Time marches on. Archives march with us. There is a power inherent in 45+ years of photographing the same subjects... For better or worse.

B. Nearly 50 Years Ago.

What a strange week it's been for me. The air conditioner replacement ended up taking three days of my time. Don't ask! But everything is now finally working as it should and the house is comfortable again. Just in time since the temperatures are starting to spike and aim toward their usual Summer range of discomfort. B. was in San Antonio helping with her mom so the task of handling the project fell to me. 

I've had central AC units replaced four times in my adult life and it seems that the ones on the way out always fail at the least opportune times. Dead of Summer. In the midst of a heat wave. On a busy week. The cost of AC replacement for a house of a certain size increases year by year but this is the first time that I felt like I could just throw money at the project without consequences. I guess knowing that was the silver lining for the week. 

I'm a bit anxious about the surgery to remove some cancer from my face this coming Tuesday. It's not that I'm fearing some negative result of the procedure as much as this sort of malady seems to signal to me some sort of encroaching mortality. Something I can't just pay my way out of. It also makes me worry about what the next shoe to drop might be.

I tease a bit about my anxiety of being out of the swimming pool and away from my swim friends for the time it takes to heal the wounds and deal with sutures but underlying that is the very real uneasiness about having a changed routine. It will be the first time I won't be in the water for a couple of the hottest weeks of a Summer and, on paper, that doesn't look good. I swim with a psychiatrist who constantly tells me that doctors tend to be way too conservative and that I could be back in the water within a week. I'd love to believe him but... 

Over the last week I've been diving into older and older files of negatives and I showed, a few days ago, images from a long trip I took during my college days, to Europe. I'm not sure that it's healthy to revisit the past. For any number of reasons. But the reason it seemed to affect me the most is that the images reflected the sheer freedom I felt in those days. I traveled with a backpack full of clothes, a small camera bag, a collection of travelers checks in several different currencies, and a girlfriend. We had no real agenda for the months during which we traveled. We made no reservations at all. Not at hotels or restaurants. We'd just show up and see if a decent looking place had vacancies. Or if there were good campgrounds to be had. Or if a restaurant was filled with locals and had a menu that looked good. We never really thought about money, or getting back to work, or buying cars. We had a semester off and could do as we pleased. A fantasy for lots of people. 

So...  the photos reflect the casual and unhurried nature of the trip. Which contrasts so much with the next 45 years of teaching, starting and running businesses, raising a child into a fully functional adult and all the other stuff. During my 30s, 40s and 50s it always seemed like vacations were planned around work, and the need to get right back to work. Two weeks was about the limit I could tolerate before I started worrying about client base erosion, bills coming due and the logistics of running a business without employees who could take over in my absence. 

Seeing the old photos, revisited in scans and fine-tuned in Lightroom, makes me wonder now about the rationality of my early choices. Whether my focus in life was less than optimal. Especially now that photography seems to be, commercially, in a rapid and unyielding decline. 

I have to remind myself that no one could predict the future. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That my own life has been largely without serious trauma or deprivation. That I've been surrounded by good friends and loving family. 

And yet, seeing images from a time in my life when everything seemed possible, everything seemed to be in reach, and a time when we had decades and decades of runway in front of us makes me very nostalgic for that time --- when we were thin and beautiful and unencumbered by the mundanity of every day life. When everything we thought we needed fit into a backpack. When 401Ks and mortgages were an indistinct concept we could put off into the future. A time in which good hiking shoes were our easy aspiration.

For me it was also a time of first discovery in photography. Totally unconstrained by having to decide between cameras or formats or systems. When I traveled in 1978 my girlfriend and I shared the two cameras we'd brought along. Nothing more would make sense to carry along with us. While my grasp of the process wasn't has sharply and deeply honed as it is now that was compensated by the thrill of learning something new and looking forward a couple of months to making prints in a co-operative darkroom. Watching black and white prints come to fruition in the Dektol. Learning to make comprehendible contact sheets. And sharing the prints with small circles of friends. Having "beginner's eyes."

Scanning old memories can be painful. Lost love. Changing landscapes at home. A world that never slows down its changes; mostly for the worst. The images paint a clear picture of what's been lost for us and how much we miss those things when confronted with proof of their prior existence. 

The slender bodies of youth. The swimming holes not yet surrounded by endless subdivisions, quiet train rides unsullied by the relentless, banal chatter of people yakking away on their cellphones, mountains unadorned by recreational constructions and cameras that didn't beg one to surrender wholly to immediacy. No need to hurry out photographs. Something to save for later; for leisure.

I guess I scan them to remind myself that any talent I have as a photographer was already there in the beginning and that the relentless acquisition of technical knowledge, coupled with an ever increasing selection of "better" and better gear, had nothing to do with my actual enjoyment or competency concerning photography. In fact, some of the earliest images seem like my best work...at least to me.

I say, from my experiences, that you should be careful how deeply you revisit your past. It may make you happy but it may make you sad. There is always a tendency with hindsight to experience regret for the roads not traveled. If you are happy with life today it's not so dangerous. If you are more and more unsatisfied as time goes on then better memories from a time in your own past might trigger a sadness you might not want or need to deal with in the moment. It's the regret mostly that you didn't take the chances you were presented. Preferring, as we mostly do, security over risk.

Eventually all of the work will disappear. You'll be long gone. Maybe it's best instead to seize the moment, seize each newly arriving day and make the most of that. Better than longing for that full head of brown hair, that 30 inch waist, that svelte and amiable girlfriend, that open space with blue skies and clean air. 

Just a few cloudy thoughts after scanning too much of my early adulthood. Before routine and responsibility intruded. We always meant to slow down and enjoy that life again at the other end of being responsible but it's hard to unlearn the lessons of working, saving, focusing on making the bucks. 

It's hard to sever the umbilical cord of security...

What would we give to have back the energy and the potential we were richly endowed with 50 years ago? Knowing what we know now would we do things differently?

First portrait of B.

And 15 years ago.

And at a favorite restaurant now long gone.

And at the very beginning of the road.

Grab love and happiness while it's in your grasp.

I don't regret my choices. I do wish I could have better seen life's rich menu as we 

progressed along through the years...

 

Me. On the Eiffel Tower. October 1978

Scanning again. This is an image I took of Lou out at a downtown coffee shop. On film. Back in 1994...

 

The cameras in the film age didn't record metadata like the digital ones. It was incumbent on photographers to remember what cameras and lenses they used and what their settings might have been. I know this was taken with a Contax RTSIII because it was one of the only cameras I had that actually recorded the day in the space between frames. With that info I can see that it was taking in 1994. I remember pretty clearly that we were sitting around a coffee shop just South of the State Capitol complex in the mid-morning. I photographed Lou using an 85mm f1.4 Carl Zeiss lens that came with a Contax mount. I must have breathed during exposure because I missed perfect focus by a bit. Not a big bit. Just a small bit. 

This is a scan from the original black and white negative. I was testing for Agfa at the time so I'm sure this was AgfaPan 400 instead of Tri-X. I scanned this one using the multi-res mode in a Lumix S5. The resulting file was 8000 pixels by 12,000 pixels. You can clearly see the individual grains in the film when you ultra-pixel peep. The scan takes about a minute total. Load your neg into a film holder, blow off the dust (there's always dust), fine tune the focus under the Sigma 70mm Macro Art lens. (I use focus peaking on low and know I've got it when both sides show red focus peaking signals as well as the same in the center of the frame. A two second shutter delay and you are in business. The actual exposure is eight conjoined frames. It takes about 15 seconds to shoot and then render the file. If you shoot in raw the files are massive.

Then it's into Lightroom Classic. I use the curves menu to invert the negative to a positive and then I start working on adding much needed contrast and fine-tuning the exposures. It's fun. Kinda like when we first saw prints come to life in a wet developer tray. 

I love the "wide awake" look in Lou's eyes. She was just wonderful to work with.

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Air conditioning install was too time consuming. And the techs had to come back and troubleshoot some condensation issues. Finally all figured out. I spent three days on this. I'm asking for a partial refund as a compensation... We'll see how it goes. But, bottom line, the house is nice and cool and everything is functioning as it should.

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Slammed my hand into a lane line while swimming butterfly at practice yesterday. Blood in the pool. A one inch gash. But I did finish the set before I got out... stupidly. Now healing fine. Back in the water tomorrow with one of the world famous kid's waterproof bandages... Grrrrrr. 

That's all for today. 

Lingering over film from the past. "Scanning" with a Lumix S5. Having fun savoring pangs of nostalgia.

I figured I would be "out of commission" with sutures on my face starting on Tuesday of next week so I thought I should come up with a hobby so as not to go too stir crazy. Sure, I'll go for long walks and do my dry land exercise but there's a lot of energy to soak up and I need something to keep my hands busy and out of the Devil's Workshop. Right?

So I looked around the office and I noticed a five foot high stack of negative pages. Film carefully inserted in rows into archival plastic. First I wondered if there is really such a thing as "archival" plastic but then I starting thinking about going through thousands of really old negatives to pull out some favorites and make some scans. To see how I did as a fledgling photographer with an ancient, compact film camera and no real guidance to speak of. 

Some photos, the oldest ones, are from a backpacking trip I did with a girlfriend in the Fall of 1978. It was the old days. We actually carried sleeping bags, a small tent, a blue gas stove and one small frying pan. We spent nights in major cities in hotels but in the South of France the weather was perfect and we'd hit the campgrounds for weeks on end as we traveled on student Eurail passes on dozens of trains.

Fellow traveler in the Greek Islands.

Paris 1978.

London, England. 1978.

The campsite in Avignon was amazing. The one in the ski area above Grenoble, in mid-October, delivered a bone chilling couple of nights. In the mornings we had to be careful not to jostle that icicles that formed inside the tent from the condensation and freezing of our breath. The camp grounds outside Perpignan were a hippy paradise. But it was a different time. I can't imagine being so absolutely carefree these days. Scrambling eggs over a sputtering, portable burner, drinking Kronenbourg beers at 12,000 feet, feeling the cold winds start up at dusk, and hibernating in a small tent while the gusts buffeted the tent walls with gusto...

Camping in the Alps. 1978.

The tent that got dragged around and set up all over Europe for a semester...

Fish vendor. Greece.

Travel companion yawning during a rest break at the Pompidou Centre. 1978.

We stayed with friends in the city. A comfortable break from camping on hard ground.

Paris.

Shopping in Villard de Lans, France. On the way back to the campground. 

Hard to believe that in 1978 one could walk right up to the Mona Lisa painting.

No crowds, no bullet proof glass enclosure. No endless barrage of phone selfies. No influencer

bucket list. Just a nice painting by some famous guy from the past...

Some friends we met while camping on an island south of the Greek mainland. 

Grandmothers in black,, with plastic bags of live octopi, accompanied us on the 

boat rides between islands. Time was measured in days and weeks, not hours. 

Going to the Parthenon was quick and easy. Any time of the day.

I didn't end up shooting many rolls of film but I'm oddly impressed at the amount of keepers I have gotten so far in the scanning process. And how easy it is to reproduce black and whites. You really can see just how much less resolution 35mm ISO 400 film negatives provide. And color? Fraught with peril. 

But once you get into the rhythm of the process it goes easily. And the memories float up at you from the little screen on the back of the camera. 

I wish I had been a better photographer when I started out but I think I would trade all the technical skills and training I have now to get back the sheer delight of discovering how to capture life with my camera at the very first of my camera adventures. Photography was secondary back then. Maybe it works better that way. Beginner's Eyes. There's a lot to be said for new adventures. Revisitations just leave one feeling empty. I can't imagine going to the Louvre any more. Every time I've been, paced over the years since my first visit with my parents in 1965, has been a little less fun. Less interesting. Less of a wonderful compromise between time and access. Now it's like waiting in the lines at Disney World. With the same people.

In 1978 there was no "Pyramid" to enter into the space. You entered through a small door on one side, barely tall enough for a person of normal height to get through without bending a bit. There were no lines. Student admission was something like $1.25 US. There was no café inside. It was marvelous. Uncrowded and unhurried. You could spend a long, full day there wonderfully engaged. No distractions. 

Old people always talk about how great some things were back in the day. But it's true. Once you've been around the block a few times you have perspective. Those without perspective are enjoying or encountering stuff for the first time. They have no previous reference. Kinda like learning photography...Maybe things were better in the past. At least some things. But everyone comes to an experience in their own time, and with their own set of prior knowledge; they can't really know what they are missing in the present. Funny that way.

Wish I'd been more attentive about focusing back then...

Bookseller in Paris. One of the stalls along the Seine. 1978

Canonet QL17. Tri-X. Before I had enough practice focusing...

The Coliseum. A group of Japanese tourists.  

Where else but Rome. 1978.

Somewhere outside of Grenoble, in the mountains.

Near Villard de Lans?

The crowds in Venice. 

Vegetable merchant in Venice, Italy. 

Venice. 1990. Looking for the crowds.

Rome. 1986.

Rome. 1990.

Venice. 1986.

Venice. 1986

In a WC on a Boeing 747 heading to Europe with a Leica M3.

And a pocket full of Tri-X. And B.

Paris. 1978

Tourists in 1978 could wander the halls of great galleries without bumping into 

large groups of people. A more civilized time for travel. 

Sete, France. On the way to Perpignan. 1978.

A lovely little hotel on the coast where we ate roast chicken outdoors,

on a warm evening under a strand of lights, just yards from the

Mediterranean beaches.

All the times I've gone back to favorite cities for work or just to revisit I'm reminded that the experiences in my younger years were the ones that live on with the most power. The most value in my mind. I guess those early experiences are part of the mix that makes you. I'm always glad I took a camera...