About

My photography adventures began when I lugged a Mamiya C3 twin reflex - weighing in at 1.7kg - on bicycle from Champaign, Illinois to Vancouver, BC via LA. It survived a similar trip the following summer to the East Coast, from DC to the northern end of Nova Scotia. By then I'd shot enough pictures to know how to see a good picture even if it wasn't staring me in the face; and to know how much I liked photography.

A gift of a Kodak Retina Reflex followed - and departed just as quickly out the gearshaft opening in the floor of the truck I was hitching a ride on south on the New Jersey turnpike. Two more Japanese cameras, the Olympus OM1 and OM2 - part of a setup including motor drive, filters, and an assortment of Zuiss lens purchased from this cat - alleviated the grief, and the next year a darkroom was added to the setup: it came from a man named "Woody" who, sensibly enough, was named after the actor he could have doubled for. Prior to the digital age I racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 images.

Because I was raised as a math-science-art kid, whatever writing skills that didn't atrophy lay dormant until the late 20's when, for better or worse, they surfaced in the form of poetry. As repulsive as this medium might seem to many, it pales in comparison to performance poetry - aka the Poetry Slam, which I stayed in just long enough to get splashed across the front page of the Chicago Tribune magazine one Sunday morning in 1990. This shameful experience did, however, yield exquisite pleasure: the pained indignation of Wicker Park's veteran performance poets who were passed by in a photo op for a smart-assed upstart in a shabby sharkskin suit, rumpled hair and dirty fingernails.

The poetry horse has, thankfully, been taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery. Many other fits and starts have followed. What makes sense here in this effort is taking two things I truly love to do and combining them into one. This blog is not titled "What I am Seeing" because the emphasis isn't supposed to be on "I" but on thinking about what is shown in the photo, how it came into being, and what sort of connections get drawn from it.