Death by a thousand cuts
I had considered myself one of the luckiest guys in the world, a hometown boy who had made it to the big leagues in photojournalism. It is rare in our business to have the privilege of working for the newspaper that you grew up with. As a child growing up in the Baltimore City neighborhood of Roland Park, I devoured both the morning and evening issues of the paper, always looking for that latest bit of information. I was enchanted by the seemingly endless array of stories that the paper contained each day, and I was especially drawn to the news photos. I loved to study each one, and I always checked the credit to see who had captured that storytelling image. It was truly a dream come true that a photography class in my senior year at Loyola College would so capture my heart as to make me change my career direction away from law school and ultimately lead to a job as a photo editor at The Sun.
I had always loved photography but had never considered it to be anything more than a hobby until Ed Ross, my photo teacher at Loyola, took me under his wing and showed me that I had a real gift as a photographer. I decided to put my plans for law school on hold and pondered how best to find a job taking pictures. Working at a camera store seemed to be the logical first step, so I put on a coat and tie, put together a collection of my best shots and visited the local photo shops. I was lucky enough to
get a job as a counter clerk at Service Photo Supply Co. I used my time there to network with the professional photographers who frequented the store. The editor of Lacrosse magazine was a customer; I impressed him with some of the sports shooting I had done in college and was soon shooting freelance assignments for him. The editor of City Paper was a regular, and I persuaded him to let me shoot an assignment for a story. That was my first published newspaper photo, and I was hooked.
My first big break came when I was hired as a staff photographer for Stromberg Publications after two years of working at the camera store. It was a chain of suburban weekly newspapers, and I could not have been happier. I was now a photojournalist, making a living taking photos. Stromberg was soon bought by Patuxent Publishing Co., where I would continue as a staff photographer for 10 years before I decided that my talents would be best served as a photo manager. I was the assistant director of photography for nine years and thought that one day I would be the director. But the Times Mirror Co. bought Patuxent and decreed a round of cost-cutting that would have eliminated my job. Happily, The Washington Times asked me if I would be interested in being the paper’s photo assignment editor.
This was an even bigger break, my first job at a major metro daily newspaper. It was hard for me to
Photo by Greg Auerweck
Works © 2010 by the individual authors except as noted. Remainder of site © 2010 by the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation. Site map
