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Joseph Rodriguez.
How to get Joseph Rodriguez
, documentary photographer famous for his intimate portraits of communities, to be your mentor: Be hungry and do the work.
“If you do the work, you are part of the family,’’ photographer Rian Dundon remembers Rodriguez telling him when Dundon was a student in Rodriguez’ class at New York University. “He really showed us what it took to do this kind of work, and also that it was possible, that it was reachable regardless of who you were and where you were coming from.’’
The work means documentary photography, the kind of long-term projects where a photographer is immersed in a subject and a community. In his 40-year career, Rodriguez has photographed young Latinos in Spanish Harlem and East Los Angeles, children in Afghanistan, factory workers in Romania, residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and sex workers in Mexico City. He is now photographing Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
He has also been a longtime mentor to a host of photographers, including street photographer Joseph Michael Lopez, filmmaker Carlos Javier Ortiz and photojournalist Lili Kobielski, who calls Rodriguez “the best and most remarkably generous teacher I ever had.’’
For Rodriguez, mentoring photographers as they pursue documentary photography is...