Choices

It’s exceptional to be haunted by one’s own work – to have created something that sticks in one’s brain for decades, something that captured a moment, and yet….

I took this photograph in August 1977, on a borrowed Mamiya/Sekor DSX1000 with Tri-X Pan 400 film. It was taken in the basement level of Newhouse I, the I.M. Pei-designed home of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

I was one of a number of high school students from all over attending something called the School Press Institute, a two-week immersive education in writing and production of newspapers and yearbooks that was hosted by Syracuse University. I was 16 and already nearly certain that I was going to be a journalist, but my school did not have a newspaper, so this was exceptionally important to me as it augmented the experience I was getting outside of school through an Explorer Post sponsored by General Electric’s Advertising and Sales Promotion Operation.

It was also exceptionally important to me because, as a young, white working class kid from a very, very white suburb, this was the year when I would start branching out beyond the boundaries of the village of Scotia and the town of Glenville, and start really meeting people from other places. That, too, began with Explorers, which through various events put me in contact with kids from other parts of the state, the Northeast and the whole country. I had spent a week in the spring of 1977 at a national Explorers congress that was essentially several hundred very lightly supervised high schoolers from all over the country fully enjoying what it meant to be young. Now, just a few months later, I was having another, more educational experience with a (much more heavily supervised) group of kids centered around a common purpose – in the course of those two weeks, we would create an entire newspaper and yearbook around the event itself.

Somehow I got lucky enough to be chosen for photography staff, which was a small group that, in addition to working on writing, editing and pasteup, would be responsible for all the photographs in the publications we were producing. That meant we would be trained in basic darkroom techniques in the Newhouse darkrooms – my first direct exposure to film developing and printing. I already had interest in, and a basic understanding of, photography from one of our Post’s mentors, who was a very avid amateur photographer, and who lent me the Mamiya that I took to SPI.

The photography crew put in some late, late hours in those darkrooms in the Newhouse basement. It is one of my more unpleasant memories that we were there the night that news of Elvis Presley’s death came out, and the only music playing on the radio throughout the darkrooms was Elvis music – which may partially account for my dislike of Elvis to this day (there are other reasons, though).

As I recall, it worked this way: the editors and writers would come up with a story idea, and if they wanted a photograph to accompany it, they’d write up a photo order, which the photo editor would assign to one of us, and we’d go out and shoot it. We didn’t have unlimited film, but we were also able to take candid shots, which account for most of the shots I still have.

Outside of the typewriter lab, where we spent, I think, most of our time, in the low-lit beauty of the lower level of Newhouse, there was a row of vending machines. And one of my fellow students paused to make her choice:

So this is truly one of the first photographs I ever took with intent, with purpose, with an understanding of what I was trying to achieve. I knew the light was low – I had a fast lens, 55 mm and f1.4, which was probably wide open to get the match needle even to move under this lighting. I was already quite good at keeping a steady hand, a steady pose, for low light shots –that would be a vanity that followed me throughout my photography, which sometimes served me well and sometimes led me astray. Today, with digital cameras, the light sensitivity is comparatively unlimited, and one can get an exposure under almost any lighting conditions. That wasn’t so in the days of film, when ASA (later ISO) 400 was the fastest film generally available, and it was normal to “push” it a stop (to 800) for newspaper work, but at the cost of graininess. I probably learned to push film at that course.

I thought I had something good from the start. Unfortunately, the photo always faced limits – the extremes between the dark and light areas; the challenge of maintaining detail in her face when, from the angle I was shooting from, there was hardly any light on it at all; the tendency of the vending machine lights to blow out the highlights. On an enlarger, printing to photographic paper, making things darker and lighter was a matter of time, of seconds of exposure. Holding on to dark areas of an image while making others less dark involved blocking the light, essentially casting a shadow, and was a huge amount of trial and error, where differences were measured in seconds.

I tried to print it many times, but I never became skilled enough in dodging and burning techniques to correct for those problems without making them worse. (My formal education in photography began and ended with those two weeks, and it rarely occurred to me that some actual instruction might help – I just assumed, as I assumed with most things, that of course I would get better at it. Also, once I was in college, it was not possible to just get into a photography course as an elective in either of the schools that offered photography as a major.)

In the early days of digitization and photo editing, I scanned this and a whole bunch of other negatives from the ’70s – and ended up with somewhat better images. Not magically better, but better than my old paper prints. Years passed, scanners improved, etc., and I rescanned them again last year and: suddenly, there it was. The picture I’d always wanted it to be.

Looking at this now, I have such tenderness for all these lovely young people, even for myself. We had such dreams, such expectations, such bright futures. Except for the other student from my own high school, I lost touch with all of the friends I’d made here within a couple of years. That’s the nature of these things – for just a few days, a whole bunch of young people come together, make new connections, learn new things, and then scatter apart as their lives move on. When our own children’s turns came, we made sure they had these same mind-opening, world-expanding opportunities. They’re momentary, but so, so very important.

Maybe this picture was perfect all along.

Some other little bits from SPI: