October 28 – November 12, 1980
I was still new enough to photography when I made these three images (and the other Brownies in this exhibition) that now, in retrospect, this body of work tells me more about what I was looking at and trying out and emulating than what, as a person in the world, I was living and feeling and wanting to express.
When I had purchased the Brownie Starflash mid-1978, using plastic cameras for serious work had recently become a bit of a thing. In her haunting book “Iowa,” Nancy Rexroth had used a cheap novelty camera, the soon-to-be famous Diana, to render evanescent imagery with the qualities of memory or dreams.
These days for me, dreams are food for my heart and soul. Over the past two years, I have been part of a dream group that explores each other’s and our own dreams in a Jungian-esque way. So when in preparation for this exhibit, I came across these three never-printed shadow images in the old Brownie contact sheets, I was both startled and amused. Transparency and solidity! My shadow! Underpinnings!