JRossBaughman

I was trying to secretly photograph a black nationalist politician being tortured by white cavalry troops when the soldier next to me noticed what I was doing. He whispered into my ear, "If you take that picture, you'll be next." Many years later, an artist helped me to recreate the scene, almost the way one would work with a police sketch artist.
this is a drawing of the scene

Back in 1976, I found the Nazi headquarters purely by coincidence. I have made it my life's work since then to find such things on purpose. As for escaping that night I thought was my last? Pure begging.

And yes, if that cluster bomb had worked, this AMA would have never happened. I've kept one of the unexploded bomblets as a paperweight at my desk, along with a number of other wartime keepsakes.

Several times the people I have been hanging out with (and trying to photograph) are themselves pretty dangerous people. In the only story where I went totally undercover, I infiltrated the American Nazi movement, but one of the less stable members decided to steal all of the weapons stored at the party headquarters in Cleveland on the night when I was the only member in uniform on duty with a revolver on my hip. He had me on my knees, ready to put a bullet in my head, and I thought it was all over for sure.

Then there was a night in Lebanon when an Israeli pilot dropped a cluster bomb on top of the Palestinians I was accompanying. It failed to go off, but we did get all of those little metal bomblets raining down on our position.

I don't worry about the latest equipment so much, so that kind of practice isn't necessary. What's most important is refining the question that your photos will answer.

I nearly decided to give up on the life of a photojournalist after that happened. But I couldn't. I used up quite a few more of my nine cat lives.