I was a projectionist at the Atlantic Theatre in Atlantic, Iowa all through high school. Here is an uncharacteristicaly long line at the theatre in February of 1971. The movie showing,  Cold Turkey, was filmed in Greenfield Iowa, about 40 miles away from Atlantic. People drove there to watch the movie being made, and some townsfolk got picked to be extras, so it was a very popular film in town. I liked it.

This is my dad. This is the only time I ever saw him.

Seeing all these old photos has brought back so much I'd forgotten, and more than memories are being re-awakened. Yesterday I found the picture of my heart breaking.

I don't remember the moment of that photo. The action is small on the negative, difficult to discern from a contact sheet, even with a loupe.

She was my first love, so maybe I couldn't accept what I saw and immediately blocked it. Even so, my documentarian reflex kicked in, and I snapped a quick photo.

I've already written about how nice it is to see these images large and clear and detailed enough that I can remember why I took them. I remember the next photo on the strip well, though I'd always misread his expression. Knowing he was her next boyfriend, I liked how goofy he looked.

I was scrolling backwards through the images Sara had scanned in, and came across this one.

Seeing him staring down at me clearly for the first time, I see that he's gloating. It bothers me.

"Why didn't I ever notice this" I wonder?

I'm answered by the next photo I see, taken just before the gloat.

It's not clear at first that there are 3 people in the image. But I knew right away what it was.

"She's kissing him!"

I quickly moved on to the previous image from the film strip, a portrait of her.

Somehow, the pain of that betrayal, which I couldn't acknowledge, became locked in the photo of that kiss, like an emotional Dorian Gray portrait. Just the quick glimpse I got was all it took to awaken that supressed pain. Over the next 24 hours I tried to behave as usual, but there was a mounting turmoil inside that I could barely contain.

I finally took a good look at the kiss, and at first was sure I had been mistaken. I see her back, and only one set of legs. Maybe her hand is up because she's taking a photo of the dorm behind her. I zoom in to be sure, and there is the white leather sleeve of his letter jacket, and the top of his head. The kiss is ending, and they're parting now.

Later, I tried describing the photo to my girlfriend Pat, who knew something was up with me. It was hard to say anything to her. It didn't seem fair to Pat that I'm suddenly feeling the hurt of a heartbreak from 37 years ago. I tried to dispassionately describe the photo to her, and how it was bothering me, but when I held out my hand to enact how "Her hand was on his face," I broke down.

And I was engulfed in the hurt of that first loss. 37 years did nothing to dull the pain.

That was last night. I feel much better now. Pat is very understanding. "Your pictures are very important to you." she said.

I have often been told that I hold in my feelings. I always thought I just let them pass through me, but here's one instance where I denied the feeling in the first place. Unknown to me, though, that hurt was still locked deep inside. Who knew a photo would be the key to release it?

I'm still excited to see the rest of the photos. I feel a restored sense of who I am as the photos remind me of who I was. Carlos Castaneda wrote about  following 'the path with heart.' With the way my heart is responding to my photos, that path is feeling closer.

When I was shooting film, the only view I got of an image was on a contact sheet through a loupe. I always thought that was good enough. I could pick out the best photos and make enlargements.

Now that the images are digitized, I can easily view every photo at 11 x 14 inches on a hirez monitor. I'm seeing things in the images that, had I seen them back in the 70's, would have led me to change how I was taking my pictures, to ensure better results next time. (Though nothing beats the immediate feedback from a digital camera.)

For example, my sports photographs needed a higher shutter speed to really freeze the action. The slight motion blurs don't show up on a contact sheet, but do on the monitor.

If only I had had the things we have today back in the 70's. HiDef video cameras with digital editing and effects. Digital photography. Hi quality large format archival output color printers. Cell phones. Google.  (Insert photo of me lost in useless daydream of 'If Only'.)

Since I take the photos of life size subjects, the larger the viewed image the more the image captures what I saw in the scene in the first place.

Remember, you can click on almost any image on this site to see a larger version.

After a month of digitizing my old negatives and slides, my mind is swimming with restored memories of places I've been, people I've known and things I've done. My memory archive's neuron clerks are all busy scurrying back and forth from the high school axion to the college dendrite then on to the early New York nucleus.

Seeing the variety of photos I have taken reminds me that I have the freedom to shoot any type of photo I feel like. And now that I'm shooting digital, I'm not limited by 24 or 36 exposures per roll, or the type of film that's in the camera. 

Suddenly many more creative options are available to me.

An unfortunate side effect of this freedom, however, is the sheer number of digital images I now have to deal with. There are currently 85,000 files in my photo backup.

Here's another of my favorite images. This is from the summer before college, in July of 1971. My friend and often model Connie was baby sitting, and I stopped by to take some pictures of her. Her young charge had a huge toy gun that provides an ominous contrast to his innocent face.