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MacGregor, as he was known to his fellow photo-journalists, had an odd,

egg-shaped head. He was not very tall, and no matter what time of the day or

what day of the year you ran into him, he always appeared to be wearing the

same pair of jeans---dirty, shrivelled, child-sized jeans that suggested he spent

the better part of the day crawling through mud, blood and paddy fields, which in

fact he did.

MacGregor liked to connect with people, but only through a pint of beer, or

through the lens of his camera, with the camera he was a master of the human

subject. He was capable of putting on a disarming air and liked to seduce

whoever he was photographing with mild conversation as they writhed and

flexed in his viewfinder. He was even better at courting war. Order from chaos,

he liked to say, as sighted exploded around him. He often talked about finding

the constant point in chaos, that solid bullet of rationality. “It’s not just point and

shoot, point and shoot,” he would say. “It’s a thinking man’s job.” When he

talked his brain, concealed behind that high forehead, was boilder factory inoverdrive, ceaselessly generating sweat.

Like most photographers, MacGregor wore the khaki multi-pocket vest, a

badge of courage for his industry. Among photo-journalists, these vests were

venerable uniforms, not because they were glamourous (Clint Eastwood wore

one in The Bridges of Madison Country ) but because they were useful for storing

lens caps, lens filters, cigarettes, gum, and cheap little toys that photographers

like MacGregor stocked to give to the street children of Manila, Jakarta, to reward

them for sitting still and not looking into his camera.

If asked what kind of pictures he specialised in, he would reply that hetook pictures of “scenic poverty.” He pronounced “poverty” with a detached and

lovely northern accent, so that instantly one conjured up images of Indian

pilgrims washing red-dyed cottons in the Ganges, of babies with kohl-lined eyes

staring defiantly into the camera in Afghanistan, of wizened Peranakan women

squatting in doorways of Malacca. Scenic poverty, he would say gently, picking

up a Guinness and shaking his head.

MacGregor was very ironic about his job. He had learned, as a young man

practicing his craft with the British Army, that newspaper and magazine editors

loved irony, loved oxymorons. Ugliness in beauty, beauty in ugliness. The youngeditors from Oxford and Cambridge, with their neat little silver ties and

cornflower blue shirts in air-conditioned London offices, loved the human drama

that MacGregor sent to them from far corners of the world. It stoked in them

small fires of poetry that they had first experienced as undergraduates reading

Heredotus and Homer. MacGregor was not a deep thinker, but he knew what

deep thinkers wanted.