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Dietmar Busse's portrait of designer Isabel Toledo, part of his new Artists and Starlets project. ©Dietmar Busse

After high school, I was just traveling. I was going to go to university, but I was really too busy hanging out in Spain, Morocco, Turkey. I registered at Berlin University to become a lawyer. That was the only thing where you didn’t have to have a certain kind of average; they would let anyone become a lawyer at that time. And since my grades were very mediocre, they were just good enough to become a lawyer without being on a waiting list. The day I was supposed to start school, I got a little job offer taking care of a farm in Spain for German people. I went there, realized the job was not for me, and on my way back to Germany, I got stuck in Madrid. I was only 20 years old, and started going out and partying while university had started in Berlin. I was having a nice time being a club kid, and started to meet people there on the scene. Everyone was a model or designer or photographer. And this kind of sparked my imagination. Meeting people who were involved in that kind of business made it seem more possible for me to be part of the business, and I started to think I could become a photographer, too. I went with a model friend of mine to a photography studio to check things out and I just kept going back. The first assistant was a German guy, so I somehow got connected with him and the studio. And that’s how I started. I really didn’t know anything about photography; I never went to photography school or anything like that.

While I was going to that studio, I picked up books on photography and just taught myself. I went to the studio every day until I became an assistant, second assistant, and eventually first assistant. I worked at that studio for almost two years, from 1987 to 1989. After that, I freelanced. Well, I was also working as a bartender, night jobs. Just sort of getting by. The freelancing wasn’t going very well in Spain. There was not enough of a market. I planned to move to Italy, since I wanted to stay in photography and I wanted to stay on the Mediterranean. Me being German, I liked the idea of living where all the rest of the Germans had to go on vacation. I was getting ready to go to Italy, and then somehow, through fate, I met someone who had moved to New York City, and he gave me his business card. A month before I planned to go from Madrid to Milan, I talked to a friend, and he said, “You’re crazy, you shouldn’t go to Milan, you belong in New York.” And when he said that, I knew I was doing that.

Rossy de Palma ©Dietmar Busse

So I came to New York in 1991. I knew one person, the guy who had given me his card. I called him to see if I could stay at his apartment. He said yes so I just packed my stuff in two bags and bought a ticket to New York. I’d never been there before. I rather quickly found a job at Industria Super Studio, a big studio down on Washington Street in Greenwich Village that had just opened. I was very naive, and very nice, and Germans have a good reputation for work ethic. So I got the job I think just by my nationality. I worked there for few years on a freelance basis as a photo assistant. One of the perks of being so closely associated with Industria was that you could use their equipment and studio. They were very friendly and supportive. The payback was not so much in the kind of money they would give you, it was very much in the access one had to the other photographers, assistants, and their equipment. So I ended up working with different people. It was very open. It was a good place to become part of a network.

I worked like this until 1995 when I started getting my first gigs as a photographer. When I look back on it now, my transition from being an assistant to becoming a working photographer went really quickly. Within a very short period of time I was working for magazines, like the New York Times Magazine, Visionaire, Interview, and Paper Magazine. It was great. This is how I became a photographer.