Today, Steve is free of cancer, married to Marilynne for 38 years, father of one, grandfather of three—and leading a distinctly nonlinear life. The faith of his earlier years was discarded to pursue success as a news photographer, which he left behind and then rediscovered his faith, which in turn strengthened his love for photography with a purpose. It has been an interesting journey.

Raised in an evangelical family, Steve now thinks he “certainly wasn’t walking close to the Lord.” As editor of a high-school newspaper that had no photographers and needed one, he picked up a camera and discovered a passion for photography. Soon enough, he began working for Associated Press as a night photo editor during the height of the Vietnam War. But the faith of his youth seemed absent.

“All my time with AP and in the years that followed, I walked away from my faith,” he says. “Left it behind. I bought into the secular, humanist lie that to be a journalist, you have to be cynical, skeptical—you have to have no beliefs. For all those years, I bought the whole lie.”

For the moment, his ambition would own the day.

“I would go in every day and ask to go to Vietnam, and my boss would say I was too young for combat photography.” But he finally offered Steve a job at a one-man photo bureau in Albany.

During his time in Albany, a group of African-American students staged an armed protest at Cornell University.

“They took over the Student Union. It was the first time in America that students had taken over an Ivy League campus,” Steve remembers. “When they came out the door with all these shotguns and ammunition, I was there, and the UPI guy was still driving down the freeway. It was one of those things that broke my way big-time.”

And his photos got big-time recognition as well, netting Steve the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1970. With his stock rising at AP, Steve took a job in the Miami bureau, passing on an offer for Washington, D.C. But after several years in Miami and seven years of internal AP politics, Steve decided to leave it all behind and start a freelance business in Miami.

“Freelancing then was easier than it is today, but it was still difficult,” he says. Steve’s work consisted entirely of commercial photography—news photography was a distant memory—but his business began to prosper. After several years, with more than a dozen employees, he realized that his work had not left behind just photojournalism, but also photography itself.

“I was terribly unhappy. I was no longer making pictures, I was just running a business. I was burning out, and I was just coming up on 40.”

Steve decided to sell the commercial business and start over as a one-man freelance operation. But deeper questions still troubled him.

“There seems to be a window in life when people start asking the right questions,” he says. “I wandered into a little Episcopal church near where we were living. I was looking for the Lord, and found Him, in that little church.”

Through the fellowship of a few men at his church, Steve revived the faith of his youth in ways he had never known—and started shooting photojournalism assignments at the same time. “It was really a blessed time. I was back in photojournalism and rediscovered my faith.”

His work for the Picture Group—later the Saba agency—prompted Steve and Marilynne to accept an offer to start a Saba bureau in Los Angeles in 1992, a move that later proved perilous in taking him away from his spiritual roots.

“I was working so much in Los Angeles that we didn’t find a church home. Soon, I felt that my renaissance with the Lord was fading.”

and opened a freelance business concentrating on Christian ministry assignments. At first, assignments were slow in coming, but he finally felt as if he had arrived where God meant him to be.

Then Steve Starr got sick.

When he arrived back terribly ill from an overseas assignment, Steve’s doctors feared tropical diseases—perhaps even the deadly Ebola virus. But in a battery of tests, they discovered a form of leukemia not often friendly to treatment. After initial success with chemotherapy in 2001, his condition worsened—a bad sign, since returning cancer is almost always harder to treat.

By the time his white cell count had diminished to virtually zero, Steve was certain he would soon die, but he was not worried.

“I realized that I was totally OK with going home to the Lord,” he says. “I knew that my sins were forgiven; I knew I was going to heaven. I knew I had made a mess with the earlier part of my life but found truth in the end. And I was totally at peace with that.”
Shortly after his church held a ceremony to lay hands on Steve and pray for his health—and after another round of chemotherapy—Steve’s cancer suddenly reversed. His tumors disappeared, and his infection-fighting white cells returned. Steve believes simply that God used the technology in granting his healing. While reluctant to call it a miracle, even Steve’s skeptical oncologist called his recovery “very, very unusual.”

For Steve Starr, it is another of a life full of second chances.

“I was totally at peace. But if the Lord wants to use me for some other purpose, then that’s what I want to do.

“One thing about having cancer and coming back from being nearly dead is that it gives you a sense of perspective. I have no reticence any more about being bolder with my secular customers, praying more with people, living more for the Lord every day. As Christians, we need to reclaim our heritage in our society. We are supposed to have truth.We need to act like it. We need to live like it.”