Lonnie Schlein sat in the desert and waited. Somewhere along the New Mexico-Arizona line, he had found the photograph he wanted, or at least the place where he thought it might eventually appear.
There was a yucca plant in the foreground and railroad tracks beyond it. Schlein settled into the sand and waited for the rest of the picture to come to him. He needed a train, but not just any train. So, he waited.
“I had to sit there for a good two hours in the middle of nowhere waiting for the right train with the right colors, with the right sky,” Schlein said.
Eventually, everything came together. Today, a roughly 6-foot-by-4-foot metal print of the photograph hangs in his home. For Schlein, who spent more than four decades at The New York Times, including 10 years as its national photo editor, the story behind that photograph says something about what separates taking a picture from making one.
“You’ve got to hang out and absorb the atmosphere,” he said. “And really look around.”
That philosophy — look around, be patient and find something others might miss — followed Schlein throughout a career that placed him alongside some of the most significant moments in recent American history.
A collection of Schlein’s work will be on display in Las Cruces when “Through the Lens” opens Sept. 2 at The Mad Hatter Gallery. The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 5, includes photographs surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, political images from presidential conventions and other events, and scenes of Americans at work and play.
Schlein, who now lives in Dallas, will visit Las Cruces Sept. 10-11.
His journey to becoming a photographer, and one of the people responsible for deciding how Times readers saw the news, began long before he entered a newsroom.
Schlein grew up in Brooklyn in a family with connections to both photography and the arts. His uncle was a director of photography at CBS in New York, where Schlein spent afternoons during junior high and high school after taking the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
CBS had massive photography studios at the time, frequently used to photograph celebrities traveling between New York and Los Angeles. Schlein hung around the photographers and lab technicians, learning black-and-white photography and darkroom skills.
His father, meanwhile, was a Broadway musical director who worked with Cole Porter and others during a career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1960s.
One of Schlein's earliest affirmations as a photographer came when he was only 10 or 11. His father was working on a production that traveled to California after closing in New York, and Schlein went along. Armed with a Polaroid camera, he photographed one of the show's actresses during a publicity event.
Later, he slipped the Polaroid underneath the door of her hotel room.
The next morning, she sent him a handwritten note on hotel stationery thanking him for the picture.
“You’re a great photographer, Lonnie,” Schlein remembers it saying.
“I still have the Polaroid,” he said. “But more importantly than that ... that was the first time anyone ever told me I was a great photographer.”
Photography, however, wasn't the career Schlein initially expected to pursue.
His other childhood interests were politics and history. He began reading The New York Times when he was 12 or 13 and clipping stories he considered important, essentially creating his own archive of history. The oldest complete newspaper he still has is the Times from the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election in November 1960.
He studied political science at Brooklyn College, spending a year along the way at UCLA, and earned his license to teach high school history in New York.
By the summer of 1968, Schlein already had a teaching position waiting for him that fall. He also had a part-time job at The New York Times. It wasn't in the newsroom.
Schlein was working in the circulation department, supervising telephone solicitors selling home-delivery subscriptions. The job wasn't glamorous, but it accomplished something important. It got him inside the building.
Then one day, the circulation director asked Schlein for a favor. An executive needed a ride across Manhattan. Schlein was sent downstairs to meet him and found Harding Bancroft, then an executive vice president of The Times, waiting in a limousine.
Schlein drove him across town, and they got stuck in traffic. Bancroft asked the young college graduate what he planned to do with his life. Schlein told him about his teaching license and the job awaiting him.
“No, no, no,” Schlein remembers Bancroft responding. “We need young men like you at The New York Times.”
Schlein didn't think much of the exchange. The next morning, the personnel department called. Bancroft wanted The Times to find a place for him. Schlein gave up the teaching job and became a copy boy.
It was the beginning of a career at the newspaper that would last until 2011.
He moved from copy boy to news clerk, doing research for editors while still performing the mundane tasks expected of young newsroom employees in that era, including fetching coffee, cigarettes and snacks.
Eventually, an editor learned about Schlein's interest in photography and handed him a stack of contact sheets. Pick your five favorite frames, he was told. Schlein agonized over the assignment before making his selections.
“This is incredible,” Schlein remembers the editor telling him. “You picked exactly what I would have picked.”
Whether the editor was flattering him or not, Schlein isn't sure. What mattered was what happened next. Schlein became the first picture editor assigned to one of the newspaper's Sunday sections and eventually oversaw photography for The Times' culture coverage.
Then he moved into the newsroom. In 1991, Schlein became national photo editor, one of the most coveted positions on the newspaper's picture desk. For the next decade, he helped direct photographic coverage of presidential administrations, national political conventions, inaugurations and major events across the country.
In a way, the job finally brought together the two interests that had followed him since childhood — photography and history. It also gave Schlein plenty of opportunities to explain to photographers what he believed made a memorable news photograph. The predictable picture wasn't enough. In Washington, that often meant photographers shouldn't simply return with another photograph of a president standing behind a podium.
“Boring, boring,” Schlein said.
Everyone could see that picture. Schlein wanted his photographers to take a more complete look at their surroundings.
“Look around and see what's going on in the room,” he would tell them. “Give me some surprises, something that a reader would never see unless they were inside that room.”
It was advice he repeated countless times.
“Look around the room and see what you see and show it to us.”
Then came Sept. 10, 2001. After a decade overseeing national photography, Schlein had been reassigned as picture editor for The Times' Metro section. The newspaper was planning a redesign that would give photography a much larger presence in the section, and Schlein would oversee all 36 staff photographers. His first day was Sept. 10.
The editor he was replacing wasn't particularly pleased that Schlein, who knew little about the inner workings of the Metro desk, had been assigned to the position. At the end of the day, she made a joking remark Schlein has never forgotten.
“I hope a big thing happens tomorrow, and you're left here alone on the Metro desk as a photo editor,” Schlein remembers her saying.
The next morning, Schlein was home in Manhattan when a German guest staying with his family knocked on the bedroom door. She could see smoke coming from the World Trade Center.
The telephone rang. Someone from the Times photo desk told Schlein a private plane had apparently struck one of the towers and that he needed to get to work. But first, they asked whether he could get to the roof of his apartment complex and take a photograph looking south toward lower Manhattan.
Most of Schlein's camera equipment was at his family's home in the New York countryside. All he had with him was a 3.5-megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera. He took it to the roof, and as Schlein watched, the second plane struck the World Trade Center. He had the shot.
While photographers across the city raced toward Ground Zero, Schlein's vantage point produced something different: the burning towers surrounded by the broader New York City skyline. It was, in a sense, exactly the kind of photograph he had spent years asking his photographers to find.
The image appeared in The Times and later in A Nation Challenged, a book Schlein edited documenting the newspaper's photography from 9/11. But he was never fully pleased with the look of that classic image.
The little point-and-shoot camera had produced a low-resolution file. For nearly 25 years, Schlein couldn't make the kind of large print from the photograph that he wanted. Technology finally caught up with the image.
Working with those helping curate his Las Cruces exhibition, Schlein was able to use modern image-enhancement software to produce a 17-by-22-inch archival print. For the first time in a quarter-century, he said, he could see the photograph in print the way he remembered seeing the scene with his own eyes.
“It's really very, very exciting for me,” Schlein said.
That photograph will be among the images displayed at The Mad Hatter Gallery. The exhibition will also include a wall devoted to Schlein's political photography, much of it from the Clinton and George W. Bush era; photographs connected to 9/11 before and after the attacks; and images collectively depicting America and Americans. Additional prints will be available for visitors to leaf through rather than displayed on the walls.
Although Schlein spent most of his Times career as a photo editor rather than a staff photographer, he continued exploring his own photographs. Anything he shot for the newspaper was done as a freelancer, often while traveling, on vacation, on weekends or outside his regular working hours.
He continued shooting after accepting a buyout and leaving The Times in 2011.
“I haven't stopped shooting,” he said.
The road to Las Cruces came through another artist. Schlein became friends with New Mexico artist Virginia Maria Romero after helping connect her work with a gallery in Stockholm, Sweden, where Schlein had exhibited his own photography. During a later visit with Romero in New Mexico, she introduced him to the owners of The Mad Hatter Gallery.
The conversation eventually turned to whether Schlein might exhibit his work there. “Why not?” he remembers thinking.
Now, a career that began with a kid carrying a camera around New York, developed in the darkrooms at CBS and unfolded across decades of history at The New York Times is arriving on the walls of a Las Cruces gallery.
Through all of it, Schlein's approach hasn't changed much.
The camera matters less than the person behind it, he said. He has little interest in photographers boasting about expensive equipment. Modern cellphones, he points out, can make remarkable photographs.
The difference is knowing where to look. Sometimes that means standing on a Manhattan rooftop while history unfolds in front of you. Sometimes it means being inside a room with a president and turning your camera away from the podium.
And sometimes it means sitting quietly in the New Mexico desert for two hours, watching the clouds and waiting for the right train to come along.
“Look around,” Schlein said. “See what you see and show it to us.”
