He wasn‘t much of a writer, knew little about politics, spoke bad restaurant-French, lacked all training and qualifications, possessed only a passport and a vivid image of himself smoking beneath a ceiling fan in tropical countries, a battered Nikon and a bottle of whisky by his bedside.

Of course what he really wanted was to be a photographer. At sixteen he had completed a photo-project called "Texture‘, full of black and white close-ups of tree bark and sea-shells which  had  apparently  "blown‘  his  art  teacher‘s  mind. Nothing  that  he  had  done  since  had given  him  as  much  satisfaction  as  "Texture‘  and  those  high-contrast  prints  of  frost  on windows  and  the  gravel  in  the  driveway.  Journalism  would  mean  grappling  with  difficult stuff  like  words  and  ideas,  but  he  thought  he  might  have  the  makings  of  a  decent photographer, if only because he felt he had a strong sense of when things looked right. At this stage in his life, his main criterion for choosing a career　was that it should sound good in a  bar, shouted  into  a  girl‘s  ear,  and  there  was  no  denying  that  "I‘m  a  professional photographer‘  was  a  fine  sentence,  almost  up  there  with  "I  report  from  war  zones‘  or "actually, I make documentaries.‘