Personal Surveys

Providence

The Photo Comp

Little Essex Street

Personal Calibration

52 Sundays

The Crosses of the
Northern Neck

Providence

These images were taken from 1977 through 1979. It was a blurry time. I would not have remembered  many of my classmates at RISD if not for these photographs. That memory has no basis in the way things actually were.  They are simply my filter to the past. I can only imagine where Sybil or Larry are now.

The pictures were processed by hand using Sprint photo chemistry. Sprint was a photochemical company founded my professor, Paul Krot. Paul dyed his hair bright orange and scented his stop bath with vanilla. The whole fluorescent  hair look adopted by the punks may have come from Professor Krot.

The images were a reaction to a discussion I had with the photographer Lewis Baltz. He had given a lecture about his series of photos of Irvine, California. I asked him what he was feeling when he took the pictures. He maintained that he was feeling nothing and that the images had neutral emotional content, that they were factual and true records of the new industrial park.

How could this be? I thought that all photographs were based on the photographers predisposition. That truth belied what was just outside of the frame. I had this in mind as I took these images.

As Errol Morris put it: Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: “true and false.”

Click to see images.