It's an interesting fact that some photographers who take many shots of a particular subject find, in the editing process, that the best shot was the first one. Not for Jonathan Torgovnik. With him, it's usually the last one.

"A lot of times, with the way I work, and the fact that my subjects are real people — usually I don't shoot known people — in real situations, it takes a while before they relax," said the Israeli American photographer. "Like the project I did in Rwanda, it's a very sensitive and emotional issue and people are not used to being in front of the camera, so it takes a while before I can get something more natural instead of being posed for me."

It could be that, in the case of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, he was just lucky. Torgovnik recently photographed Holder at two locations — the military academy at West Point and outside the Attorney General's Office in Washington, D.C. — for Newsweek.

"I was promised 20 minutes for the D.C. shoot and after I shot four pieces of film, after just three minutes, his handlers told me I had to stop," Torgovnik said in a recent interview. "We were shooting on the street and there was a big crowd of tourists gathering and they were nervous. It was very stressful, but one of those four was the one (the magazine) chose for the cover."

Torgovnik, who gives a free lecture and image presentation in Santa Fe on Tuesday, has worked for Newsweek since 1999 and has shot on contract with the magazine since 2005. His portfolios at torgovnik.com include series on methamphetamine users, cholera epidemics, Guatemalan elections, slums in India, and AIDs in South Africa, as well as portraits of artists, blues musicians and African children.

His earliest experiences with cameras and film were in high school in Israel, and his first professional work was during his service in the Israeli army from 1987 to 1990. At that time, he was working exclusively in black-and-white film, which he often processed himself.

"We had a lab and I would go out for a week or two to work on some kind of project, and sometimes I would do my own film-developing," he said. "That was my service. I did six months of infantry basic training, but I had a back injury so then I asked if I could be a photographer."

His camera work outside of the military had no real focus for some time. It was "just taking pictures on the street," as he puts it. After he was exposed to the pictures taken by the great documentary photographers Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he fell in love with it.

"Initially I really wanted to be a war photographer, but toward ending my time in the military, I decided I wanted more of a documentary angle. Today, I am more interested in social issues and global health. Plus, to be honest with you, I had to make a realistic calculation because since I was born in Israel, it would be hard for me to work in many Arab countries. You can't compete with many top photographers if you can't even go into half of the conflict zones.

"I also had a dream to come to New York to study art and photography, and that's what I did."

Torgovnik went on to earn a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and saw his photographs published in Le Monde, The Sunday Times and Aperture, among other journals.

Today, he often shoots using convenient digital cameras, but for the Eric Holder cover, he used a 4-by-5 view camera. "Newsweek is really good," he said. "When there's no pressing deadline, they're really open for me to shoot film. Yes, everybody's cutting back in this economy, but there's a certain level of creativity and quality that they don't compromise on. On something like this, when they know it's going to be a big feature and possibly a cover, they didn't hesitate letting me shoot 4-by-5 film."

Torgovnik is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. He led a workshop titled "The Digital Photojournalist" this past winter session and also has a documentary workshop, a workshop about working with NGOs, and a 10-week shooting and critique class in photojournalism.

He presents a fee workshop Tuesday through Saturday on "Environmental Portraiture" for the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. One of his own environmental portraits is of the comic Eddie Izzard. "I spent about two days following him around while he was performing in Boston," Torgovnik said. "He was very nice, low-key, and very interested in the history of the U.S. that you see there. And then at night he did his act. He's smart and funny and he has a ritual of watching old films while he's getting his makeup and getting dressed."

And how about the architect Richard Meier, another portrait subject? "I found him to be nice, but kind of dry. It's kind of indicative of his work: very white and very clean, the same as his office, with all the cubicles and everything white," Torgovnik recalled. "I do admire his work, and this is what I love about what I do: Every day or every assignment, you meet a lot of people and learn something new, things that most people will not have exposure to.

"Sometimes, though, you have no time to connect with portrait subjects, because they have to leave immediately. That's the advantage of doing my personal projects, like the big project about Rwanda I just concluded."

His Rwanda work will be the focus of the free Tuesday presentation sponsored by Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. That organization, founded in 1990, offers more than 200 workshops each year at its headquarters in Santa Fe, at a satellite campus in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and in field expeditions all over the world. Six other photographers besides Torgovnik — Joe Buissink, Jerry Courvosier, Nadav Kander, David Michael Kennedy, Norman Mauskopf and Tony Sweet — offer free presentations with the Santa Fe Workshops on the evenings of Wednesday and Thursday.

Torgovnik's involvement in Rwanda didn't end when he departed the East African country with the photographs he had sought. The photojournalist made repeated trips there, documenting the stories of many of the mothers of an estimated 20,000 children born from rape during the country's 1994 genocide. He is a co-founder of Foundation Rwanda, an organization dedicated to providing education funding for those children, offering aid to the children's mothers, and spreading the truth about genocide and sexual violence.

Aperture published Torgovnik's new book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape in May and hosted an exhibition of his Rwandan photos at its New York gallery earlier this year.

The project was three years in the making. "The big one before that was about the film industry in India," he said. (That work is documented in his first book, Bollywood Dreams, published by Phaidon Press in 2004.) "And in between, I have personal stories I do. I'm very organic in how I work. I'm not a photographer that has like a five-year plan. I read, I look at things, and I finally try to engage some of the things I think are important and maybe are under-reported."

IF YOU GO

What: Jonathan Torgovnik, public lecture/image presentation
When: 8:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Santa Fe Preparatory School auditorium, 1101 Camino de Cruz Blanca, 983-1400
Cost: Free


www.santafeworkshops.com/workshops/calendar-detail.php?workshop=369&all=1
www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/about/index.jsp?sid0=68
www.aperture.org/exposures/?tag=intended-consequences
www.aperture.org/ic.html
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rw.html
www.foundationrwanda.org/