by Carrol Siskind, 1978

My formal art education is minimal, next to nothing.  But here are some life's experiences that helped mold my talents. I remember back in the fifth grade, making Halloween masks.  Instead of just drawing a face on cardboard like the rest of the class, I started out, going my own way, in my own approach. I took heavy construction paper, cutting, folding it, crimping, stapling, gluing, a grotesque, skull shaped form.  The teacher saw where I was going and took me aside and invited me back after school for some extra help and encouragement.  We mixed some paper mache', and formed a disfigured, tiki like face of bulging eyebrows, broken nose, warped mouth. Then painted it red and purple and glued white paper shreds, used for packaging fragile objects, as hair. It was a great mask, and I wish I kept it. 

My father in his younger days, was a botanical illustrator of the flora of Puerto Rico, where he grew up.  Some of the drawings were published in a text book.  My uncle, I was told, was an aspiring painter and was going to study art in Paris.  Instead, both entered medicine; my dad became an ophthalmologist, and my uncle a psychiatrist.  Both highly respected.  Though my dad always enjoyed working with his hands in his wood shop, making furniture and teaching me carpentry skills.

My father also loved to bake in his spare time: breads; white, whole wheat, French baguettes, hard rolls, apple pies, sticky buns, (those sticky buns were brutal!).  I remember him laboring for hours, kneading, rolling dough in his T shirt and long, white baker's apron, in a hot kitchen, yelling at me, "CLOSE THAT DOOR," "HANDS OFF!"  Then, pulling the loaves from the oven, that warm buttery aroma of perfection brought you floating on a cloud to the kitchen. He would slice the first loaf, smell it, squeeze it for texture, taste.  The first comments I often heard from his own mouth were a stiff, stern self critique, "AH, not enough yeast, oven too hot, more kneading, too sweet!  You would think he wasted the entire afternoon and would throw the whole batch away out of frustration. (NO DAD, WAIT, IT'S FINE!!!) To hear him sing his, low pitched hymn, "mmmmmmmmmm" of approval, meant the finished product was SUPERB! ( And it sure was!) What made his baking so memorable over the years, was his ruthless, persistent, perfectionist attitude, and once he worked out the basic recipe, an ability to modify and improve on that recipe.

I received my first exposure to serious photography my junior year in college when I took basic Photo I, just for the credits towards my biology major.  Click the image to read of my auspicious first few weeks with the teacher, Carroll Siskind.  By the next semester, I was his teaching assistant.  He took the above portrait of me after graduating with a BS in Biology in 1977 from Monmouth College, NJ.
 

I also attended a Zone VI Workshop, with Fred Picker back in the late 70's.  This was an awakening for me photographically.  One thing in particular was my printing, I was making them way too dark.  The negatives were exposed properly, but I was examining the wet prints and making judgments under too strong a light.  I remember working like a horse, , and eating like one, and still losing five pounds. It was a week of intense, up before dawn, asleep by 10, and in between, constant motion.  I remember one afternoon our group went to Lil Farber's house.  When we got there, I immediately set up my 4x5 camera and took a picture of a stone wall and ferns.  The group went inside, but I strolled up the street by myself to a small stream and found this wonderful arrangement, "Boulders, Stream," 1978, Putney, Vermont, that appeared in my 2003 New England Black and White Calendar.

Afterwards, I forged ahead on my own, reading, experimenting, applying, from Ansel Adam's "Basic Photo Series" and Fred Picker's "The Fine Print."  I have always believed that a true artist is born and not made.  That he has to find out for himself, how the materials look and feel when applied to his own vision, under his complete control, so to achieve his desired results, not someone else's. Also, that influence, inspiration from others should be kept at a minimum and in perspective.  Not that one should live in their own creative vacuum.  Formal education can facilitate the learning of technique and craft.  The viewing of others work can  reveal what one has overlooked or where ones own work stands or sits in the stream.  But that the emphasis should always be on evolving ones own personal vision and perspective, instead being anybodies clone.

Here it is now 2004, 26 years of chasing after sun and weather, and renditions of the world around me, changing, growing in vision and craft and maturity.  As life and history unfold, it is gratifying to know I am able to slice microscopic sections of existence, within my own insignificant field of vision, onto a piece of light sensitive material for posterity, that deems it worth viewing. 

Time and tides wait for no one, especially photographers.