After one career as a photojournalist and editorially engaged photographer, presiding over Magnum and willingly taking assignments and commissions, he chose another course—a path he called personal documentary—in the context of art and education. This is when photography, for him, was no longer the next assignment but was itself the assignment. Eventually his photographs, still prescient descriptions of the mood and content of what was happening, became less moored to the time and place of their picture stories, photo opportunities and the documentary imperative, and became abiding images that capture the poetry and humanity of existence. Looking at his work retrospectively is a journey in form and feeling we need to experience to help preserve our own delicate contact with the pulse of life.
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In Charlie’s last book, he spoke to the title "Departures and Arrivals" in his introduction and how they are part of the nature of life. “Things change in every life and disappear, but it is the photographs that remain from my life. They are what I looked at, fell in love with (or didn’t), and never forgot. There are pictures of men and boys, women and girls, statues, pensive monkeys; moments that took my breath away, angered me, made me smile. That broke my heart.” He said some departures go smoothly and sometimes they hurt. His death is like the pictures he loved the best, the ones that were at once a departure and an arrival.