These photographs stir my memory.  Perhaps they will for you too.

Individual images remind me of particular times and of general times.  I and everyone else tend to shoot photographs of happy times and friendly people.  The photos you’ll see here reflect my happier experiences, but I’ve had a rather stressful chaotic life shadowed by a major depressive disorder undiagnosed until my mid 30s.

Behind these photos are stories.  I hope to tell a few.

Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, tried to write an autobiography.  He couldn’t get it started until he figured out the method and how not to do it.  Don’t try writing it as just one story, from beginning to end, but instead as a series of stories, vignettes about his life.  

I’m going to do something similar here on this website, in this blog.  As I wrote earlier, I am presently scanning my black and white negatives in the same random order as they are stored.  They are stored in envelopes containing one roll of film or its equivalent from several rolls.  I’ve numbered the exposures based on the random number given to each envelope, along with the frame number on the film.  As I write this, I’ve uploaded contact sheets 00001 through 000101.  (I’ve only been able to edit and clean up the images up to 00068 or so, but will replace the unedited images with the edited as I go.)

I’m going to expand this blog to include the stories of the images, starting with 00001.

As always, memory is imperfect.  If you remember it differently please let me know.

Until the 21st Century to publish my photographs I had two choices, put up an exhibition or get them printed somewhere.  Printing changes the half-tone grays of the photographs into a matrix of dots for the transfer of ink.  The quality of the lithographic image depended upon the resolution of the half-tone screen.  There was a work-around though.  You could do two press runs of the same image, but with the half-tone screens rotated 45 degrees from each other.  Then the shading of the image in the black-and-white image is more nuanced.  The Cornell College yearbooks, The Royal Purple, of the years 1976, '77 and '78 were all printed this way, in duotone, to better present the images.  If the printer does not correctly orient the two half-tone screens, then the dots form their own pattern, a Moiré pattern.

I'm hoping that in publishing my memories I can transfer the shades of gray in my life with nuance, but I'm sure that unintended patterns will emerge sandwiching words with images.

We’ll see how it goes.  Like life.

Thank you.