This is a brief introductory paragraph if you are new to my blog.  In the 1970s I was shooting black and white film because it was cheap when I did the lab work.  Rather than make an enlargement of each individual photograph on the roll of film, I would make a collective print of all the negatives.  In the darkroom I would set the negatives on the unexposed 8 x 10 sheet of photographic paper, put a sheet of glass atop that to keep the film flat, and flash the paper with ten seconds or so of light.  I’d then develop, rinse, fix, rinse, and dry that photograph.  Because the photograph was made from the negatives flat upon the paper it was called a contact sheet. Sometimes this strip of six negatives would get separated from others in the same roll of film.  Not every contact sheet is from one roll of film, and many have several rolls of film.

Okay.  Two paragraphs.  My contact sheets are currently in three-ring binders.  The contact sheets are in no order within those binders.  In this blog I am going through each contact sheet as I’ve scanned it.  In each blog essay I write about the photographs on that contact sheet.  Because the scanning is random, so are the topics. 

Contact sheet 46 contains photographs from autumn 1974 at Cornell College.  They feature two people, Bruce Costas and Bella Abzug.

Bruce was one of my first friends at Cornell College.  We were both assigned rooms on the second floor of Rorem Hall.  Bruce had had an interesting high school experience.  His father managed the YMCA in Santiago, Chile.  He was from New York.  His Spanish fluency helped him pass for Puerto Rican.  I don’t know the reason for these photos, if any.  I was interested in portraiture.  Bruce convinced me that the CIA ran the country, having just seen what it did first-hand in Chile.

I feel that I ultimately failed Bruce.  Midway through my second semester freshman year I changed dorms, from Rorem to Altoona, and started hanging out with different people.  Bruce developed leukemia his sophomore year and had to drop out.  I lost touch with him.  Amazingly he came back to college.  I didn’t reconnect with him.  His time was brief.

Bella Abzug was one of the first famous people I took photographs of up close.  She was a good politician and thus knew where the camera was.  She played well to it.  This demonstrates a corollary to my observation that the relationship between the photograph and subject is mirrored in the relationship between photograph and viewer.  She knew how to turn up the wattage when the camera was on her.

I think I’ve told this story before on this blog, but I’m not sure.  I don’t quickly see any other photos of Ms. Abzug preceding #46.

A few years after graduating from Cornell College I took a graduate seminar on semiotics through the rhetoric department of the University of Iowa.  Our professor, John Lynne, noted that the best way to get people to believe an implausible story was to preface it with, “you’ll never believe this, but . . .”  This came to him while on holiday in Greece.  He had awakened early and gone to a café alone without his traveling partner.  At the café in Greece he ran into Bella Abzug.  When he returned to his motel room, he told his partner, “You’ll never believe this but I ran into Bella Abzug.”  When the professor told this story at that seminar there was another person in the room that went to Cornell College.  I had a photograph of him with Bella Abzug.

You’d never believe it . . .

The photographs referenced in this essay can be found in the gallery of Photos by Number, in 00046.