About Early & Later Black & White
Early & Later Black & White (1967 – 1980s, 2005 & 2009)
In 1967, when I was working at a psychiatric halfway house in San Francisco, I took, for no particular reason I can recall, an interest in photography, while knowing absolutely nothing about it. On a whim, I bought a clunky, fixed-lens, Nikkorex 35mm camera. Since then I have moved often, and in one of those moves I lost most of the negatives I made in the first couple of years in which I threw myself haphazardly but with great zeal into making pictures. (No real loss, I am sure.) One of the only images to survive from that year is of a coffee shop that was not far from the halfway house. I suppose I could read into it various premonitions of work I would do over the next several decades, but I think that would be nonsense. It was, nevertheless, an important first step, and I think I recognized that in some way even then.
The picture of my infant niece – who is now married and the mother of two – on a blanket adrift on a sea of dark grass, is a metaphor or dream. Not that I realized this when the shutter clicked. It was a piece of luck more than a product of intention. As Lee Friedlander has remarked, photography is a very generous medium. One of the things you have to learn is to accept with some measure of humility the gifts that it gives you.
I had the good fortune to work with Minor White while I was still an undergraduate, and the further great luck to pursue graduate studies with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. There is little point in resisting influences like these. Even for someone as reflexively contrary as I am, the only sensible response is to absorb them and be grateful. Sooner or later, if you keep working, you integrate what you emulate, and you make something new from it. My overt Callahan knockoffs are an homage to a man I greatly admired.
The rest of the pictures in this portfolio reflect my continuing absorption in the medium. I became increasingly intrigued with discovering, through the making of photographs, a sense of mystery, theatricality, revelation, and absurdity along with the magic of light in the world around me. Those interests remain as vital as ever more than fifty years after I began.