Photography has changed in the 55-years since I began.  Today, nearly everyone has a phone in their pocket and a camera in their phone.  Today, you can shoot a picture and immediately see what you got.  Today you can put that photo up on the internet for the world’s attention.  Today each particular photograph costs you nothing more.  Today you can manipulate each tiny constituent pixel in the photo to change the bigger picture.  Today people take almost as many pictures of themselves as of others.  The world is awash in photographs and the computers are getting better at identifying what is in them.

I began shooting pictures in 1964 at eight years old with a Kodak Duoflex 120 rollfilm camera.  It hung from a strap around my skinny neck and dangled at my belt line.  To get a photograph, you would look down at the camera rather than out at what you were taking the picture of.  You would need to twist the knob to roll the film to ready the unexposed film at the right spot.  Back when I was eight and attending an Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in my father grabbed the camera to take a quick shot.  He yelled at me that I would never be a photographer because I had not already advanced the film.  His picture was lost because the film was not ready.  Because each shot was expensive, I didn’t advance the film until I was ready to shoot because I didn’t want to accidentally trip the shutter.

When I finished the roll of film I’d take it to a drug store to have it processed.  Sometimes it would take weeks before I’d use up the roll of film.  I have a 110 film camera that still has an unfinished roll that was started in the early 1980s.  I don’t know who processes this format any more.  It would take at least three days before the processed prints came back, and they were expensive to an adult as well as a child.  Later when I was thoughtfully trying to improve my photography, I recognized that I was trying to understand the relationship between the act of shooting a photo and the photo I got.  Now you get instantaneous feedback on what you are doing right and wrong.  Then it could take weeks between act and product.

When I was 14, my uncle Phil and aunt Sandy returned from Germany.  Phil had been a journalist for the Army and moved nearby to study journalism at the University of Iowa.  He helped me get set up with a 35mm film camera and a darkroom in the basement of our house in Muscatine.  Cost was a major impediment to doing photography.  35mm was both a cheaper and better format than the popular Instamatic option.  Doing my own film processing would have been cheaper had it not led to doing so much more of it. 

A camera had become my constant companion.  This was also the era before cable TV or video games.  In Muscatine we had four TV stations – the three networks and PBS.  I was easily bored then.  Photography gave me a reason to explore, to get out, to interact with others.  My neighbor and friend David Richmond saw what I was doing and got interested.  With Phil’s guidance, he too put a darkroom in his basement.  David just retired as head of the art department at Simpson College.

I quickly figured out that photography would be cheaper if someone else paid me to learn.  I began shooting photographs for the high school yearbook.  This got me out more and to places I never would have gone otherwise.  It gave me a social role – photographer – and a reason to get more socially involved.  Doesn’t everyone feel alienated in high school?  At least I could be an observer with a mission. 

I got good.  I had a natural talent for composition.  I started being able to sell my photos.  Thanks again to Phil for showing me how to contact potential free-lance opportunities.

I went to Denmark as a summer exchange student.  My photography helped me explore a totally new place.  The photographs I shared opened doors for me.  I came home knowing deep in my heart that the world was not Muscatine. 

I went to Cornell College.  I began shooting photographs for their newspaper and yearbook.  I met Jeff Courtman, a good photographer who was editing that year’s book.  I met David Babcock, then the photo-editor of the Cornellian student newspaper.  We got off on a bad foot though.  A few weeks after school started, police executed a search warrant for drugs in a men’s dorm.  I shot photos and stayed up all night to meet the deadline for that week’s newspaper.  David chose not to run them, saying that they would inflame an already troubled student population.  I teased him about that decision until he admitted it was wrong.  He became one of my best friends.

I would say that I loved my Cornell experience.  I loved parts of it.  I also had a major debilitating depression that went undiagnosed until I was in my 40s. 

One of the features was that I met Hugh Lifson, an art professor.  I took a drawing class from him and learned a lot, not only about drawing but also about two-dimensional art.  I persuaded him to give me a half-hour of his time a week in a tutorial program.  I would bring him what I shot for the week and he told me what he thought.  He had no background in photography and had no concern about the process of how I got these photos, only what they said to him there and then.  He was the best critic I’ve ever had. 

I also began studying philosophy and zen.  I was intrigued by an idea.  The camera I used was a single-lens reflex.  This meant that I could look through the viewfinder to see what was going to be projected onto the film when I released the shutter.  (A shutter then was a valve for the light.)  There was a mirror that reflected the light from the lens up into the viewfinder.  When I tripped the shutter, the mirror flopped up out of the way, letting the light go directly back to the film, exposing it.  This also meant that the viewfinder went momentarily black.  The viewfinder black, I never saw the photo I had taken until I processed the film.

A photograph is a static, framed frozen reflection of reality.  A good photograph suggests more than is framed.  A good photograph is dynamic.  A good photograph reaches outside its limitations to provoke an insight.

How was I taking such good photographs of things I never saw?

This was the first koan of my adventure.