RICHARD SPEEDY wasn’t planning on working last January when he took his fifth trip to Mexico’s Copper Canyon, but he happened to be on the same trek as senior editor Joe Nick Patoski, who needed someone to document his crossing of the vast and brutal expanse (see “Let’s Get Lost,”. Yet while Speedy is a veteran advertising photographer whose past clients include Lucent Technologies and Sony, he was nervous about this job—at least at first. “It kind of scared me,” he says. “I had to think about things in a different light and about photographing things I wouldn’t normally photograph.” Fortunately, the mystical quality of the canyon put him at ease: “I eventually got into a groove and became very comfortable with the assignment. There’s magic there.” Speedy, who makes his home in Princeton, New Jersey, says he felt an unspoken bond with his fellow hikers, one he knew was genuine when he read the first draft of Patoski’s story. “I thought, ‘Wow, we saw and experienced the same things,’” he says. “Even little details in the story described things I had photographed—and we had never talked about it.”
