Fred Baldwin's life took a turn towards the extraordinary when he decided to interview and record Pablo Picasso: in his last year of college he delivered a letter with his own drawings.

What followed were picture stories about reindeer migrations, a day and a night with the Ku Klux Klan, Nobel Prize coverage, cod fishing in Arctic Norway and polar bear expeditions, then underwater work on the fight of hooked marlin in Mexico, an homage to Hemingway. In 1963 he joined the Civil Rights Movement and recorded Martin Luther King; a two-year stint as Peace Corps director in Borneo was followed by more work in India and Afghanistan. The account takes the reader to high adventure worldwide, but also to disaster and failure: an illustrated love affair with freedom, showing how a camera became a passport to the world.