I have to say that I feel privileged to have started out, age 16, with a Brownie--that simple old "Everymans' camera" through which so much record of our forebears still lives. Now approaching 66, I am finally admitting my age--as one who comes primarily from an era much less media saturated. So what follows here is more like the talky "Dial M for Murder" than most on any type of screen for 2 decades. For starters, this early Brownie shot from 1968 records, as lead Sioux dancer in black, a woman who as a small child survived the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre:

 

 

In college in 1974 I acquired, as a graduation gift from my folks, a Yashica Electro 35 GSN, a popular rangefinder, which I then used for 20+ years with just its simple accessories. Its Yashinon lens was great and I figured that alone could keep me busy for decades or a lifetime. I never much cared about equipment or gear. For me, photography was about finding the subject, and then staying with it long enough to see how to shoot it. I would take awhile to contemplate it, and then try to get what I was after in one shot. I meticulously studied different films and f stops and made scrapbooks with data, but only rarely bracketed. If I had it, I had it; otherwise no.

 

 

I was mostly a nature photographer for many years, to the extent I was doing anything beyond recording my life, places and people. My portraiture was rare for well over a decade. I never felt comfortable asking people to pose, largely because, I know, most people do not feel entirely comfortable doing so. Even so, I amassed a handful of spontaneous portraits over time -- pictures where people were just integral to the moment. These still constitute for me a sort of ideal. Eerily, in hindsight, they stand for lost times, faces, and places that, after years, I alone now recall, and too often only because of the picture.

 

 

My original Yashica was destroyed by seawater trying to get shots at sunset at Ragged Point, California in August 1988, wading in tidepools. The last roll was one of the best I ever shot with the camera . . . .

 

 

I picked up a couple Electro GSN replacements in used shops, but they never seemed as fine tuned as my original Yashica which, while rudimentary, was one of the most astonishing devices of any kind that I have ever owned. Afterwards, I tardily graduated to SLRs with a Canon AE1 which opened up new possibilities, especially regarding available light.

 

 

I used the AE1 as my primary camera until 2005 when I went digital after a long attempt to avoid doing so. I then began using digital Fujifinepix, first the S5100 and then a long stint with the S9100. Both are excellent, especially the latter. My tardiness going digital had much to do with having to admit that 30 years of intense study of a different technology was for many practical purposes superceded. But not for all. For I had also found that old technology challenging, especially the different types of film available back then, and their wide variety of effects. All built in, by the way, in film choice--and so a challenge. In the world before photo shopping, you just had to be more adept and careful,

 

 

I also still sense an unfamiliar coldness about even the best digital shots -- perhaps especially the best. You can't knock the results overall, of course. So I still explore areas where I believe film photography remains relevant with the now refurbished Yashica rangefinders, the Canon AE1, and a recently acquired refurbished Yashica FR1. Digitals are great but, like any other invention, they cannot do everything, and technical superiority is not all. I mainly use the old cameras in the summer when I set up projects in my backyard studio; albums here for past projects, using all my cameras, are Bonfire of the Vanities and House of Mirrors.

 

 

My current project is mixed new work and photo shopping old, titled Convergences. It developed this way because in the midst of it, I came down in late 2016 with a serious illness that prevented me getting out for many months. It is part pictorial autobiography, but also that "converged" with family history, signs of the times, and some perhaps arbitrary visual motifs from the prior projects, from which it adopts some out takes. I will know better what this massive undertaking is when I finish it--or perhaps just arbitrarily cut it off and move on, which I am dying to do since now getting better.

 

 

 

 

With the Finepix in hand, I had zero interest in "graduating" to a digital SLR, for a long time, remaining something of a Luddite on the whole issue of photographic equipment. I greatly liked the flexibility of those Finepix cameras when outdoors on treks, or just in the backyard.

 

 

Nevertheless, in the fall of 2012 -- age 61, if you can believe that -- I finally decided to call off the long self-imposed apprenticeship with the Finepix cameras & acquired a Canon Eos Rebel T3i. As far as my decades long involvement with nature and landscape photography, it is now as good as it gets.

 

 

Much of the action now is reprocessing our new world of digital images on the computer, which I am now quite free about although I long considered it heresy--an image was an artifact of life, I had always felt. Alteration comes naturally with digitalization, of course, and in many respects a digital image stands in the shoes of a negative during the film era--requiring further work. But I nonetheless believe this everyday manipulation of images -- now available to anyone -- is a seismic shift in the craft of photography since its inception. It is already deeply effecting attitudes toward reality worldwide, for good, ill, and both. I prefer Microsoft Digital Image Suite to any edition of Adobe Photoshop for manipulating images, and I am very sorry it has been discontinued. I confess I am experimenting deeply in manipulation too; some posted at my Digital Darkroom album here and in the My Photo Lab collection. Virtually all the images which you see posted here, old and new, have been recast on the computer to some degree, and I have also started digital restoration of historical images.

 

 

I have no formal training or schooling in photography, although I have read and studied a great deal, especially about the early history of the craft. Perhaps this is why I have been satisfied all along with basic gear -- realizing how much was achieved in times past with so much less. I have been on shoots with students of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, but the largest direct influence on me was the late George Anstrand, a Benedictine oblate who I knew in my teens at a Dakota monastery, when I was just goofing around with the Brownie. His surviving work that is in my possession is posted in an album here in tribute.

 

 

Unfortunately I do not have a photo portrait of this dimunitive man, by myself or anyone else. So the basic record -- the primary office of photography -- is not fulfilled in his respect. Besides George's slight size I remember him as nervous, verbally inarticulate. Yet his surviving images speak to me of a vastness of vision and a great patience. Such paradoxes thus remain a spur, 49 years later, to keep scratching deeper into what can be unveiled out of a split second of time.

 

Incidentally -- and only in most recent years -- I have finally "gotten over" posing people, and have started doing portraits more formally, although still usually on location and somewhat spontaneously.

 

 

All in all, while occasionally called on to do some formal work for friends, such as weddings, or for institutions I have been associated with, anyone can see I am but an experienced amateur, and frankly lacking a lot of skill you see in others at this website. But I have a 40 year career in a whole other area -- plus, when it comes to creative work -- my largest acquired skill relates to literature and writing. So why photography? Well, frankly, an escape from all that. Love to spend hours on this website, and learn much from many of you especially some of my first and oldest flickr friends. My outdoor studio & indoor studio are my own personal Great Escape from controversy, cultural meltdown, and, to borrow from Hamlet, "words, words, words."

 

 

 

Is photography an art? That really remains a big question. I simply recuse myself from that debate. But read Susan Sontag's provocative book length study on that question, "On Photography." I am more comfortable with the word "craft." Yet even then, many photos taken by people with zero skills are priceless.

 

I would say that photos, good or bad, have an important -- and perhaps primary -- office as a record. We are already so accustomed to them after 160+ years that we forget how they are inherently illusory: they stop time -- in their way perhaps more violently than any other form of art up to their invention in the mid 1800s. Things fleeting momentarily appear before us, display facets of permanence like a mirror-ball . . . which facets are more deeply true, which less so? Or even, dare we say -- in the face of the apparent evidence -- false? Which aspects of vision will call one back to attention, later, without falling into a mere visual cliche -- or worse, into outright propaganda, disrespect for the viewer? You have to decide quickly -- for as soon as the cloud moves, the light goes aslant, it is no longer there.