I began photographing things as a youngster. I liked the family camera despite the fact that my mother always said it was no good. It did leak a bit of light. I took the only class in photography when I was probably around 13 at the local YMCA. The class was entirely darkroom. Something important happened in the darkroom. Somebody, maybe me, exposed a negative and slid the paper into the developing tray. Gradually an image appeared. A moment. Magical. From nothing appeared a picture. I do not know how many magical moments a life is allowed. If there is a limit, I'm not sure that there is, but if one is allowed only a limited number of magical moments then I may have just about used all of mine. Hope not.

It may be that I inherited my interest in photography from Will Daffron, my mother's father. My whole family came from the land, farming, farmed cotton on a small scale, you know why he hoped for something else. My grandfather acquired cameras and studio props and tried to make a go of it as a portrait photographer. It never worked out as a business. But he made some fine portraits.

I think that he may have started in Millport Alabama. By around 1905 he had moved his family to Tuscaloosa. He tried to make a go of it there. He did some professional work but not enough to support a growing family. Inevitably he and the family returned to the land and spent many years as tenant farmers, moving from one place to another in Alabama. The work was hard. The family kept growing. Gradually the kids became helpers with the tilling.

I do not think that my grandfather ever abandoned the idea of being a professional photographer. But the cards were stacked against him. He was a farmer and good at that. His wife Jessie Mae was a farmer and also good at it. She was a typical woman. Able to handle a juggler's box of duties. As is true in most of the south, she was another woman who held things together.

portrait businesses in Tuscaloosa and Millport Alabama. I never worked professionally as a photographer. Will Daffron was able to make a go of professional photography only as a sideline. He cared for his sizeable family by toiling in the earth as a tenant farmer. I have more than a handful of his portraits, mostly of members of the family. I have whatever caring I could for my quite small family by toiling in the classroom and from time to time in the barren earth of higher education administration. I have published a few things in the history of Byzantine art and architecture and many more in the history of photography. But I never stopped photographing for my own pleasure, did a little exhibiting and selling, but mostly just photographed because I could not not photograph. Thanks, Granddaddy. Increasingly I make black and white photographs. I do not have a black and white camera (except for my film cameras: my trusty old Nikon F that I bought used in 1975, an equally trusty Olympus Pen-F that I bought around 1965 and a Yashica Mat twin lens from the late 50's). I still have negatives from my early years and I am gradually scanning them. They please me not only because most are black and white but also because they reflect a youthful, experimental and accidental vision. I am visiting color images from later years, converting them to black and white and sometimes directly to grayscale.