VOL. 23, NO. 12	JANUARY 23, 1998

Max Aguilera-Hellweg. Record Photo by Joe Pineiro.

t happened when Savvy, a now-defunct women's business magazine, sent Max Aguilera-Hellweg to shoot a laminectomy (a back operation that removes the rear portion of one or more vertebrae from the spinal column) at the V.A. Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

  "When I stepped into that room I knew that I didn't want just to photograph the saving of someone's life," he says, his eyes alight and his small hands gesticulating; "I wanted to save that life." That was eight years ago and although by then he'd spent almost 20 years in photojournalism, Aguilera-Hellweg was suddenly and irrevocably consumed by the desire to be a doctor.

  As surprising as it was to him at first, he now sees his operating room conversion as just the final turn in an evolution begun long ago. He remembers that even as a kid he would excitedly leaf through medical books, devouring the diagrams and photos of operations and diseases. And increasingly while shooting stories he "hungered to cross that line"—the line, he explains, dividing the passive chronicler of events from the active participant.

  To become a doctor Aguilera-Hellweg needed an education. He was then in his late 30s with only a high school diploma and an academic transcript that showed little promise in science and even less in math (he failed trigonometry).

  But during the years that his contemporaries spent in classrooms and in offices, he'd been in Peru: pointing his lens at cadres of the Sendero Luminoso, the country's most violent terrorist revolutionary faction, as they pointed their gun barrels at him and writer-turned-presidential-candidate Mario Vargas Llosa; and he'd been in Texas: in the jail cell of a young mass murderer who had shot nine Buddhist monks; and in Bangkok: among 12-year-old Thais who'd been sold into prostitution by their parents and were adorned with numbers so johns could easily pick them out, and in California: in the orchards and fields with migrant labor leader Cesar Chavez, about whom Aguilera-Hellweg says, "It was like meeting Jesus Christ."

  For the admissions committee at Columbia's School of General Studies, that was preparation enough; the discipline, drive, maturity and intellectual curiosity he demonstrated in his career as a photojournalist largely filled the holes in his scholastic record. "It's obvious from looking at his work that Max is not just an eye, not just an aperture," says Thea Volpe, Aguilera-Hellweg's GS advisor and the director of the school's Post-Baccalaureate/Pre-Med program. "His approach to his subjects is very analytical: you can see his brilliance in the way that Max's work tries—and succeeds—in revealing the emotional and spiritual characteristics of what he's photographing." Aguilera-Hellweg, now 42, entered GS in the spring of 1995.

  Rather than an end in itself, photojournalism has become a means to an end. Aguilera-Hellweg sold a publisher on the idea of a coffee table book of his operating room pictures—of liver transplants, tumor extractions, radical mastectomies: of the human body under the surgeon's knife—that became his passport to explore the world of medicine. "The book was an excuse to go back into the operating room," he says. His fascination had doctors and nurses remarking that he asked more questions than med students did.

The Museum of Modern Art has this photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger, an early work of Aguilera-Hellweg, in its permanent collection.

  The Sacred Heart was published last fall to much controversy. Criticism of the stark images of surgical operations have ranged from "tantamount to cannibalism" to "godly and humane." Ironically, the bookstore of the Museum of Modern Art, which has an early Aguilera-Hellweg of Arnold Schwarzenegger in its permanent collection, refuses to carry The Sacred Heart. The book has nevertheless sold so well in other stores that its distributor quickly ran out of copies.

  But to pay his GS tuition and the rent on his Manhattan apartment, Aguilera-Hellweg has maintained a full-time schedule of magazine assignments. In the space of a week he may be sent to Seattle for The New Yorker, San Francisco for Forbes and Phoenix for Esquire.

  Despite studying more often than not on a plastic fold-down tray table at 30,000 feet, he only has a few labs left to take to fulfill his pre-med requirements. Aguilera-Hellweg estimates, however, that at the present pace he is still two or three years away from a BA.

  When the day comes that he can at last devote himself entirely to medicine, Aguilera-Hellweg says he won't look back: "I feel like there's nothing more for me to do in photography; I feel compelled to become what I've passionately been photographing—and on my days off take snapshots of dogs and cats like normal people."