Bruce Jaffe fell in love with photography at age 8 at summer camp. There was a photography teacher there who had set up a darkroom and showed him how to develop and print the pictures he took with his Kodak Brownie camera. Even though it had a cheap lens, it used the same medium format versatile, fast Tri-X film used by professional photographers with their Rolleiflexes and Hasselblads. From then on he took pictures with a passion - for the high school yearbook, the college newspaper, and so on.

Later he shot pictures as a freelance photographer of anything people would pay him to photograph - weddings, portraits, you name it. Eventually he got a job as a photo editor and later photo library manager for a major news and stock photo agency in New York called Liaison (later acquired by Getty Images). That was followed by a short stint filling in as a photo researcher at Newsweek magazine over the holidays in 1992. His stay there kept getting extended until finally he was hired as a staff member a year later, where he remained for 15 years. He rose to Senior Photo Editor, working on every section of the magazine and major news events including international news, politics, arts and culture. Jaffe's tenure included working on just about every major news story of the time, from the Internet revolution and return of Steve Jobs to Apple Computer, to the Oklahoma City bombing, to 9/11, to presidential campaigns, to the capture of Saddam Hussein, to the Asian Tsunami.