A photographic memoir of photographer and FotoFest photo festival
founder Fred Baldwin's extraordinary life: how he followed his dream,
used his imagination, overcame fear, and acted to accomplish anything.
This account takes the reader to high adventure worldwide, but also to
disaster and failure. This illustrated love affair with freedom shows
how a camera became a passport to the world. The son of an American
diplomat, who died when Baldwin was five, the book describes a string of
disasters associated with six elite boarding schools and one university
led to his exile to work in a factory where he joined low-paid black and
white workers in his uncle's factory in Savannah, Georgia. Baldwin
escaped by joining the Marines and was immediately shipped to North
Korea in 1950. Wounded and decorated twice, Baldwin also learned from
the brutal, 35 below zero weather at the Chosin Reservoir where his unit
was surrounded and outnumbered by the Chinese. After Korea, Baldwin
moved to Paris, then returned to a junior college in Georgia, won a
scholarship to Harvard and transferred to Columbia. Baldwin to teach
himself photography by visiting MoMa and every photo gallery in New
York. Baldwin wanted to be a photojournalist. By chance he spent a day
and a night with the Ku Klux Klan and then he set out for Europe,
heading for Scandinavia and the Arctic. What followed were picture
stories about reindeer migrations, Nobel Prize coverage, underwater
pictures of cod fishing in Arctic Norway, polar bear expeditions. After
that he went to Mexico to photograph underwater the fight of hooked
Marlin - an homage to Hemingway. In 1963, Baldwin joined the Civil
Rights Movement, photographing Martin Luther King. A two-year stint as
Peace Corps director in Borneo was followed by more photojournalism in
India and Afghanistan. The stories in this book are often laced with
self-deprecating humour, a mechanism that Baldwin had developed early as
a survival tool.
