Max Aguilera-Hellweg

Photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg was first entranced by photography when, as a boy playing hooky, he came across his father’s World War II photo albums. After exhausting his father’s collection, he went to the library and sought out history books and old magazines—anything with pictures in it. “I was mesmerized by the power of photographs to reveal the unknown,” he says.

Just a month shy of his 18th birthday, he was hired by Rolling Stone magazine to work in its darkroom and assist chief photographer Annie Leibovitz when she was in town. Aguilera-Hellweg began to take his own photos, including a shot of a young bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger. That photo now hangs in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.