Black and white negatives from June and October 1971 and April 1972 ~

These photos are from my first years in 35mm photography.  The composition in some of the older photos is boring and balanced.  A few photographs show some insight.  I was trying to learn but I wasn’t also yet learning how to learn.  This collection of the photos on the single contact sheet is a good snapshot of my early progress in photography.

The June 1971 photographs are from the summer that David Richmond and I haunted Weed Park and the mall.  We lived next door.  We were getting interested in photography.  We were bored.

I took a series of photos of the women who worked at the park’s concession stand.  They were a few years older, among the popular pretty girls of their class.  Dave and I tried to be entertaining.  They sold us soda.

By October 1971 I was a sophomore in high school and beginning to shoot photographs for the yearbook.  My relationship with the yearbook began as a very productive symbiosis.  They told me what they wanted photographs of and provided the film, chemicals and paper to create those photographs.  I gave them a lot of photos until the relationship died.  I’ll save the story of the end for later.

Shooting photographs for the yearbook was the great blessing of my high school years.  Not only did it fund my basic education in photography, all that experience, but it also gave me a reason to go outside my comfort zone and a role to play when I got there.  I learned that if I had a camera and looked like I knew what I was doing, I could pretty much go anywhere.  Like nearly all teenagers I felt alienated from the society around me (the society of the alienated).  The camera gave me an observation point and helped to teach me what I was seeing.  It was also gratifying that I was naturally good at this at a time when I was not particularly good at anything.

By April 1972 I was one of the more dependable photographers for the yearbook.  They sent me out to take photographs for the advertisements that funded the yearbook.  I learned the next year about the yearbook’s secret.  Larry Kemp ran such a good operation that the publisher, Josten’s, subsidized the yearbook so that they could use it as a model for their other clients.  The yearbook had been accumulating money.  In 1973 they had around $8,000 in its cash reserve.  I suggested to Mr. Kemp that we could buy a Cadillac to drive in the homecoming parade and still have enough money left over to print a book.  By April I was also comfortable in taking my camera everywhere, shooting whatever was interesting.  That feeling continued through the rest of my life.