HOW I BECAME A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER

From Macduff:     My pathway was not linear. I left home at 17 with my surfboard, eventually hitchhiking around the world. I literally picked up a camera that a disgruntled tourist put down in the street on the Danish island of Bornholm, not wishing to look like a tourist. From that I ended up selling my first stories after reaching Japan, then after exploring Mexico for an educational film company for several years, I worked as a backcountry guide (where I developed a further understanding of light and weather) running a pack station in the Golden Trout Wilderness (horse and mule business) and then as a whitewater river guide, all in order to self-fund my visual anthropological documentation of the living Maya in Yucatán in the belief I could create a seminal book on an area celebrating the lives of ordinary people, the heart and soul of a culture and in the process becoming one of the best panoramic photographers in the world, represented by galleries with work in many public museums and private collections.

I could add that in order to gain access to villages in Yucatán I worked in a regional family circus, performing as Comandante Macduff, grandson of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, the commander of a frogman unit that recovered the Apollo 11 space capsule, then later managed the ranch next to Ronald Reagan’s Western White House (meeting Queen Elizabeth on the road where she pointed to me and my son, saying “There’s a cowboy!”), then finally, as an editorial photographer, often on the road over 200 days a year, but then I run the risk of writing a run-on sentence.”