The Birth of Hunger
My dad had a subscription to Time Magazine and the National Geographic. I can remember being blown away by the images contained within the pages of those magazines – their beauty as well as the utter rawness they displayed. Those images (pictures) had the ability to rip the viewer from the safety of their own reality and pull them, at times unwillingly, into the someone’s else’s world. The truth they invoked was undeniable. The December 04, 1978 Time Magazine cover “Cult of Death” by photographer David Hume Kennerly forever affected me. I was eight. Sure, the mass suicide of some 900 plus people was horrific at its core, but that’s not what moved me. I was amazed at Kennerly’s ability to walk among the lifeless bodies of those who leaped willing into the afterlife on the words of the false prophet James Warren, a.k.a, Jim Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana – all the while snapping pictures. Needless to say, I’m sure that experience haunted, chased, Kennerly for the rest of his existence. Seeing those images made me wanted to be him. I wanted to be the person who went head-first into the abyss documenting life’s events – the ugly and the beautiful. That issue of Time Magazine, the images of that event, an event absent of God mind you, gave birth to my hunger to be a photographer. Admittedly, my life took a different path but my hunger for photographer never subsided – in fact, it burns as deep now as it did back then.
Marques Haven ~
Above Shots:
“Wet Streets” – Taken in Rome, Italy
“Lights of Boston” – Taken at Copley Square in Boston Massachusetts
