" and the friends
that I've known,
that I've loved and let go -
how I wish that I could see them again.
I'd ask them to forgive and forget that we met
when my heart was too young and so thin" ...
Verse from the song Dropped Stitches 2008.
When I was seven years old my mother took me on the Santa Fe Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, then on to New York where we visited relatives that I had never seen before. My uncle Abe handed me a Kodak Brownie camera, put a Brooklyn Dodger cap on my head, and quietly motioned towards the entrance to Ebbets Field as if it were holy ground - which it was. So began my lifelong love for photography, baseball, trains and old cars.
While attending the University of California @ Berkeley I frequently printed photographs in the ASUC studio where one day I was introduced to the great Czech surrealist photographer Vilem Kriz. Eager to show him the print I had been working on for about an hour I brought it into the light where he took the wet print out of its' fixing bath to study it. To my astonishment he then let it slide through his fingers and onto the studio floor. "Garbage, my dear" he said. "Simply garbage...you must do over". I knew at that moment I had found my master.
For the next three years I became Vilems' apprentice and unofficial teaching assistant at Holy Names and Mills College in Oakland California. He taught me about the poetry of light, shadow and time that comprise the heart of photographic endeavor. "Righhht lighhht" he would yell at me. "You must be patient my dear". Wherever I walked I would carry my trusty Rolliflex - you never knew what surprise the Gods of photography might have in store for you.
Storm Clearing, Arcata 1970
One afternoon my friend Mary Mason called to tell me the photographer at the theater she worked for called in sick and could I come down and take publicity photos. I said sure, never having taken a theater photograph in my life. That night I walked into the marvelous insanity of the Berkeley Stage Company, insinuated myself on stage and photographed a dress rehearsal for an experimental theater troop. By using an old M2 Leica I was allowed on stage since the rangefinder type camera made none of the noise one hears from the usual 35mm reflex cameras. Just an almost inaudible "tick".
Unfortunately since you are not literally looking through the lens of a rangefinder type camera it is possible to shoot all night with the lens cap on! Which - I discovered back stage - just as the director entered the room with a "well, how'd it go...get some good shots"? I rushed to develop the film I had never used before, in developer I'd never used, dreading the blank images I was sure were there. Holding my breath I surveyed the wet film by the darkroom light - the images were fantastic! The lens cap had been correctly off all the time I had been shooting. So began a five year career as in-house photographer for the Berkeley Stage Company culminating by winning the City Arts Monthly award for best theater photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1980.
