Maggie Steber (English)

Where dreams come from is a podcast featuring successful people from different walks of life around the world. People who have pursued their dreams to arrive at a station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. When I think about the outstanding career of photographer Maggie Steber, the words resilience, persistence and faith in the world come to mind. Having found photography quite by chance, Stever has followed her passion from our first journalism job in Galveston, Texas, step by step to the pinnacles of photojournalism. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, National Geographic, the list is long. She has been honoured by World Press Photo and is a Guggenheim fellow. I spoke to Maggie at her home in Miami, about her dream of becoming a better photographer every day. Maggie Steber. Thank you so much for joining, where dreams come from? I just wanted to ask you, if you would start from variable born and brought up and what that life was like? Well, Sanjeev, thank you so much for inviting me to talk to you about these things. Basically, I grew up in Austin, Texas, and I was raised by my mother, who was scientist parasitologist, who studies the diseases caused by parasites, and I started school early, because in Austin, there was a test that you could take with the school district that would measure your level of intelligence. I'm not sure I could pass it today. But when I was a little girl, I took it. And so they wanted to start me early. And so I started school when I was five, and I went to this very progressive public school PS school that was in the middle of Austin, children would come from all quarters. And that created this sort of multicultural experience. For me and all of the students who went there, can you just compare that experience as compared to the rest of America, for example, Austin, is a very, I like to say it's the liberal oasis of Texas, which is an otherwise rather conservative state. And even then it was, but it was a very progressive city. And this was the only school like this that existed in in the city. What was very exciting about it was that even people who came from very poor or lower economic circumstances, had an opportunity to come to a school that was extremely progressive and a public school at that, so there was no paying for it. I think I was quite lucky to go there. At the time, when I was growing up, I had a very bad Lisp. And so I had private lessons with a speech teacher three times a week. And she taught me how to talk again, I have a little hiss now, but it's not so bad. But it was that kind of school that it would do whatever it could to move the children forward and create opportunities for them in a myriad of ways. When did you start even thinking about photography? Oh, I didn't start thinking about photography until I was in university. And actually, I had some really along the way, I had some remarkable teachers. And in the eighth grade, I had a social studies teacher, Mr. shank, he's the one who first started calling me Maggie. And when he would give us tests, he would play classical music. And if you could name the title of the symphony or the opera, he would give you extra credit. Well, my mother raised me on opera, classical music, and so I was always getting extra credit. So he really liked me very much. I was so enamored with French, I started out in college to be a French major, and I was going to be a high school French teacher in Texas, heavily. I was working my way through school, and I was not doing very well, when I got to this one French course where you had to read three medieval French novels a week, but I was working 20 to 30 hours a week to put myself through school and going to school full time and I made a D and my major, but at the same time, I had a roommate, who was going to be a journalism teacher, and she had to take a photo course and so she would use me as her model to show running and action and raising action and portraiture and things like that. And she would come home with these prints. And one day I went with her do the darkroom and just the magic of the darkroom. That was it. I changed my major immediately to journalism. I would take courses in the journalism department take writing courses at 10 courses and things like that. And I also took classes in the art department. So in the art department, the most extraordinary man was teaching and that was Russell Lee. Russell Lee was one of the Farm Security Administration photographers to photograph the United States. As it was going through this depression. Russell's work was so honest, one of the things he taught all of us was to respect the people who allow us to come into their lives. And that was really big for him. But I also loved how he taught because, you know, we're all trying to make these sort of artistic photographs, and I'm sure they were just terrible, but he would always laugh and because he wanted to encourage us to try these things, you know, and then he retired. And Gary Winogrand came to teach there. He was a street photographer, and a very famous one. But he also did advertising. But his work was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was a really famous photographer, and he was very gruff. But I learned from him how to really look at photographs. And this came in handy later when I became a picture editor. But we would hang on pictures up on the wall, and he would make us look at them, we would sit down, and he would say, Okay, what is the best picture up there. And of course, everybody went for the well composed kind of eye candy picture. And he would tell us all that we were full of shit. And he would choose the most obscure photograph on the wall. And he would talk about it for 20 or 30 minutes. And from that, I really learned to spend time with pictures, not only how they were composed, but to go further and really think about what they meant. I guess there were signals along the way, about what you're supposed to do. And what you're probably not supposed to do. French has been extremely helpful and useful to me in my career. And I love speaking it. But it was really in university that I started taking pictures. Before the magic of the darkroom, you said that there were some signs, perhaps now looking back, what comes before, I'd have to really go back further and say that it was my mother who encouraged me to dream, because she and my father divorced when I was six months old, until I really grew up without a father. And she was always worried that I would feel lesser than, and so she would always remind me to hold my head up high and square my shoulders and be proud of who I was. And that was really, really important. My first job at our school was on a little paper in Galveston, Texas, and it was for a reporter photographer, that story how I got that job is kind of funny. It's a great lesson, and especially for women. So I heard there was this opening, and I had never been to Galveston, but I got in my car. And I drove down there. And I walked into this paper and that, you know, little papers you can just walk into, and I walk in to the managing editor's office, and I told him that I had heard there was an opening, and then I'd like to apply for it. And he said, Well, you know, we already have two male candidates for that. And we're not really hiring a woman for that job, because it's going to be at nighttime, and you have to go to these little towns around Galveston and do the police reports. And, you know, so we're not really going to hire a woman for that. I said, Well, what time do you come to work in the mornings? And he looked at me in a strange way. And he said, nine o'clock, and I said, I'll see you in the morning. And I got up and left. And I went straight down to the proverbial coffee shop in downtown, which is small Galveston, where everybody goes the same people every morning. So I started talking to people and not asking them, what is going on here that the paper hasn't reported on? What's the big story? What are you all talking about? And it turned out that the University of Texas had a medical school in Galveston and there was a very beautiful, old surgical theater. It was an oval building made out of wood with wooden slats. And it was kind of like theater in the round. And so the students would watch was taking place down in the middle of the floor, the University wanted to tear it down to build a parking lot. And the townsfolk were up in arms about it, because it was part of their history. And a lot of the students and the doctors who taught there were very upset. And so I did these man in the street interviews, I went and interviewed some of the professors and the students. And then I snuck into the building, and I processed the film. And I stayed up all night making prints and I wrote a story. And at nine o'clock the next morning, I went to the paper. And when the managing editor saw me coming, he said, Miss, really you you need to go and I said, Well, before I go, I just want to show you what I did yesterday. Here's a story I did for your paper, and he started reading the story. And he looked at the pictures, and he read the story again and he looked at the pictures again. And then he looked up at me and he said, You've got the job. That was a very important lesson to me for the rest of my life. First that if there's not one way to do something, there's always going to be another way. And your job is to figure it out. But also not to let people crush you or crush your dreams. So I worked there for a year, and I did all kinds of things. And it was wonderful. And then I moved to New York, happily for me again, I had a friend who worked for Associated Press, and he said, you know, we don't have any women photo editors, and the AP is really under pressure. So I went, and I applied, they had me come back. And they said, Well, we really like you. You know, this is a tough job. And you'll see a lot of arguing and fighting. And there's a moment by moment deadline constantly. So there's a lot of stress and everything. We've been watching you and talking to you. And we think you would do well here, but we don't have an opening. And I said, Well, okay, thank you, I'll just stay in touch. And I thought, Well, that was a great write off. But again, this is where I got this from my mother is to have faith that something will happen. And so in the meantime, I was working at a furniture store. And also, this is kind of racy. But I like the story. I did nude modeling for art classes heavily. I only had to do that for two or three months. Somebody quit, and I got the job. And I loved it. And I just loved looking at the pictures. It was very exciting. I was seeing things from all over the world because everything would come to New York, I did very well there. And they finally made me a supervisor. And that was like being the captain of a starship. But little by little they were steering me toward management. And that was not what I wanted to do. I did not want to be a manager, I want to have my feet on the ground in my hands in the soil. I suggested one day that they send somebody to do a story in Africa about this long distance runner, who was winning every race, he won, his name was filbert bhai and he was from Tanzania. He could not go anywhere without winning a race. He was amazing. And they kind of patted me on the back and said yes, maybe that's a nice idea. But they didn't do it. So I thought, Okay, this is a good story. I know it is. I'm gonna go do it. So I went on my vacation and pretend days I stayed in Tanzania. And filbert by he was adorable. I would photograph him training. And he was also in the military. So I got to photograph him. During that. I went back, I wrote the story. And the AP said, Oh, this is really great. And they wanted to run it. And I said, No, I'm not giving you this story. And I ended up selling that story. 12 different times in the United States alone. And cluding, a full page and the Sunday sports section of the New York Times, I fell in love with Africa. And I started to think, you know, maybe I could do this, maybe I could freelance. And I decided that that's what I would do is that I would quit AP and I would go and try to freelance and cover the war. I that's what I did. For two years, I covered the last two years of this guerrilla war. And I met somebody I fell in love with. And we almost married an Australian cameraman. But in the end, we weren't really ready. But we've stayed friends lo these many years. After the war, I came back to New York and I had this portfolio of war pictures that I award that Americans were not at all interested in. So I had to start again from scratch. I started doing portrait assignments with a lot of business magazines. But I also started looking for funny little stories, little feature stories. And little by little things got much better. I started going to Cuba quite a bit to learn to teach myself long form storytelling. And that led me to a really great opportunity with Newsweek and so on and on. You've talked really, in some detail about the importance of resilience. Resilience is along the way you've referred to, but I don't think you've expanded on yet. What role mentors may have along the way, I ran into people who were extremely supportive. They saw in me as somebody who was really, really trying hard to become better. When I was covering the war in Africa. I hooked up with a French photo agency, and they had an agent in New York City. Jocelyn bid second, and she had worked at Time Magazine. She had worked all over the place. She was highly regarded in the photo business in New York. And she wasn't too keen about working with me. At first she liked men photographers, but when she saw how hard I was working, and all I didn't mind working on speculation, so she took me under her wing. And she was probably my first mentor and the person who encouraged me, she was a very strict disciplinary into somebody else who has figured large just as a great friend was Jim Colton, Jim and I worked at AP at the same time. We were AP Brett's and then he went on to work for Newsweek magazine. So when I was going to Cuba on my own time and my own dime, which I did for several years, I would come back and I would have all this film that I needed to process, which was not cheap. And so Jimmy would process it for me, and he would look at it, and he would do an edit. And he would say, Well, I think if you had tried this, or this, this might have been better. Jimmy believed in me and Newsweek believed in me, I became a contract photographer for them for four years. And they were so sweet to me. And it was Jimmy, who moved me along in my career, all of the people at Newsweek, and they had a lot of faith. You know, looking back, it's not clear to me at what you were chasing? Was it money fame? in my career, I haven't really thought about being famous. Because once you shoot to the top, the pressure is enormous. Everybody is saying, What's next? What's next? What are you working on now? They expect even more and more. And the pressure is extraordinary. And a lot of these people were not ready for it. And they would crash and burn. So I wasn't really so interested in that I just wanted to be a photographer. I wanted to get to go places. And I wanted to tell people stories, I didn't have a family except for my mother. And I decided I can make my own family from the people that I meet, I think I can have a very adventurous life with the people who let me tell their stories, I wanted to be somebody who practiced humility, and who recognize that it's such a privilege that I was lucky, I also had to rely on the people who would let me photograph them and tell their stories. And that the only way to do that was to do research. And to learn as much as I could about a place or the culture, or what I was doing by reading the history, reading contemporary things, talking to people trying to learn as much as I could, and then going in, like a baby who didn't know anything, I would be the blank page for them. And on which they could write their story. Along the way, I also decided I wanted to help other photographers, wind this very complicated and competitive. My TA, or career, and now it's even harder, because everybody is a photographer, and everybody wants to be a photographer at a time when there are certainly fewer venues. I mean, newspapers are dropping like flies, magazines have much smaller budgets. I remember my second story for geographic was on Miami, where I didn't live, it was a six month assignment. Can you imagine? And now, if you get an assignment from the geographic, you're lucky to get six weeks. So I decided I would try to help other people, a lot of younger people, and I try to help them edit their work. And I look at their work. And I brainstorm with them. And I suggest publications that they might look at for getting their work published. I'm sort of surprised. Because a lot of younger people, especially photographers, don't really understand the idea and the benefit of research, but also not being familiar with their market. So sometimes when I teach workshops, I talk about the marketplace. And they look at me like what is that? And I asked them a question. And that is well Who do you want to work for what magazines besides National Geographic? Because everybody wants to work for that do you want to work for and they say, well, oh, we didn't think about it. And I said, well then go to Barnes and Noble. And look at the magazine racks because there are all kinds of magazines. And that's your pocket and you have to be familiar. And don't think that you're just gonna go to the top right away, like be willing to do business portraiture, if you look at magazines, if that's who you want to work for. Everybody needs portraits. So develop a portrait style, even if that's not what you ultimately want to do. And because this is a step by step process, before we conclude it would be just not complete without talking about it. And we haven't done that yet. In what ways did you get involved in Haiti? I think in The Guardian, you'd said one time before to read that he called hunger is when hunger overcomes fear. When I came back from Africa, and I was working in the States, and the French picture agency, I worked for us, called me and said, Maggie, we want to go to Haiti to do a story on poverty and you're going to love Haiti because it's very African. And I really did sorely Miss Africa. So I said Okay, it was 1980 and I went down there on my own dime, I would go out every day and photograph and I had to be careful because it was the period of the devalue regime and papa doc Duvalier had formed this secret police, the Tonto my code. And my code were fierce, they were the law. They could shoot you on the street, and nothing would happen. So I had to be mindful of that when I was photographing because I didn't want to get into trouble. But also, I didn't want Haitians to get into trouble. But while I was there, baby Doc, who was the son of Francois Duvalier announced his engagement to a woman and her name was Michelle Bennett, then I covered the wedding. But in 1985, and December, I read this little short piece in The New York Times that there were food riots going on in Haiti. And having been there, and knowing how dangerous it was for people to demonstrate at all. People were starving to death. So I went, and I went straight up to the north, where most of the demonstrations were going on in K patient type of ICN. And one day, at the end of a long day of demonstrations, people just went wild. And they ran over to this food Depo, this big building warehouse, where all of this food aid was kept the food that was never given to them. It was always sold on the black market. They covered that building like ants on a piece of candy. And it was complete chaos. And people broke into the Depo. And they were stealing bags of rice and tins of oil. And they were fighting each other and they were carrying them away. And it was crazy. It was wild. And so I was in the middle of it photographing photographic. And these were the days of film, so you don't know what you're getting. I wasn't even paying attention to whether I was in danger or not because it was so chaos. And then I went back to the Capitol, I shipped my film. A couple of days later, my agent called me and said, Maggie, you have a picture. That is amazing. She said I can't even describe it to you. But US News is going to run it two pages. So I kept working because then all of the riots trickled down to the Capitol and froze the Capitol Porter prints. And a few days later, john Claude Duvalier and his dragon lady wife, Michelle Bennett, fled the country and went to into exile in Paris. Suddenly, for the first time in 30 years, people could come out into the streets, they could demonstrate, they could sing, they can dance, an interim government was formed to organize elections, the first democratic elections in 30 years. And so it was a really, really remarkable time. I'm getting chills just from talking about it. But when I went back to New York, and I saw this picture, I couldn't believe it. So it's a picture of a little boy trying to steal a box of food from underneath a shuttered door at this food Depo. On the left, is a soldier coming in with a rubber stick a baton, so fast that the battle is curved. And then from the other side of soldiers coming in with a rifle. This is a picture about Haiti. It was about the powers that be and about the poverty and the resilience of people to overcome that. And so I called it when hunger overcomes fear. And the Haitians just, you know, taught me so many lessons. Whenever I would get discouraged, I would think about them, because in the worst situations, they get up every day, and they do it again. They are so resilient. Let me ask you a question about the whole trajectory that we've talked about that, do you have a clear sense of what you came into photography, thinking what photography would be, when I first started taking pictures, I just loved taking pictures, I thought it was magical, that if I can make a living as a newspaper photographer, or maybe I don't know, you know how I would use photography, but I would have been really happy and content with that. But at the same time, if I would work hard, and gamble on myself, that I could see that I was moving forward. The big things were like when Newsweek gave me some great assignments, but then hired me to be one of their contract photographers for four years. And then certainly everything that happened in Haiti because I started winning awards, just all of the kind of big markers once I started to get to work for the geographic, and I received grants along the way, and then I had opportunities to teach that was sort of a very wonderful thing that made me think that maybe I was a better photographer than I gave myself credit for, but that I still could be better. And that's always been my goal is to be better and better. Yeah, I have a life I never thought I would have. And I'm Yes, I'm living the dream. I'm living the dream and it's a really nice dream because my riches are in the people that I meet and I've had a very rich life. Maybe Steven, thank you so much. Thank you so much to extend you.