confessions in f8

OK, so maybe you read my corny artist statement, but that probably doesn’t tell you very much about me.

I am an artist/programmer/photographer/musician living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, though I am originally from what’s called Greater Cleveland (or maybe it used to be called that until someone came up with “the North Coast”). I grew up on the Beatles, Ghoulardi, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. We had a black and white TV, and I think I can agree with a recent NPR story which asserted that kids who grew up watching black and white TV dream in black and white. I think the colors in my dreams are muted, or selective, sort of like what Spielberg did in Schindler’s List.

My first camera was a little toy camera that neatly fit in to the side of my Man From U.N.C.L.E. briefcase and took shots on hard-to-find-at-the-drugstore 8 mm film. I recall my mom getting one roll processed, and that was the end of that. Soon, instamatics swept the landscape, and I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of snaps that were my doing in my mom’s albums.

My dad was an action painter. He died the stereotypic death of an artist, crushed in a motorcycle accident at age 38 in Manhattan. My mom taught French Literature until her retirement. Now she’s one of Cleveland’s foremost authorities on the work of James Joyce.

I attended the Berklee College of Music in the late seventies and early eighties, when the jazz world was convulsing with the explosion of jazz-fusion. I had some fusion heroes, notably Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and John McLaughlin, all Miles Davis alumni. But once Spyrogrya came along and turned fusion into elevator music, setting the stage for Kenny G, I was done with that and sought out punk and new wave in order to reintroduce some grit into my life.

I managed to get a job a few years later in a typesetting shop (before all the typesetting shops in the world ended up in the La Brea Tar Pits), where I learned to operate a large horizontal stat camera. I used to have to make up developer and fix, and one day my pal Kathy Chapman lent me her copy of Ansel Adams’ The Negative. After devouring all the technical information about exposure and development techniques, I decided to take a risk and put a 35mm camera around my neck.

I experimented for a few years with different formats, and accumulated darkroom equipment. I’d have to say that my favorite formats were 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 and 4×5. I shot black and white exclusively, souped my own negs, and played pretty heavily with the multi-contrast paper and filter systems that were available at the time. I was on a quest for the tightest grain and the widest tonal range that I could manage, given my primitive tools and limited budget.

The bottom fell out for me when Kodak stopped production on its Pan X film line. Kodak was pushing hard to make the industry adopt their T-Max films, which everyone had to, given there was no choice. I actually didn’t mind T-Max; in fact, I remember getting some really good effects with it. But I was kind of a retro guy (still am) and between the death of Pan X and the never ending battle against dust and lint in my darkroom, I finally gave up and put the whole ting on the shelf. I could see that digital was coming, and that it would be a good five years before digital camera would be inexpensive enough to reach the masses.

So, here I am. Digital me. I still miss Pan X, but hey, now I have Photoshop.