September 6 – October 3, 1979
I had just wrapped up a year of studying photography at Evergreen State College, and I was still in many ways a student when I started making these photos with a used Brownie Starflash sourced from a thrift store.
Though I had seen and loved the beauty of black and white photographs, what I myself wanted to photograph presented itself in colors. In 1978, the use of color in serious photography had yet to be universally embraced by the art world, and some photographers seemed to take that as a dare — like Craig Hickman, who was working at Evergreen the year I attended. He taught me to print in color and also showed me his own color prints and Polaroids (which were as totally surprising and witty and unique as his work continues to be to this day.)
“Some Twenty Odd Visions” had been released that spring of 1978, not long before I was invited to join Blue Sky as its sixth director. To see in that collection the mundane world transformed by an irreverent and experimental use of camera, lighting, framing and subject matter was a creative liberation for me.
In addition to being influenced by that groundbreaking book, I was also exposed to hundreds of images by the artists whose portfolios we were reviewing and showing and, most significantly, by Blue Sky’s original gang of five. I can see now that the three images shown here were unconscious homages to these new and generous friends.
Ann and I shared a profound and comprehensive love of small domestic and neighborhood scenarios that seemed to fall into our lives from heaven; Chris’s images revealed his genius for making light and shadow assertive material entities, and he also put every other formal element to new and exciting uses; Bob’s radical in-camera croppings and use of flash to reimagine reality were stunning revelations while Terry was a photographer of a magic manifesting in the everyday world; and then back to Craig, with his prolific love of the small details as well as larger objects that rose hidden in plain sight somewhere along the side of the road.
I wasn’t consciously imitating anyone’s work, but clearly that work informed and expanded both my vision and the future course of my photographic endeavors, both as an artist as well as in other lines of work.
What I might claim as most my own in these three images is a particular recipe for “eye candy” that is sometimes oddly sweet (as in these three images) and other times strange or botched (as in some of the rest.)