegal immigrants in Mexico as they possibly could.
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And I'm photographing one guy. He steps on the coupler and then he turns around and he grabs the railing at the end of the boxcar, and he leans his head back and closes his eyes and opens his mouth. Santo Antonio Gamay was his name. And he said, "I was just holding on and I was gripping and I was praying that I won't be caught a third time and sent back to the Guatemala border on the bus of tears." That was one of those jolts I hadn't expected.
That was a moment. Oh my God. Did I really see that? And that happens through constant observation, through anticipating action, through being there.
You may not know what's coming, but you're there and you're waiting.
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I'd been riding all night, but mostly crouched down out of the cold air. Well, I was three cars behind when I saw this lone figure on top of this hopper car. And I'm running as fast as I can to try to get close to him before we disappear into a fog bank. I jumped from car to car, and it sounds irresponsible and crazy, but I knew how to do it by that time.
And I come up to him and I instinctively grab the 24-millimeter lens, take two horizontal, two vertical, and then one slightly from the side. And I said, "I've got it. This is incredible. This is the metaphor for a child traveling alone to an uncertain horizon." But what I did not expect is what happened next.
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And it still hurts. I don't know if you've ever seen a child, an infant has cried so hard, they can't catch their breath. He was crying. He may have been both crying because he was shivering.
He was shaking like a leaf and he wasn't dressed for this cold overnight passage. So instinctively I thought, as a father, "This is not my place." Because I remember as a young man and as a young adult when I was surprised during a good cry by somebody I hadn't expected, and it was profoundly embarrassing. So I didn't want to do that to him. So I just stepped back and I put my notebook away and I kind of backpedaled on the grate of the moving train and turned around and walked away.
One of the very, very few times that I didn't supplement a powerful image with backstory. I said, "I can't take this anymore."
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It became the signature picture for the series of pictures Enrique's Journey. It's not Enrique, but it perfectly represents a child traveling alone. So I've ended at the home of Enrique in North Carolina, where he reunited with his mother after being left behind for ten years. So it became the story of reunification.
It was not a Cinderella story. Migrating to the United States for survival is not always perfect; in fact, quite often, it's expensive, it's heartbreaking, it's tragic, and it's not always perfect.
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Some breaking news coming out of the area of Tijuana, Mexico.
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Big news this morning. We're going to start with this. A caravan of Central American migrants traveling for more than a month is at the US-Mexico border trying to cross. Hundreds are simply setting up camp here where the border meets the Pacific.
I'd already been retired from the LA Times three years when all over the news were these migrant caravans from Central America. It was the same story, really, but there was a difference. People were coming in huge groups, and I wanted to see it.
Inaudible
some plan to deal with the thousands of
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-- I thought I was there to participate in a peaceful march when all hell broke loose.
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As many as a thousand people came bounding up and over this levee and down into the river. They were bringing backpacks, carriages, food, bread, water, babies. And I looked and I said, "I've already seen this." Through my head are flashing all of the pictures from so many decades ago. And my God, the similarity was ghostly.
The same levee, the same river, but a different generation.
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Well, this is the place where the dreams of these Honduran migrants end, right at a place where, for the last 40 years, I had seen migrants from Mexico and throughout Central America climbing this kind of fence. They came here, found a gap, and they were all turned back by tear gas grenades, and it was essentially the end of their dream of going to El Norte. The phenomenon of migrant caravans is a new twist on the need for something better for so many poor people in Central America. So that proves to me the value of photojournalism will never end.
So the experience that day was like a bookend on my 40-year career, where I had seen all of this activity taking place for decades, and I hope that up-and-coming photojournalists will continue this saga on migration for survival because it's the never-ending story.
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The photograph is the greatest gift, I think, to our 21st century civilization. They're documents of history. They're an international language. Anybody can understand a tear, a hug, a laugh.
Anybody can understand sadness and joy. To be honest with you, had I ever not been able to be a photographer, I think my life would have been somebody else's life.
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