Friday, January 23, 2009

Part Two - Back to Africa

In New York I spent two years working 16 hours a day in two waiter’s jobs, and sleeping little. Then, having saved enough to cover the purchase of additional photo equipment (I owned only one camera and two lenses), a journey on the cheap, and my family’s upkeep during my absence, I returned to Algiers. The year was 1963. Passing through Brussels, I overheard my father-in-law whisper that I was a boy scout who would not grow up. I understood his feelings and empathized, but was glad not to have grown up yet, or I might not have dared to risk another failure.

Through the Algerian part of the Sahara I rode on oil trucks. Through Niger and Benin I squeezed at the top of overloaded and overcrowded trucks that broke down continuously. Again, I had no budget for hotels or restaurants, but was hardly ever close to any. I lived on a dollar a day, plus what little I paid for transportation.

All through the Sahara I tried to pay Tuareg nomads to take me on a camel ride adventure, but they laughed and thought that I had lost my head. Back in the Sahara after Benin, I finally found two of them willing to do it. Over a month and 650 miles of desert, we would ride from Agadez (Niger) to Tamanrasset (Algeria) through the Air and Ahaggar Mountains, two beautiful parts of the Sahara.

Back in New York, I returned for a year to a 16-hour work day, though half of it as a photographer’s assistant this time. Meanwhile, Venture, published by Look Magazine, gave me the cover and ten pages of its third issue. Argosy, a man’s magazine, used my pictures to illustrate the story of a man’s jeep trip across the Sahara. And a photo agency sold a large numbers of my Algeria pictures. Not only had I recouped my journey’s expenses and the purchase of two camera bodies and lenses, but I was left with a profit.

It took National Geographic a whole year to decide not to use that story, which I had also submitted to them. Most of my shoot was in black and white, and at that time the editors thought that they would never run black-and-white pictures again, though they would return to that some day. They did give me some money to allow me to return to the Sahara the cheap way to ride with a Tuareg salt caravan and spend another three months sharing the Tuareg’ lives.

When those nomads refused to let me travel with them, saying that no Westerner would survive such an ordeal and that they had no business having to bury my bones in the desert sand, I offered them to share their work, which they could not resist, for they were undermanned. They might also have accepted me in exchange for money. But I had hardly enough left by then, and it would have to last four months. On my way there I had run into problems that had cost me much of what National Geographic had given me. It hadn’t been much anyway, as I was still an untested photographer and writer.

The 22 days that I traveled with the caravan, up to 16 hours a day, often without water to the limit of survival, and with very little food, would indeed be galley slavery, but I count them as the most wonderful days I ever lived.

National Geographic gave me the cover of its November 1965 issue, and Paris Match, the French counterpart of Life magazine, followed suit by publishing that story on 17 outsized pages. That story, and others that I would do later for NG, appeared in my book, Wind, Sand and Silence: Travels with Africa’s last Nomads, now out of print.

National Geographic asked me what else I had for them. And so they would give me another 11 assignments, resulting in articles and book chapters, three of which they would not publish. I would also travel for many other magazines, nearly all of them long out of business now.

To my everlasting wonder, I was now able to travel anywhere I wanted--in Africa, South America, and Asia—for assignments nearly always resulted from ideas I proposed. My interest in anthropology would push me to share the lives and cultures of more than 30 indigenous peoples. To this day, the Tuareg, whom I have visited again and again over the years, three times for National Geographic alone, remain my favorite people. But do I not owe them my career?

In 1974 I moved to Colombia. Up to 1996, when life there became fraught with problems, I self-published photo books on that country, while still traveling elsewhere on assignment. After that I had to move back to the United States.

Though all this happened a long time ago, I keep traveling to the places of my choice and producing articles on my trips. There is no money anywhere now for extended journeys, but I learned to do in two or three weeks what used to take me three to four months. I’ll do that until the end of my life, for I could not imagine a different life. To keep in shape I jog and work out at the gym three to four times a week. I learned that life is not what you get, but what you make it.

http://www.victorenglebert.com

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