ARTISTIC FIRSTS

Me in early 70’s with first painting

Here is a photo that I was overjoyed to find while digitizing family photos last year. It shows me perhaps at the age of 13, proudly in front of what I considered my first painting – the first one I did on my own initiative and valued. I used an old roll up window blind as the canvas. I gave it to my sister as a Christmas present but it was lost and I despaired that I couldn’t remember it exactly. I copied the design from a National Geographic. I already had a favorite artist – Picasso. A couple years later it would become Vincent Van Gogh, who I love to this day.

A shot of my nephew for a high school photo essay which I found recently – one of my first photos ever. 1974

Another picture I found shows my first “photographic project”. I have written elsewhere of how I never used cameras before taking up photography in 1989, but this is an exception. I tried a while to work for the high school newspaper and decided to make a humorous photo essay for it, borrowed a camera and shot my nephew wandering the halls as if it was his first day at school. This photo was evidently not processed properly so it has turned into something else with the decades. Strangely, it is the sort of thing I might do today if I could. I love “accidents” like this. It’s as if life is showing you how to make art, to see the beauty in the process and the flaws, in time itself.

My first self-printed photo? Angel Island 1987 or 1988

Another, sadly not well reproduced here, can be said to be my first self printed photo. I was studying movie making at City College San Francisco. My girlfriend was meanwhile studying photography. She told me one of her classes was taking a field trip to Angel Island and that the best photo would get a prize. Angel Island was formerly a military base in the SF bay, which had abandoned barracks, all without doors, windows or staircases, in the midst of a huge eucalyptus grove. She inquired and I was allowed to come along and participate, even though I only could shoot using my Super-8 film camera. The topics of the competition were doors, windows and photographers taking pictures. It may be difficult to see, but this is a picture of someone using a camera on a tripod to take a picture of one of the barracks windows.

I looked through the frames I shot and picked a couple to try to print. This meant making an internegative on 35mm black and white photographic film myself, something I’d never done. I used the enlarger I’d bought for my friend to do this and then to print the photo I submitted, again my first. At that time I was using a manual processing tank to develop my movie film. It was quite easy to get agitation problems and end up with wild processing flaws, which I naturally liked. I picked one that seemed most ethereal as well as most messed up chemically speaking.

I learned later that my photo was selected for the final round in the competition, even though I wasn’t taking a photo class. I was told I nearly won but it provoked an argument between the teachers who formed the jury. I never got it back unfortunately – apparently it was lost. The copy I show here was a poorer quality work print copied by my sister using her cell phone for me. I still have the film though so perhaps one day I will reprint it. I remember it looking fabulous with rich blacks and hazy, smoky developing flaws.