Why decide to be a freelance magazine photographer rather than be directly employed by a magazine?
The big advantage was having ownership of my work. If I had been an employee of a company, that company would have 100 percent ownership of my work. If I had gone to work for Life—it was the greatest place in the world to work and I was offered a job there—but besides not retaining ownership of my work, I would have had to move wherever they wanted. By then I was working for the University of Miami, married with four children, and had a nice house. I wasn’t about to go to New York. As for work, I’m a master of ideas. Back then starting out I would get photography ideas from the local newspaper. Magazine editors in New York didn’t read the Miami Herald, yet Miami was a hotbed for all kinds of things going on. For instance, we knew of Castro long before the people in New York did. Eventually, Life started a bureau in Miami, and I was a freelance photographer attached to the bureau. Every picture I took for them was my property—something they didn’t think about then, because no one was th
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