Photographs: 1967-2003

A Photo Show At Rooz Cafe, January 2004

In January 2004, I presented a selection of my photographs on the walls at Rooz Cafe on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. Attached to each photo was a small story about the picture. These have all been gathered here for those of you who may have missed the show.

Why do we take pictures? Maybe to “own” an instant in space-time forever? Or maybe to take away something interesting for later inspection. Or perhaps as a running visual autobiography. But I still don’t know why I take pictures.

I am not a professional photographer. But some of my images have wound up in strange places - like the backdrop for an off-Broadway play about Greenwich Village in the ‘60’s (its true!). Or the cover of a book. Even a record jacket.

It started when my Dad gave me a Kodak camera. I must have been 12 and living in the suburbs of New York City, on Long Island. I took pictures of my friends, airplanes, the sky, the street, our car. They weren’t very interesting. So I put the camera away.

My Dad kept taking pictures with his Nikon F. Mostly pictures of me, my brother, my Mom, the family. I have hundreds of his pictures of my Mom with her handbag, standing in front of something, somewhere. I figure most people take pictures like these.

In the 60’s I moved into the City to go to college. Eventually I bought my own camera, a Nikon like my Dad’s, and started taking pictures again. Some actually seemed interesting. But would anyone else think so?

I kept on taking pictures. New York City, Berkeley, Europe. Wherever I went, I took a camera. Now I have over 8000 images. Most are autobiography. But here is a selection of 32 that I find most interesting. The number of choices approaches infinity. But wall space is limited.

Current digital imaging has finally made it possible to actually mount a show like this. Previously, the cost of printing each slide to 8x10 would have been prohibitive.

All the images before 2003 were taken with various Nikon cameras that I have owned, using Anscochrome, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, or Fujichrome slide file and scanned with my own Nikon film scanner. The images from 2003 were taken with a small Nikon 3100 digital camera. All the images were post-processed with Adobe Photoshop 7 on a Mac and printed optically on Kodak color paper stock by ofoto.com. Each image represents a file of about 2 Megabytes.

Enjoy the show.

If you are interested in purchasing a framed print of any of these photographs, let me know.