Diego G. Diaz

Coffee date today with Diego G Diaz, pro photographer I met in the streets of Portland. This is a link to his social justice work, but he’s marvelously skilled and versatile, and you can navigate through his website to portraiture, sports, music, travel, or whatever your interest may be. We talked about photography, gear, processing, the business, our backgrounds and hopes. We spoke of other photographers: Cartier-Bresson, Paula Luttringer. I lifted his backpack: forty pounds. I could not have run around with that weight on me, even when I was at my physical peak. He’s the age of my younger son and bursting with fitness. He played soccer as a young man and has kept himself in shape. We talked about the dangers to photographers, especially in situations of conflict: the danger from police, from angry protesters, from aggressive young men looking for trouble, and from thieves. His parents left Argentina when the dirty war began; he was only five years old then. He grew up in Barcelona. He loves travel. He laughed that a busy day for a photojournalist in Portland is like a slow Tuesday in London; but Portland, he says, is a good place to come back to. 

The one thing he doesn’t want to shoot is war. “I want to be able to sleep at night,” he said, “without images of horror in my brain. There is plenty of other work to do.”

“You’re not a Nachtwey,” I mused.

“No,” he said firmly. “I know who I am.” 

After we parted I thought about Salgado, about his burnout, his reorientation from war and suffering to trees, to the regeneration of the planet. I thought about beauty--in nature, in human faces. How beauty replenishes our energy. How love is what drives us all. Some of us are thrust into situations of conflict, and when that happens, we document it any way we can, by writing or photographs, by art or by memoir. Because when hell happens on earth, we have to tell about it, we have to hope that telling about it lessens the chance of it happening again. Some of us stand up, wherever we are, to injustice. We document others who stand up. But unless war is thrust upon us, as Diego says, there is plenty of other work to do.