During my freshman year of high school, I took a graphic arts class, where I first learned basic printmaking and also darkroom photography. According to my hazy memory, it was my first semester, but time has made me less certain. Perhaps it was my second semester. One of our projects was to design a poster for a school dance, but I can no longer remember whether it was Homecoming or what they called “Winter Dance” that took place in January or February. Searches through my old portfolios for this project have turned up nothing to corroborate.
What I have been able to find are a few of the prints I made while learning the in’s and out’s of black and white photography. I took photographs of our cat, General, items from around the house, and whatever I could find in the woods I used to wander.
I remember being both fascinated and mystified by the process. Winding the film into the reel in total darkness and the negative images revealed after bathing everything in chemicals and rinsing them away. The mechanical precision of enlarging and printing the images, the F-stops of the apertures and the ticking of each second. The red lights and white lights and the magic of watching the positive image revealed in the developer. More bathing, more rinsing, and the waiting for everything to dry.
I’ve never been a particularly technical photographer. I have limited patience for tracking every little detail, and it took me a years of attentive listening and practice in college to feel truly competent at producing a technically “good” photograph in the darkroom.
The focus of the assignment was applying the rules and methods we learned about composition, such as using the rule of thirds or utilizing a leading line. You can see traces of these principles in most of the photos, if the formal execution leaves much to be desired. On the back of each one, written in pencil, are the seconds the the aperture. They are the work of a fourteen-year-old, still learning.
Looking back at the photos again, I remember the woods, smell the scent of the dead leaves, and I remember our cat, who years later would wake me early in the morning to be let in. The glimpses of our house remind me that we moved that summer, when I was fifteen, all the way across town. The woods became another memory most of them razed to make way for more houses twenty years ago. General died at some point while I was in college.
The photographs, the first I ever took for artistic purposes and printed on my own, are a record, fragments of another time.