Page 96 - AlertDiver_Winter2013

IMAGING // S H O O T E R
94 | WINTER 2013
Then it was all about journalism. I was embedded on the
front lines and had opportunities to document battles for
the Associated Press in Israel — stories that got worldwide
circulation. I shot black-and-white and color negatives as well
as medium-format color slides. But it got to the point where
blood, smoke and fire wore me out. It was exciting, challenging
and emotionally disturbing, but I’d had enough of that life and
moved on. The next chapter of my life was entirely different.
Three friends and I went into the yacht-delivery business, and I
got to see a lot of the world pass beneath our bows.
As for New York, I was still bumming around but had a
dream to learn television and film. With nothing in particular to
lose, I moved there, going to school at New York University at
night and supporting myself driving taxis. I could barely speak
English then, so I fit right into the local cabbie scene. I wanted to
improve my language skills, so I found a job with Atlantis II dive
shop in Manhattan, working with dive icon Butch Hendricks.
That forced me to speak English and learn the vocabulary.
SF// What happened to your dream of being a filmmaker?
AN// I was in a wonderful program at New York University.
The year was 1980, and my dream class had three teachers:
Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Francis Coppola. There
were 400 applicants for this class, and we all had to show our
work and then be interviewed to be accepted. Incredibly to
me at the time, I was one of only 35 invited to move on to
advanced studies. But I couldn’t afford the tuition. That was
essentially the end of that dream.
Yet my days of wandering the globe on other people’s
yachts suggested I was good at travel — organizing logistics
and executing complicated tour itineraries. A friend of mine
from the service joined me, and we decided to promote the
dive attractions of our home waters in the Red Sea.
SF// I remember my first trip to the Red Sea in the early