Susan B. Markisz
March 28, 1998
My husband woke me up early this Saturday morning saying: "Sue, you might want to see this," referring to a 3 column x 12 inch color picture on the cover of the New York Times Westchester section of tomorrow's Times, (we get some of Sunday's regional sections delivered with Saturday morning's paper)....with my photo credit underneath it.
I could have used an extra hour's sleep, but I was sorely in need of a pick-me-up. Every few days for the last three weeks, to no avail, I've called different assigning editors with what a colleague and I often refer to, only half jokingly, as "the begging phone call."
The conversation is invariably quick and to the point: "Hi, how's everything? Haven't heard from you in awhile, I'm around if anything's going on." At one time, the mere thought of making these phone calls seemed to me to be designed to shorten one's lifespan, at least exponentially in proportion to the amount of time it took to contemplate making the call.
In 1995, I had my first freelance assignment for the New York Times. A metro story on budget cuts of social services for abused women and children required a photographer who could speak fluent Spanish (I knew that my knowledge of Spanish would come in handy one day!) because the subject, a mother of four children, did not speak English and she was reluctant to be photographed. I was able to communicate with the mother, and I reassured her that if she refused to be photographed as recognizable, I could do that too. Not only was it not a problem at all, she allowed me to photograph her with children as well and it ran in the metro section 3 columns wide.
One assignment followed another for awhile. I was so happy to be getting work once a week or so that it didn't occur to me to be soliciting editors for MORE work. Even though my pictures consistently ran well, frequently multiples, one day the bottom seemed to drop out from underneath me. I suddenly got no more work. Unaccustomed to calling editors to let them know I was around, I didn't get any work.
My insecurities at work, "Is it me?" I wondered. "What did I do wrong?"
It seems they were using freelancers less frequently, but that didn't make it any easier on me. And since I refused to call (not out of arrogance, but rather out of sheer terror that someone might say, "Well, you know, you're really not that good!", I simply had burned whatever bridges I had built.
While I would like to have a job with semi predictable hours, a liveable income, and health benefits, getting a staff job at one of the New York dailies seems unlikely. Competition here (as in most markets, I surmise) is fierce and there is a wealth of really talented people . So, I'm honing my marketing skills and trying to diversify.
The future sometimes seems kind of bleak in terms of photojournalism. Those phone calls, which at one time, sent my heart into an arrythmia, are now easier to make, but no less stressful when there's an awkward silence on the other end or three weeks between assignments. It helps to see one of my last assignments run well, something that I can hold onto...for another few hours, until the phone rings.
A friend of mine told me he calls the Times almost every day. "What do you say?" I asked him. "I tell whoever's on the desk a joke," he said.
Clever! For someone who's rarely at a loss for words, I've never been great at telling jokes in English, but I still have a whole repertoire of jokes that I learned while living in Spain years ago.
?Habla espanol, anyone?
Susan Markisz
March 28, 1998