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Halstead’s parents soon discovered that photography would become a very expensive venture after giving their 14-year-old son his first camera and darkroom outfit. “From the moment I put my first ounce of fixer in that little plastic tank, I became hooked,” he says. And seeing the contact sheets come up in the print tray was magic.” According to Halstead, his foray into photojournalism was “a natural evolution.” In school, he found that he could be excused from class when he took pictures, and by giving his photos to people, he became very popular. By the time he was a junior at a high school in New York, he was taking pictures for the Bedford Villager, where he was paid $5 for every picture they used. “Within a year, that small weekly had become a chain of seven weekly newspapers,” he explains. “Suddenly the two or three pictures I’d get in an individual paper got multiplied times seven, and I was still making $5 a picture. But when you’re talking about a 17-year-old, this was good money.” Constructed from Cloth During his senior year, he became mesmerized after reading Robert Capa’s book, Slightly Out of Focus, as Capa had a reputation for being the most famous war photographer in the world at that time. “The thing is, he didn’t
Then fate stepped in. “The day I graduated from high school, Capa stepped on a land mine in Indochina and was killed. By coincidence, they decided to inter the body at a Quaker cemetery in my coverage area.” Halstead went to photograph the funeral, but was confronted by John Morris, head of Magnum Pictures (the agency that Capa had created), who informed the young man that no photographers were allowed to be there. “At that exact moment, they brought the casket by—it was nothing more than a wood shipping box,” he says. “I just stood there in total awe and Morris conferred with Cornell Capa (also a Friedman), and they decided to let me stay.” Halstead wrote a story about the experience, which appeared in the following week’s Patent Trader. He took copies of this newspaper to a very appreciative Morris. “As I was leaving, he asked me what I was doing that summer, and I said I didn’t know. Magnum had been invited to cover a group of Presbyterian students who were going to Guatemala to build a school. It was nothing that Magnum was interested in, but he turned over the information to me.”
On the way to Morris’ house, Halstead had heard that a war was brewing in Guatemala, and press from around the world were headed there. “I just tuned out the part about the schoolhouse, and tuned in Guatemala,” he remembers. “The next day, I went down to LIFE magazine, looked up the name of the picture editor and went to see him with three newspapers.” He had a picture of Joe Welch and McCarthy from the McCarthy hearings on the cover of one issue, the story about the Capa funeral in another, and coverage on Rita Hayworth’s divorce, which appeared on the cover of another paper. “So I pitched LIFE magazine on why they should send me to Guatemala,” he says. “Amazingly, they agreed.” The magazine offered him $1000 in film, and so began Halstead’s official foothold in photojournalism at the age of 17. He began working for UPI in Dallas, Texas in 1957, and was with them for 15 years, and he started the first UPI picture bureau in Saigon in 1965. He photographed Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 as one of only six photographers who were permitted to accompany the president. “After that, I accepted a contract with Time magazine, and wound up going right back to Viet Nam to cover the events of 1972.” Halstead spent the following 29 years traveling around the world for Time doing feature stories, and became the senior White House photographer, where he covered the terms of six presidents. A Defining Moment One of his most famous photos was taken two days before the 1996 presidential election, when President Clinton was attending a late-night rally of young democrats at the Mayflower Hotel. “He would always get off the stage and work the crowd at the end of his speech,” says Halstead. “I just covered that event and didn’t think anything of it, because nobody knew who Monica Lewinsky was.” A year and a half later, a picture of Lewinsky broke—one where she was on the White House lawn wearing a beret, taken by an intern. Soon after that, people started asking Halstead if he had taken a similar picture. When he saw this photo, he had an epiphany. “I looked at it and thought, ‘I have seen that face somewhere, and I think I’ve photographed her with the president.’” Every time a photographer takes a picture and the mirror goes
Industry in Flux During the mid-1990s, after working for Time for 25 years and traveling all over the world, Halstead began to recognize changes in the industry. “They couldn’t support the careers that we were used to. There was no longer space in the magazines for photo essays. Everything boiled down to one picture, and more importantly, the resources were no longer there.” During the ’80s, budgets became increasingly important. “It became clear that the era of globe-trotting photographers taking pictures for big spreads in magazines was no longer sustainable,” he says.
In 1997, he started his online publication, The Digital Journalist, with the help of Hewlett Packard; a venture that began “by accident.” Halstead was traveling around the country giving lectures, and gave a presentation at the Smithsonian. He was approached by HP, who offered him a website. However, he counter-offered with the idea of a monthly online magazine geared towards photojournalists. His first story was a multi-media piece on the White House. “Our mission was to create a 20th century version of LIFE using Henry Luce’s old vision (the publisher in the magazine’s heyday) —to show people the world and take them to places where they had never been.” Every month, The Digital Journalist boasts impressive contributors, about 200 images, and intriguing stories. One special feature is called “Dispatches,” sponsored by Canon and headed up by Marianne Fulton (former curator of the George Eastman House), who reaches out to photographers around the world on assignment. These photographers contribute images and write about their experiences, which Halstead describes as “an unfiltered look into a photographer’s world.” The publication has also won the top award from the online news association for its coverage of 9/11.
Becoming a Producer His advice to budding photojournalists? “What distinguishes a photojournalist is that the whole point of their work is to communicate,” he replies. “It doesn’t matter what the medium is. What’s more important is the God-given gift of an eye. Too many students who enroll in journalism programs have no sense of curiosity, and if you don’t have this, you’re never going to be a journalist. The best storytellers are those who are the most curious.” Halstead maintains that he has a strong commitment to his industry—“it’s my calling to mentor, to push and prod.” He also says that now is the most exciting time to be a visual journalist, despite the fact that so many of the major magazines have closed down, with the exception of National Geographic. There’s also key word that he teaches all his students: “In the 1950s, I would have said I was a news photographer. In the 60s, I was a wire service photographer, and in the 70s–90s, I was a photojournalist. Today, if you ask what I am, I say that I’m a producer. This means that I take responsibility for creating a product from inception to edit to the Internet.” To learn more about Dirck Halstead and The Digital Journalist, visit www.digitaljournalist.org. You can view excerpts from his book, Moments in Time, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0612/moments.html Click Here to see a Gallery of Dirck Halstead's Images© Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com |
