![]() ![]() Close one!Īnother time in NYC, I randomly encountered a Human Rights march that sprung up in the West Village. My friend talked me down and I made it out unscathed. I was about to lay it down as a wager because I was confident I could beat them at their own game and was going to win the pot. One time I almost lost my AE-1 to 3-card monte street hustlers. Our parents trusted us and we were off, cameras in hand, to photograph big city images and people. Growing up as teenagers in the suburbs, we often jumped on the train to New York City as a fun, welcomed adventure. ![]() This experience has since become a source of humor between us, and we laugh about it to this day. However, with time, I came to understand his perspective and the joy of capturing moments. I was initially frustrated as I saw it as a disruption and violation of the continuity of my soon-to-be manicured contact sheets. On that same vacation, my dad borrowed my camera and snapped a few photos when I didn’t expect it. I kept a “borrowed” arm of a CPR baby dummy in my camera bag and when we stumbled upon a dead shark on the beach my vision suddenly came to life. Once, I captured a series of impromptu shark-eats-baby photos. In the summer, Block Island, a small island 12 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, was our playground. I collected records as most teenagers did and I kept track of them on index cards, making note of who was in each band, and when friends borrowed them and gave them back. My stereo was always on (loud) and 1980s music was a constant presence in my life. My bedroom was tucked up in the attic where I had space to spread out with my various pet birds, my camera, and my music collection. We lived in an old Tudor house perched on a hill overlooking a hidden pond in Chappaqua, NY, an enclave of grassy and woodsy suburbs just north of New York City. I also scored 3 or 4 of those new-fangled Kodak Disc cameras that were all the rage in 1984 too! My AE-1 accompanied me everywhere I went and I burned through rolls of black and white film (usually Kodak Tri-X 400) and photo paper (usually Ilford 100), mowing neighborhood lawns to fund my passion. I received an upgrade for my Bar Mitzvah a few years later when I was gifted a Canon AE-1. They bought me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 100 at Disney World in 1977. ![]() My parents would often compete with each other to who took the best vacation photos, as delivered by the mailman a few weeks after we got home. Yet, within its walls lay a world of magic, a world where the right combination of chemicals, temperature, time, and agitation would transform the abstract into the tangible. Swayne was the gatekeeper of the darkroom, a mysterious space hidden behind a closet door in the hallway. My passion for capturing time was fostered by the school’s full-time photography department, which was led by the revered Glenn Swayne. I snapped them all: the teachers, the well-groomed preppies, the athletic jocks, the cerebral geeks, the free-spirited burners, the smokers, the eclectic new wavers, and even the hardworking lunch ladies. My role as the photographer for the school yearbook was demanding, but also very rewarding, as I captured the individuality of our campus and senior class through portraits that defied the conventional. As the photo editor of Horace Greeley High School’s student newspaper, The Greeley Tribune (1986-1988), I captured the essence of student life, from the sports fields to the cafeteria, and everywhere in between.
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