Please, no awards, or iconed group invitations.

Click here to see all my pictures on black in Flickriver

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The ribbon above is in memory of friends and the families of friends who have been affected by cancer. It is not representative an illness in me or my family. I hope that it serves to remind us all to live every day with courage, joy and respect for the gift of life.

My photographic auto-biography.

I grew up by Lake Michigan in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100 that I got for Christmas when I was 11 or 12. I learned to develop the B&W film in those cartridges. To print, I had to wait until night when my room was dark to screw in that Kodak Brownie safelight and set up some old dinner plates as print trays. I made my first contact prints (little ones) with a piece of plate glass and a 25 watt bulb. When I saw that first tiny positive image appearing in the Dektol developer, I felt a shiver at the back of my neck. After the stop bath and a minute in the fixer, the lights came on and there in the water bath, were these little stamp-sized black and white pictures of my dog Tama. I was hooked big time. I think I ended up with a shoebox full of those little prints. A couple of years later my dad, taking pity on me got me a Durst M300 enlarger and some real darkroom trays. I know I thanked him, but I’m sure I had no idea of how impactful that gift would be. I was now making 3x5 and 5x7 prints (big time!). A couple years later when I was in high school, my dad bought me, a Minolta SRT101 with an f/1.4 lens. This was a professional quality camera and I worked it. My camera oriented friends and I roamed the city (mostly Hyde Park) using so much film, that we bought it in bulk and reloaded our 35mm cassettes. We took lots of underexposed pictures and struggled to match those sweet contrasty images in Life magazine. I used that Minolta for years, but eventually it went to the big darkroom in the sky and I was camera-less for a while until replaced it with a Nikon FM that by then I was able to pay for myself. I continued to struggle to create prints that had sufficient contrast. I replaced the Durst with a Beseler 23C which, with its condenser head, really helped with the contrast issue. Still, for me, photography was too often a mysterious hit or miss exercise in frustration. I just couldn’t come up with a consistent method for good quality pictures. Most of the ‘how-to’ photography books in the 70s gave advice like “use more exposure for a backlit subject”, or, “use less for bright sunny days”. Their approach made good photography a matter of memorizing a never ending series of unrelated rules. I would use the FM2’s ‘match needle’ metering system as precisely as I could, and most of my photos were ok, but then seemingly at random, a number of shots were too dark or too light.

A Truth

On one of my numerous trips to at Kroch and Brentano’s downtown I stumbled on a little grey book called The Zone VI Workshop , by Fred Picker. This was something really different. Here was a step by step description of how use Ansel Adams’ Zone System. Did you know that camera meters try to make everything they see the same shade of grey? …..I didn’t. Suddenly I understood why that black dog picture came out too light, and why that picture with lots of sky came out too dark. That book explained how to calibrate your film, light meter, camera and developer in combination to determine your actual film speed was. What? The film speed is printed right on the box, isn’t it? Wrong. Following the instructions in Fred’s book, I spent days taking pictures of black blankets and crumpled white paper, and carefully developing numerous rolls of film only to discover that in my camera, ASA 400 Tri-X film was actually performing at only ASA 200 – one full stop slower. Suddenly, my contact prints had actual black in them instead of dark grey and finally had that elusive contrasty snap. I learned that instead of blindly following the camera’s meter, I needed to decide how much texture I needed in that black dog’s fur and how to make it look right in the print. There were also chapters on print making, and even more tests. I did calibrations, of print developer, silver rich photo paper, my enlarger and timer. It took a little over a month to create a small pile of negatives and prints mostly showing nondescript bands of grey, but when it was done I finally understood how to reliably create technically decent images and my prints finally looked like those photos in Life magazine, at least technically. I could evaluate a subject, make an exposure, develop the film, and make a print that closely matched what I was seeing when I released the shutter. Wow – that only took eight or nine years.

The other shoe.

Fred Picker said in his writings, that gaining a degree of technical control was the 5% of photography that was easy. The 95% that was difficult was learning to create images that meant something to you and others. He was right. I’m still working on that second part.