One of my first big personal successes in my career was way back in 2000, when I became Polo Ralph Lauren’s in-house photographer. It was my second staff photography job, the first one being at Christie’s auction house. Polo offered me twice what I was making at Christie’s, and accepting the position was a no-brainer. It felt great as a young photographer who’d only been in New York for a few years to have found myself in what seemed like a dream job.
But looking back, one of the most interesting things about it was how I found this dream job, through a relic of an earlier time: a classified listing in the newspaper.
At least, that’s how I’ve been telling the story for years. I found the job listing in theNew York Timesclassifieds. I did, right? I mean, memories can change over time. Maybe it wasn’t theNew York Times. I think it was. What else would it have been? Have I told the story so many times that I’ve altered my memory to something it wasn’t?
Well, I’m aNew York Timessubscriber, which gives me access to 150 years of scanned newspapers through theTimes Machine. So I decided to see if I could actually find the classified listing that got me that job.
Luckily, I’m also a bit of a digital hoarder. I have every email I’ve sent or received since 1997. All my high school and college notebooks and papers have been converted to PDF for longevity and searchability, just in case I ever really want to know what I thought ofThe Great Gatsbyin high school. I’ve scanned everything my parents stored in boxes from my childhood and recycled all the paper. I’m far more likely to reference something I can find on my hard drive than something in a box 2000 miles away.
So it didn’t take me long to search my archives and find the cover letter I wrote when I applied for the job. And that gave me an approximate date to search theTimesclassifieds.
I won’t bury the lede any further. I found it. And it didn’t take long. I figured it was probably a Sunday paper, since that’s when I would have been most likely to actually get the paper. So I went to theTimes Machinearchive for the Sunday before my cover letter was dated, and went to the job listings. I had to remember what it was like to look for a job. I went to the jobs section, found the “P” listings for Photographers.
I remember now the frustration of looking for a photography job in the classifieds. Most of the listings were not for the kinds of photography jobs I wanted. There seemed to always be a listing for school portrait photographers, and jobs that didn’t really require much of an understanding of composition. They seemed to me like jobs that happened to use cameras. But I kept looking.
And then there it was. On January 16, 2000.
It’s kind of hard to read. But it says:
CWP are the initials of the woman who would eventually become my boss.
But here is where I really do question my memory. There are two things that just seem impossible.