multiple exposures

Color possesses me.
I don't have to pursue it.
It possesses me always.
-Paul Klee

Recently someone asked me how long I'd been doing photography, realizing it might be good if I had an answer to that question, I'll attempt an overview here.

When I was 9 yrs. old I was lucky enough to have this man take on the father figure roll in my life:














He was a professional photographer. He, my mother, our cat named Sunshine and I lived in San Francisco on the corner of Turk and Levenworth in the most squalid section of The Tenderloin. Home was a 10,000 sq. ft. photo studio [complete with full darkroom] located above a Chinese Restaurant. Though I spent most of my time roller-skating from one end of the studio to the other, I did notice how things were being done. I think we were robbed 4 times in 1 yr. When he wasn't doing advertising layouts for Dial Soap he found me to be a handy subject to photograph:











































































































This early exposure [tee hee!] of living in a photography studio kindled some creative flames for later on.



When I turned 15 my grandfather gave me a 35mm Nikon FG, 8 lenses, 2 photography books and a 10-year subscription to National Geographic... and my world was rocked. I had done a lot of art prior to that but the delight of capturing the truth of a moment on film was soon to become a determining factor in how I felt my connection to all things. I took 3 years of photography classes, was the president of "Art Club" for 1 year and spent a 3 years as the yearbook and newspaper photographer.



When I was developing my own photos, the film reels had to be opened in the pitch-blackness of "the film closest". Unwinding and examining everything that was being kept in the dark became a full-on introspective practice. It's truly an uncommon experience to do something so technical with zero light. Opening the closet door and stepping into the brightness felt like a rebirthing. Next came the 18-minute drenching of the chemical elixirs over, under, around and thru the negatives. This shakedown of reality exposed everything that I thought I understood but really didn't (as photos often don't actualize as we expect they will).



As I witnessed, the slow emergence of an image beneath the safelights of a darkroom, the sheer magic of it all coming together became a way of revealing me to myself.



I took that Nikon all over the world with me and soon after high school I began to get hired for jobs, the rest is history... the medium has changed slightly over the years from 35mm to digital to 120mm but the basic elements remain the same--light, color, contrast, composition, sensitivity, serendipitous grace and of course a celebration of life beyond all reason.