Wherein I expose my conflicted relationship with photography, and set forth on a path to get my Photo Mojo back...
Anna the Photographer had been making the rounds among my mother's group of friends, taking beautiful black-and-white "natural" (or at least not formally posed) portraits of the kids. It was 1969, and the formal family portraits, with everyone in their Sunday best stiffly posing against Technicolor Backdrop #3 in a studio had begun to seem passé. Our mother had to get in on this action. I was probably 11 years old during our first "sitting." Anna followed
ma soeur and me around on a Saturday, snapping shots as we goofed around.
"Yes, baby, it's a Hasseblad, yes it's the one they took to the moon," she'd croon in her soft accent to my horse as he sniffed at the lens. Anna was Swedish, tall and blond, but more than that she was totally unlike my mother and her friends, who wore bright cotton shift dresses and lipstick and still teased their hair into bouffants and threw cocktail parties and talked about the neighbors. Anna wore jeans and a black turtleneck, and had long hair pulled back simply into a ponytail. She'd actually
talk to me as she followed me around, asking me about what books I was reading and what music I liked. She shared what she was reading and listening to. She talked about photography and art, and I was hooked. Anna was my first style icon, my first "girl crush"(aspirational, not romantic or sexual) and ultimately my inspiration to take up photography.
By the age of 13, I'd become passionate about photography. I'd decided that I wanted to be a photographer like Anna, and started buying black and white film for my little Kodak Instamatic. A neighbor friend's mother, an Artsy Cousin type who had her own darkroom, taught me how to develop film and print pictures. I'd lock myself in a pitch-dark closet, towel stuffed under the door to prevent even a single wave of light from creeping in, wrestle open one of those plastic Instamatic film cartridges, and carefully spool the film onto a developing reel, all by touch. My parents, probably grateful at that point in time that I wasn't Doing Drugs, (in the late 60's/early 70's in the San Francisco Bay Area, DRUGS were every parent's greatest fear, right up there with the Zodiac killer) eventually bought an entry level enlarger and allowed me to turn one of the bathrooms into a part-time darkroom of my own. Soon I was printing black-and-white photos of the neighbor's horse or our cat asleep on a bale of hay, or a cluster of wild oats against a cloudy sky. My interest did not wane, and after a year or so my parents helped me purchase my first SLR camera, a Yashica TL Electro-X. (You never forget your First.) I was in heaven, and would spend afternoons traipsing around our quasi-rural neighborhood snapping shots of anything that reminded me of the photos I'd seen in that month's Photography magazine. I took my prints to the camera store to be heat mounted, and spent some weekend afternoons at local Art Faires™ next to women with paintings of clowns or fruit or crocheted Kleenex box cozies, trying to sell my work. I even had business cards printed up.
Then, my sophomore year of high school, I decided to take a photography class as an elective. The teacher, who also taught English, was big on Themes and Deeper Meaning and Artistic Statements. I didn't get it. I just wanted to explore interesting visual imagery, and at that point was captivated by light and texture, and trees. For our final portfolio, I'd captured what I thought was some of my best work, a close up of rough oak bark, a bare birch branch hung with raindrops, with the sun behind making the drops sparkle like lights, a flock of crows taking off from a giant oak, a gnarled branch against an empty sky. The teacher however, was not impressed. "These are a bit trite, don't you think? What is your Theme? Where is the Deeper Meaning? I know you are capable of more." Maybe she was right, but all I heard was that I didn't have the stuff to be a good photographer. Disheartened, I gradually lost interest, sold my SLR and darkroom equipment to a friend of my mother's, and rarely looked back. (A few years later, watching the movie "The Four Seasons" I had to chuckle at Sandy Dennis' character who spent months photographing vegetables. I wonder if my teacher viewed my tree project as "rather constipated," a remark one of the other characters in the movie makes about the vegetable project.)
Since then, I've only had point-and-click cameras, and mostly have limited my picture-taking to snapshots. I felt intimidated by the thought of trying to do anything more ambitious. But in my quest to take better WIW photos for the blog, I've come to the conclusion that I need to step up my game, bite the bullet and dip my toe into the world of DSLR cameras. I came across this very helpful
video from Jeannine of Independent Fashion Bloggers on how to take your own outfit photos, and have taken the plunge and purchased a camera similar to the one she recommends, wireless remote and tripod. Wish me luck!
Just don't expect a lot of Deeper Meaning. ;-)
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