To their six-year-old daughter, he explained, "I'm going on assignment, and I'll call you from Africa".
He joined "Fortune" magazine and went on assignment with photographer Walker Evans into the South in 1936 in search of a story on sharecroppers.
Mr. Rodriguez was working with Black Star at the time, and was about to cut short his gang project in L.A. to go on assignment to Bosnia.
Each office, for instance, holds its own donations in the bank and has a list of physicians prepared to go on assignment.
It went on assignment with him from Berlin - where he was posted from 1950 to 1953, returning in the 60s - to Delhi, Washington and Brussels.
But then Simmons went (on assignment for Nest magazine) to the Museum of the City of New York to photograph the legendary Stettheimer dollhouse.
As the numbers of dangerous working environments have grown, editors have worked harder to put in processes that better prepare journalists before they go on assignment and help them know what to do if an assignment goes wrong.
On Valentine's Day, an hour before she would have been sitting down to dinner with her husband, Ann Curry wrote on Facebook, "Going on assignment but unable to tell you where because of the security risk".
"I know something about 'making' pictures — that is, going on assignment and finding something interesting to shoot," said Mr. Carlebach, 67, a former freelance photographer for The Miami Herald and a professor emeritus at the University of Miami.
