But when I came back to the Geographic I realized that the train had left the station, and I wasn’t on it, as I expected to be. So Gilka said to me “they going to send you to Ontario to do clean up for Dave Boyer.” Well Boyer was a staff photographer who also was a staff writer, and he was known to be struggling at this part of his career. Every part that Gilka had told me was unsavory. I liked Boyer and I knew that it would be challenging for him to have someone working on his pieces in order to resurrect them and make them into publishable stories. So that was bad. To do clean up for anyone is bad.

Ontario was not a thrilling place to be then as a photographer. It’s vast, it’s the size of Texas and California combined, but, put it this way, it’s not Carnival in Rio. Then Gilka said “we’re going to send you up there for six weeks, and when you come back we’re going to have a half way show.” We’re going to take a close look at Ontario and a close look at you. And then silence. So I asked if I had just been put on notice and Gilka looked at me and said “the editors upstairs think your pictures are quiet.” It wasn’t coming from him and that was important to me. And with that, our meeting was over and I walked back to my office and by the time I got to my desk, I remember standing at my desk letting what he said sink in and I had this internal mixture of anger and fear. Anger because I believed in what I called quiet photographs, and fear because I’d been put on notice. I made a resolution to change my life, in this mixture of fear and anger, to resolve, to not change, but to do quiet photography better.