A Personal History of Photography

A Personal 
History of Photography

Steven D Foster

An Illustrated, annotated chronology of

photography projects and

remembrances

 ~ First published in 2011 ~
Extensively Revised in June, 2020 & July, 2023 

1945:  I was born in a small town named Piqua, Ohio.  
The fear of death was apparently a constant presence as I awaited birth in my mother’s womb.  My mom told me (repeatedly) that my younger brother had died at birth, or was delivered dead upon birth; there had been complications when she went into labor (her cervix did not open).  I’m not sure about all the details but my baby brother apparently suffocated trying to get out of the womb.  When my mother got pregnant again with me she was terrified that the same thing would happen again, so throughout her pregnancy she worried about me dying at birth.  When my time came to be born I was delivered cesarean section.

As a child I suffered from croup cough and asthma and spent quite a lot of time in a "croup tent."  When I was older I played baseball in empty lots near my home, at the school yard and in my friends' back yards.  I liked to dig snow tunnels and trip my younger sister every chance I could get, often using rope tricks I learned from watching cowboy movies.  ~  I had an ideal childhood . . .  up to the age of nine years and eleven months, when my dad died unexpectedly and with little explanation, in August, 1955.  After that, the only thing that would be of any importance to me, really, would be photography.  Photography would save my life; and it would become a way of life for me.

NOTE:  I have made several photography projects that are both visual and textual meditations on Death.   Click here to see a list of hyperlinked Death-themed projects.  

Snapshot of my dad and me, 1945

1955:  My Photography Epiphany  
It was a hot summer day, and I was staying with my cousin Bobby because my mom was always at the hospital with my dad.  I was behind the garage shooting baskets when Bobby came running up to me very excited.  He had just gotten his snapshots back from the drugstore and he wanted to show them to me.  When he thrust out his hand, full of snapshots, for me to see . . .  I realized in that very moment that I wanted to be a photographer.  A fire had been lit inside me that has never gone out. 

The great photographer Edward Weston wrote about "The Flame of Recognition."  ~  Fredrick Sommer, the great photographer and theorist, once said:  "You don't find anything meaningful 'out there' in the world that isn't already inside you."  ~  The photographer Alfred Stieglitz, talking about equivalents, said: "the outer world reflects one's inner world."  ~  The depth psychologist CG Jung, in writing about the creative process in alchemy, and then later about synchronicity, wrote that what we perceive as meaningful is projected out on the world from within our unconscious psyche.  ~  And the great, ancient  yogic seers understood that the outer world is created by internal psychic images which are projected out onto the screen of duality existence from the One, Universal Self.  ~  All this is to say that photography has always seemed, to me, to be my destiny, my dharma, something that had to happen to me in this life. 

My father died a few days after I experienced my epiphany, in August, 1955.   On the day that my dad died I had gotten a fever.  Though it was a very hot evening I was shivering as I sat in the park with my cousins and my Aunt listening to the local band playing march music.  Then later that night I awoke myself pounding my pillow harder and harder and harder with my fist  . . .   Early the next morning my Aunt came to tell me that my Dad had died during the night.

NOTE: story #5 in my essay "Death, Art & Writing" provides a full detailed account of my intuitive experience at the time of my dad's passing.   

After my dad's death I became totally fixated on photography.  I studied photo books from the library and bought camera magazines; I studied the darkroom equipment in the Sears Catalogue photography section.  I helped my friend Larry Householder clean up his dad's old darkroom so we could use it ourselves, but before we could finish the job Larry got very sick and the darkroom project had to be put on hold indefinitely.  ~  By that December I realized it was necessary for me to move forward on my own.  I requested some carefully selected darkroom equipment from the Sears catalogue for my Christmas gift.  The day after Christmas I set a darkroom in our small basement for developing film and making contact prints.  I used the top of the washing machine as my work table.

1959-63:  Mom remarries.  High School Years in Portland, Indiana & Photography
My mother married a meat salesman and had to sell her house in Piqua and buy a house in Portland, Indiana, where my step father was living and caring for his sickly mother.  ~  Two of my friends in Portland, Jim Cox and Steve Habbercorn, became interested in my hobby:  I had set up my darkroom in the large walk-in closet just off my bedroom (no running water);  Jim set up his darkroom in their garage; Steve Habbercorn's dad turned a tool shed into an air conditioned darkroom for him--with temperature controlled running water!!!  (I was so jealous).  

The darkroom, and in general my love of photography became a safe haven for, because my step-father, we soon discovered, was an addicted gambler and drinker.  (There were forewarnings about this before my mom married Blacky, but I think she felt she had to take the chance.  Suffice it to say I lived in a dysfunctional family situation from practically the day we moved to Portland, Indiana.  My mom, as a young child, had an alcoholic father, and here she was again, dealing with a similar situation.  She had not been able to finish High School; instead she worked in a clothing factory that made socks for our US soldiers.  So of course it was hard for her to find work to sustain herself and her two children and a house.    

Marriage must have seemed like the only way of surviving.  My mom did date a few other guys before she married Blacky, who was a charmer and quite a good dancer (and womanizer).  I wish she had married Roy, the guy who called the bingo games at the Elks on Saturday nights.  He had a Rolliflex camera! and a darkroom!! and lots great camera magazines (which he loaned me).  But after he had to have all his teeth pulled out (he stayed at our house over night spitting blood till morning) my mom somehow realized he was not the right guy for her.
   
I hated Portland Junior High; but in High School things got a little better for me.  I became the yearbook photographer.  I tried using the darkroom in the physics lab for a while.  (I thought this would help me befriend the physics teacher, Mr. Settle, who was always terrifying me with his eccentric lectures in our Algebra and Physics classes.)  But the darkroom was painted black; even with the safelights on I kept running into things in the darkroom, so I went back to using my own darkroom in my walk-in closet for processing film and making prints for the yearbook.

In the summer of my Junior year our yearbook director, who was also the High School librarian, got some grant money and she took several of her student yearbook staff to a workshop at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  I took some workshops in photography there.  In one of the workshops we were given an assignment and I won a prize for the picture I submitted--a dramatically lit, off-the-camera-flash picture (mixed with exiting daylight), of a circular form of barbed wire hanging on a fence post which I found on campus near a wooded area.  It was an interesting image, as I remember, in part because it was an (accidental) multiple exposure image. (12 years later I would use the same techniques for my Persephone Series.)  Later, I had submitted a picture I took of our senior gymnast hanging on some ropes--using dramatic side lighting--and the picture won an Honorable Mention in the National Kodak Yearbook Competition.  Dramatic lighting was the key to success.  (W. Eugene Smith taught me that.)
    
I was invited by my American History teacher Bob Wyler to help him photograph horse race finishes at the County fair ground.  (He used an old army aerial camera with a motor on it that was taken from a kitchen mixer.)  Though we had agreed on a day and time for him to pick me up at home and take me to the fair ground, I ended up waiting for him outside my house for over two hours  . . . and he never showed up.  ~   Mr. Wyler felt terrible about forgetting me, and I felt terrible too because I had had this kind of (painful) waiting experience with my step-father on several occasions while he steeped into the nearby tavern.  ~  Anyway, my history teacher got it right on the second try and it was an interesting experience working with an arial camera, processing long strips of film in a hot tent, photographing horses as they passed the finish line . . .  but I wanted to be a different kind of photographer. 
   
I had discovered W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Story photographs in a Popular Photography Annual and Smith became my model photographer.  His dark, moody, dramatically lit compassionate images were (I thought) exactly the kind of picture I wanted to make.  ~  The other major influences in my high school days included The Family of Man, the paperback copy which I owned; John Clarence Laughlin's Ghosts Along the Mississippi, which I found in the public library; and a book entitled Photography--The Universal Language.  I also read Irving Stone's two biographies: one on the life of Van Gogh, Lust for Life,  and the other, on the life of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy.  Those biographies, which were suggested to my by one of my teachers, truly affirmed my unfolding, growing passion to become a photographer, and perhaps an artist--though I didn't know exactly what that meant.  

I had a really great English teacher in my senior year of High School.  Mr. Cotner was a writer working his way through his pursuit of a PhD at nearby Ball State Teachers College by teaching English and Speech at Portland High.  For his required end-of-the-year project he allowed me to create my own exhibition of photographs modeled after The Family of Man.  I displayed the mounted prints on the back wall of the classroom, and under each picture I included text excerpts which I had found in my paperback copy of the The Family of Man which was a catalogue produced for the world famous Exhibition designed at the Museum of Modern Art by Edward Steichen.  I liked especially W. Eugene Smith's photographs in The Family of Man  ~  That English project turned out to be my first solo exhibition, and it dealt with the Big themes of life:  Creation, Love, Birth, Work, Death.  Mr. Cotner praised it.

I was very shy in High School, and having a step father who would't come home on Friday and Saturday nights because he was gambling and drinking, etc., surly contributed to my shyness.  Blacky was a constant disappointment; I could never trust him.  My mom was very depressed by the situation, and so was I.  All I could think about was getting out of town and studying photography in a college far away from Portland as soon as I graduated from High School.  I was determined not to become one of those Portland guys who would get a girl pregnant and then stay in town and work in a factory the rest of his life--or at best, went to college at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana and then teach in a public school in some small town in Indiana.    

I decided to take my camera to the Senior Prom as the yearbook photographer rather than invite a girl and dance the twist with her, which I thought was really stupid.  Photography protected me from getting involved with any girl that might by chance require of me to stay in Portland and ruin my dreams of becoming a photographer.  I became a witness rather than a participant in my life as a High School student.  ~  Mr. Cotner criticized me in class one day for not taking a girl to the prom (and taking my camera instead).  I was deeply hurt by his well meaning attack.  I think he was expecting me to take the visiting Foreign Student to the Prom, and I just couldn't do it!  Mr. Cotner became one of the many father figures in my life who would disappoint me because of their imperfections. 

After the prom I put a selected group of photographs (including images of the preparation of the gym, and images made at the Prom) into something like a picture story format modeled after W. Eugene Smith, complete with text and titles under the pictures.  Then I submitted it to the Portland Newspaper.  They published the whole thing as a double page spread in the Sunday paper!  (However, I know it did not compare to my heartfelt Family of Man inspired exhibition.  And I made no mention of the band that was hired to play at the dance in my story.  It turned out that the group consisted of aspiring jazz musicians, and every once in a while they played some pretty abstract improvisations--which drew howls of disapproval from the twist-crazed Prom dancers.)  Later in life I would listen to all kinds of jazz and make photographs in response to many different kinds of music.  (Visit this link Music Inspired Photography projects.)

When I had to move to Portland after my dad died my love of sports diminished quite significantly.  Before my dad passed away I was playing sports constantly.  I loved best the pick up games with neighborhood friends.  But sports in Portland was highly competitive, and the bullying was horrible.  The stress of having to perform well totally ruined sports for me.  Nonetheless I stayed in High School sports (basketball, football) simply because it gave me an excuse to be away from home as much as possible. 

Then in the summer before my Senior year I discovered tennis, and that changed my life for the better.  I had only myself to deal with, and I excelled at tennis in a very natural way.  I made some tennis friends who were several years older than me and of course more mature than me; they lived out of town, but we got together often.  And when they were in town they would take me under their wing in a compassionate way because they eventually learned of my family situation.  ~  Tom was a college student from a wealthy family I think; Ed would drive to Portland from Detroit (quite often) where he worked as a design engineer for GM.  Those guys were amazed by my natural talent--maybe because I lacked their studied form.  I really enjoyed our evenings out-of-town, where we could play tennis under the lights.  We had a great time together and they frequently opened a new can of balls for our games.  I will never forget their friendship, which helped get though my senior year.  Thank you so much Tom and Ed!  (I was surprised to find out one day that Ed was the son of my yearbook supervisor!  It's a small world.)

My best friend in High School, Byron and I celebrated of our graduation from High School by going on a road trip.  He was to write stories (like John Steinbeck) about our adventures, and I was to make photographs to go with the stories.  We saved some of our lunch money each day to help finance our trip.  We would buy a bag of Fritos and eat them together in his car as we excitedly planned our trip.  ~  We went up into Michigan and one night we camped near the Mackinac Bridge, which was magnificent at night with all its lights.  I made a good photo of it.  ~  What I remember most about our trip was the drive back to Portland, Indiana from Michigan.  I was so filled with the excitement of going to Rochester, NY at the end of the summer and studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology . . . and then the power steering started going out on us intermittently.  I became afraid that we would be in a car accident and I would not be able to go to school in Rochester.  The sun was hot and shinning into my eyes and reflecting harshly off the road and the car would swerve out of control for short periods of time.  I could not wait to get home safely.  I really really needed to get out of Portland and on to Rochester!  

1963-66  Studied Photography at RIT, Rochester, NY  
I had decided I was going to be a photojournalist like W. Eugene Smith, and I wanted to study photography in college.  I applied to three schools, one of which was Ohio University in Athens, where I won a prize with my photo of a circle of barbed wire, but I was admitted to only one school, along with a small scholarship, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the few schools in the country at the time that offer several different high quality degree photography programs: in professional photography, in the science of photography (to prepare students for work at Kodak), and in Illustration, which could take two directions: creative advertising photography or "fine arts" photography.  RIT was also the most expensive school I had applied to.  But my mom surprised me by having enough money saved to get me through the first year and a half of college.  After that I was pretty much on my own.  (She told me she saved some money from a Social Security Benefit she received from my dad's death.)  

The first year at RIT was a mix of basic exercises and technical classes. I don't know how I got through the chemistry and physics photography classes.  And I hated the still life projects and math course and the world history course.  But they passed me on, and in my second year I was able to take a class with Minor White, and I took Beaumont Newhall's History of Photography course which met weekly at the George Eastman House Museum of Photography where he showed his slide lectures.    

Minor White's course really impressed me, and I liked Newhall's History of Photo course mostly because it was held at George Eastman House .  (I hated having to remember the dates of the slides Beaumont Newhall showed in his lectures, and all the old processes).  

(Interestingly, in 1972 Beaumont Newhall would serve on my MFA thesis committee at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where he had been invited to teach History of Photography as Distinguished Professor after his retirement from George Eastman House as its Director.)

Eastman House was truly a great place in the mid 1960's.  I loved looking at the permanent displays of photographs of the History of Photography, especially the section that included works by Harry Callahan, Minor White, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz.  And there were always fantastic changing exhibitions of contemporary photography which Nathan Lyons curated.  I especially loved the solo exhibitions he presented of the work of Aaron Siskind and Mario Giacomelli.  
    
After studying with Minor White and Beaumont Newhall, and meeting some of the other serious young photographers at RIT, including Roger Mertin and his friend Don Dickerson, John Gould, Peter Tyler Monson, Gary Metz, John Patterson, Jim Erwin, and Larry McPherson, I soon realized I wanted to be an artist rather than a photojournalist.

Working My Way Through College
The summer before I entered RIT as a Freshman I worked in the canning factory just outside of Portland.  That was an eye-opening experience.  I knew I never wanted to do that again.  Then, at the end of my Freshman year at RIT, I went back to Portland and worked as a roofer to make some extra money for college.  At the end of the summer I knew I never wanted to do that again.  ~  I had intended to make photographs during the summer but I was just too hot and tired after getting home from work at 7 pm after putting shingles on barns and taring endless expanses of hot flat factory rooftops all day long.  My walk-in non-air-conditioned attic darkroom was always too hot in the summer, anyway.  

I feel off a roof that summer.  The plank holder had loosened and I gracefully slid down the roof and fell ten feet through the air onto a huge rose bush below.  The bush saved me from my fall, but I was picking thorns out of my ass for the next few days.  The guys I worked with never let me forget that experience.  They just howled with laughter.  I swore I would never do any more hard labor summer jobs--ever.  (Nonetheless years a few years later I would end up working on the loading docks at UPS in Chicago to help me finish up undergrad school).

I was really worried about having to go home for the summer following my Sophomore year at RIT.  I could not face being home with my mom and Blacky, working again on roofs--or at the canning factory.  But fortunately my photographer friend Roger Mertin, who worked in the RIT Bookstore, helped me get a job at the bookstore for the summer.  It was really great - an air conditioned job, which included all the candy I wanted to eat in the evening after the ladies went home, made it possible for me to stay in Rochester all summer.  And Roger, an upper class photo student who had taken Nathan Lyons's Home Workshop that year, and began looking at my photographs after the bookstore closed, encouraged me to take Nathan's Workshop the next fall.  The Workshop ran the full academic schedule identical to RIT from Fall thru Spring. He charged $100 for each year.  I totally loved Nathan's Workshop, and ended up taking it two years in a row with my close photographer friend and room mate.  At the close of the second year Nathan gave me and Jim Erwin each a mounted photograph as a parting gift.  Nathan was not teaching the Home Workshop to make extra money; he was preparing for lectures he would be giving in forthcoming school, the Visual Studies Workshop which he created in Rochester after he quite his job at Eastman House.    

Early photography influences 
I have already explained how W. Eugene Smith was my first real influence during my High School Days.  Then later, in college, as I studied more contemporary photographers my influences included: Dave Heath, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Mario Giacomelli, Paul Caponigro and Duane Michaels, plus the turn of the century photographers Eugene Atget and Alfred Stieglitz.  (Nathan Lyons was another of my major influences, but mostly in terms of his Workshop teaching, and the exhibitions he curated at George Eastman House.)

1964-65 & 1965-66  Nathan Lyons, Home Workshops, Rochester, NY  
I took Nathan Lyon’s Home Workshops while I was taking RIT classes and as a part-time third year student. The workshops met every two weeks in the evenings at Nathan's home.  My best friend Jim Erwin took both of the workshops with me, and he had a car, so he drove us to the workshops which was such a big help.  ~  In the second workshop with Nathan I was studying with Roger Mertin, Alice Wells and Jim Erwin.  (Jim was a year ahead of me in the Illustration program at RIT.  He would soon become my brother-in-law and move to Chicago to study with Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design).  

Double page spread from the final book project for Nathan Lyons How Workshop, 1965-66

I would often leave Nathan's Workshop sessions shaking with excitement.  I loved those sessions.  I felt I was really being initiated into some profound kind of knowledge that was always challenging and expanding me in exciting ways that I couldn't usually say in words.  Nathan often asked us: "Why do you make photographs?" and "Do you see what you believe?  Or do you believe what you see?"  He emphasized the importance of the book form for making truly articulate substantial photographic statements; and he used Robert Frank's book The Americans as the supreme model.   Nathan had us make several hand bound books of photographs for his workshop assignments.  For the conclusion of the second year's workshop Nathan assigned us a large book project.  (To see the book I made, click here.  To see other images from my RIT days in Rochester, click here.)  

NOTE: Later, when I was a teacher, I would give a hand bound book assignment to all of my Photo II students as the concluding assignment for the semester. I also allowed my Senior students to make a book for their required Senior project if they chose to do so.

For the third summer in Rochester, 1966, I worked at George Eastman House, in the darkroom, thanks to Nathan Lyons and Alice Wells who worked there.  At nights I worked at the RIT bookstore.  I remember being thrilled at the opportunity of printing Edward Weston images from copy negatives made by Ansel Adams!, among other things.  (I think the copy prints were to be used in some historical publication.)  I loved spending my lunch hour looking at the photographs in Eastman House, and napping in the wonderful gardens there.  ~  That summer, on the weekends, I also worked for a film maker and friend, John Patterson.  He was a great photographer, in the style of Henry Cartier-Bresson, though he felt his real calling was to become a film maker.  That summer he was working on a documentary film about Rochester and he paid me to help him lug equipment around and making still photos of all the shots he was doing for the film.  

I couldn't have been happier that summer, working at Eastman House, and in the RIT bookstore, and on a film crew . . .  though I did feel a bit guilty not going home and supporting my mother in her very difficult marriage.  But I was on my own, away from Portland, Indiana, and all the problems there.  I was in the art photography capitol of the world (or, at least, Rochester seemed that way to me at the time) and I was making money doing what I loved. 

Pedestals
It took me a long time to really understand how the psychological underpinnings of my family life affected my relationships to others.  I would put powerful father figures, like Nathan and Minor White (and in Graduate School, Ray Metzker) upon pedestals, then I would look for weaknesses to show up in them so I could "knock them off" the pedestal I had placed them on in my mind.  I needed to emotionally separate from them.   

1966  Minor White's class at RIT
I took Minor White's Visual Communications course at RIT at the end of my second year, then Minor would leave Rochester for a teaching job at MIT.  It was a powerful class.  He was one of the Master's of Photography and he could do no wrong, I thought.  

Minor would have Friday night print sessions in his apartment above the hardware store on Union Street in Rochester and I was invited to one, once.  (You had to be recommended by someone who had been attending the print sessions regularly, and my RIT friend and fellow student, Peter Monson arranged to get me in for one of the print sessions).  At first it was really great being with Minor and a small group of serious people looking at prints, talking about them very seriously.  But Minor started drinking, and then he kept drinking.  Then he became quite inebriated and started tearing up about something.  ~  His drinking brought up in me all sorts of bad memories and anger about my step father.  Minor fell quickly from the pedestal I had placed him on; then shortly after that episode Minor left Rochester to teach at MIT.  I have profound respect and gratitude for what Minor White accomplished in his life for the advancement of photography as a fine art.  And I understand now that his personal problems were in part due to the failings of the culture he lived in at the time. 

Because Minor had left town and I had completed my second year studying with Nathan Lyons in his Home Workshop, I felt I had gotten all I could get from Rochester, so I decided to move to Chicago to finish my undergraduate degree in photography at The Institute of Design (the American Bauhaus) where I would study with one of my photographer heroes, Aaron Siskind.  I wouldn't have to go there alone.  I knew that me friend Jim Erwin had decided to go to graduate school there too.

1966-68  Chicago   
Jim Erwin graduated from RIT at the end of that semester and married Phyllis Meleo.  Then they drove to Chicago with a U-Haul trailer.  They invited me to go with them.  We stayed with Joe, a friend of mine from RIT, at his mother's place just outside of Chicago until we could find places to live.  Jim would be studying with Aaron Siskind as a graduate student at the Institute of Design in the fall, and I had about a year and a half worth of undergraduate classes to take at ID before I could get my BS degree.   

I wanted to experience a big city, like Chicago, and I wanted to study with Aaron Siskind.  Perhaps, I would not have gone to Chicago on my own, but I was very comfortable being in Chicago knowing Jim and Phyllis were there too.  I found an apartment near the Diversey Avenue Train Stop, just a few stops from Jim and Phyllis at the Montrose stop.  Once I was moved in to my place I started working at UPS on the docks.

*

    
Phyllis was (and still is) a great cook.  She and Jim would often invite me to their apartment on Sundays for dinner and then we would view each others photographs.  I met Keith Smith at one of those Sunday dinners.  Keith was into alternative photo processes, and was beginning to explore hand made artist books.  Keith was looking for someone to share the rent of his apartment on the West Side of Chicago, in the wonderful Mexican/Polish district, and he asked if I'd like to move in with him.  I took him up on the offer.  It was a great deal for me in so many ways.  My portion of the rent was only 40 dollars a month;  we shared a small darkroom there (without running water.)  And I actually enjoyed my elevated train trips to the Institute of Design from the Elevated stop near his place; I would read Proust whenever I traveled by train, and by the time I left Chicago I had completed the entire set of volumes of In Search of Lost Time (in my Chicago days, it was known as Remembrance of Things Past).  I had no idea what most of those volumes were about, but there were moments of stunning prose beauty that were worth waiting for.
    
Keith was interested in the the books I made in the Nathan Lyons Home Workshops, and later he would teach book-making at Nathan's Visual Studies Workshop.  Keith was an unusually kind and gentle and generous person, and he was remarkably patient with me as a room mate, and I am very grateful for the time I spent with him, though I probably drove him a little crazy at that time.  I was so young and neurotic.  ~  I have fond memories of Keith painting our apartment with cheap paint many times over, until it finally looked good; and he was always sitting at the kitchen table working on his books and listening to music when I came home late at night from working at UPS.  ~  We would have Jim and Phyllis and Larry McPherson over for home made pizza, modeled after Mr. Allen's famous home pies--with the little round sausage balls on top.   

Keith went on to become an internationally known book artist, and he self-published many ground-breaking instructional books about bookmaking, binding and the visual structure in books.  Thank you Keith.

(Jan 12-29, 1967)  Two Week Exhibition at the Underground Gallery, NYC     
While I was living in Chicago as a student two extraordinary things happened thanks to Nathan Lyons.  It took many years for me to fully realize how generous Nathan was with me.  He gave me so much in his Home Workshops, and besides  giving me a print at the end of the second workshop he often invited me up to his Eastman House office (on the third floor) to see boxes full of prints that photographers had sent him.  I can't tell you how thrilling that was for me.

Chicago, 1968  published in the Eastman House catalogue Vision and Expression  

  

Nathan put some of my work in an Eastman House exhibition and publication entitled Vision and Expression (see image above)  And he arranged an opportunity for Alice Wells, Roger Mertin and myself to exhibit our photographs in the famous NYC Underground Gallery.  (see "3" poster below).   The images I submitted for both exhibitions were city portraits, made in Chicago.  Nathan told me that my hero, Robert Frank, saw the show at the Underground Gallery and that he had made a complimentary remark to him about it.  (How thrilled I was to hear that!)
  

1967 Underground Gallery Exhibition 

I'm amazed, now, to think my work was in a NYC  gallery exhibition during my third year in college and that some of my photographs had been exhibited at Eastman House and published in the show's catalogue.  I had no idea, then, what that meant at the time--I was very naive about the politics of art; I just was loving my life as a student, making photographs in big cities away from my dysfunctional family situation in Portland, Ind.  

Of course, Nathan's influence in the world of fine art photography had charmed my life in ways I couldn't appreciate then.  As Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House he produced some of the most important exhibitions of photography in the growing field of fine art photography.  But he left the museum to start up his Visual Studies Workshop which opened in 1969.   He was a founding member and the first Director of the national organization, The Society for Photographic Education.*  ~  I know Nathan was excited for me about my decision to move on to Chicago and study with Aaron Siskind after my second year in his Workshop, but I am also pretty sure that where I would end up going to graduate school disappointed him.

(*After my life in photography had come nearly to its end, I was honored by the Mid-Western chapter of the Society for Photographic Education for my teaching career in October, 2019.  More about this later.)
  
1966-68  I Studied Photography at the Institute of Design-Chicago   
I took undergrad classes with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel and Wynn Bullock.  For a short visit as Artist In Residence I also was exposed to the work and ideas of Fredrick Sommer.  ~  While Aaron was off to Mexico photographing for one semester, he was replaced by Wynn Bullock.  They were two very different kinds of people, teachers and artists, and it was a great opportunity to have been able to study with the both of them.  And I was also fortunate to have had friendships while in Chicago with four other really great Chicago photographers: Larry McPherson, Joe Jachna, Keith Smith and Jim Erwin.   

Working my way through College : UPS  Chicago  I worked two jobs at UPS.  The first summer was horribly difficult: I was working on the docks sorting packages and loading trucks.  The work became all the more difficult when I fell through a space between the dock and the truck I was loading and seriously hurt my knee.  UPS and the Teamsters would not cover my medical problem--though they had been negligent for not having the truck backed up tight against the dock--so I suffered all through that very hot summer with a knee injury so painful I could not sleep at knight after work.  If I finally got to sleep I would have nightmares about not being able to keep up with the conveyor belts which were always over-flooded with packages.  ~  In the fall, however, UPS gave me a part-time evening job counting pick-up slips after my classes at I.D., from 6:00pm to 11:00-11:30pm.  It was easy work for good pay.  The worst part of the job was riding home on a bus at around midnight through some of the toughest areas of Chicago.  It was terrifying, and especially on Friday nights, but I was never bothered.  I just kept my head down, reading my Proust and anxiously awaiting the moment when I could get of the bus and in front of the apartment where Keith was always working on his books at the kitchen table and listening to endless recordings of operas.

Those Chicago years were the years of the big protests of the Viet Nam War.  Though my injured knee hurt me terribly for several years (it had not been properly cared for by UPS or myself--for lack of money) my injured knee probably ended up saving my life.  After three military physical exams (two in Chicago and later one in NYC) I was finally given a 4F classification because of my knee and a letter written by a Chicago doctor sympathetic to my attitudes toward the War.  I made many photographs at the large protests on State Street, and a few of them ended up in my Senior Project at the Institute of Design. 

From my ID senior book project, "Kraus"   5x7” silver print    click to enlarge

1968  Senior hand bound book : “Kraus” 
My senior project at the Institute of Design was a hand bound artist book of silver gelatin photographs entitled Kraus.  The work was about many things: it was a visual love poem to Gloria (Phyllis Erwin's sister), who would become my wife a year later; it was about the protest years in Chicago against the Viet Nam War; it was in part an homage to the writing of James Joyce, a homage to Wagner's use of the musical idea of the leitmotif, and a homage to Nathan Lyons who had inspired me to make books as a way of giving my work a full and articulate photographic form.  Visit this link: Kraus to learn more about the book and see more of the images. 

The Kraus book was an important and successful way for me to conclude my undergraduate work in photography.  It would help me get a full Teaching Scholarship at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque so that I could get my MFA degree free of charge with a stipend to help pay living expenses.  Teaching photography those three years was the best preparation I could have possibly have gotten for getting a teaching job.  Later on I would show that book to all of my Photo II classes each semester as an example of how they could bind their own books for their required final book project.   

Spring, 1968 thru Summer, 1969 :  New York City
I had met Gloria in Rochester, when I was going to school at RIT; she was dating my friend, Joe at the same time that my best friend and roommate Jim Erwin was beginning to date Phyllis, Gloria's sister.  Gloria would come to Chicago a few times to visit Jim and Phyllis and we got to know each other better there; then I started writing letters to her, and we grew pretty close by the time I was ready to graduate from ID.  

I had been quite shy of girls.  I know that my relationship with Blacky and how I saw him interact with my mom had something to do with that  shyness.  Blacky use to harp on me about not dating girls in High School.  But then Blacky unexpectedly died in my second year in Chicago from a freak medical event.  His death was a major transformative event in life; it liberated both me and my mother in multiple ways.  It certainly allowed me to open my heart to Gloria, though I have no doubt that our marriage was destined, and that in some strange way Blacky's death was part of the script.  Twenty years later, grace would bring Gloria and me to Gurumayi and Siddha Yoga Meditation in 1987, and we have been practicing Siddha Yoga together with real love and enthusiasm and gratitude for Siddha Yoga and Gurumahyi for the past thirty-six years (as I write this in July, 2023). 

After I graduated from I.D. with my undergraduate degree in the spring of 1968, I moved to NYC primarily to spend more time with Gloria who was going to be studying art at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn that coming Fall.  Then Jim and Phyllis came to NYC a few months after I had gotten settled in the Big City in a small bug infected apartment near Greenwich Village and a job working for a commercial photographer.  ~  Eventually Jim set up his own photography business in the Big City and became quite successful in the highly competitive business of advertising photography.  Though Jim's decision to go into the commercial world of photography greatly disappointed me personally, I love Jim and Phyllis and Gloria too much to let that become an obstacle in our friendship.    

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My first job in NYC was rolling dye transfers in a custom color lab.  (I had tried to get a job printing snapshots in the same lab but they said I was over qualified for that job.)  My friend Joe--who had been dating Gloria in Rochester a few years earlier, and who had helped me and Jim and Phyllis get settled in Chicago--was also working in New York City as an assistant to a very good photographer named George Hausman.  Joe helped me get settled in NYC by letting me stay with him in his little apartment until I found a place to live.  Later, Joe helped me get a job with Hausman after decided to move on to a better paying studio job with more responsibility.  Though Joe initiated the break in his relationship with Gloria, he was still in a lot of pain over the loss when I was staying with him, and yet he was a good hearted person and was very understanding about the situation I found myself in: staying with him amidst my growing relationship with Gloria at that time who would be living in Brooklyn in the fall.

I learned a lot working with Hausman in the studio, in the darkroom, and on location--it was more interesting than rolling dye transfers--but most importantly I learned for sure that I was not cut out for the commercial world, and that I needed to go back to school and get a Master's degree so I would be able to teach photography at the college level.  I had been inspired by so many great teachers and I could see no other viable options for me regarding making a living.

Other than Joe, Gloria was the only other person I knew in New York City until Jim and Phyllis arrived in town.  They ended up living in the same Brooklyn apartment building Gloria was staying in.  I was overjoyed having Jim and Phyllis back in my life, along with Gloria--all in the same building in Brooklyn!  However I nonetheless suffered working at the Hausman Studio.  George was fairly patient with me, but I made a lot of mistakes which made him pretty angry sometimes.  I knew I would have to get out of that job very soon.  (The best part of the job for me was lunches during shooting sessions.  It was paid for by the advertising agency.  I had very little money to live on in NYC.  My rent took most of my paycheck.)  
    
I met John Szarkowski, Director of the Photography area at the Museum of Modern Art, through a friend of mine, Gary Metz.  I knew Gary at RIT and to my great surprise and delight he was in New York on an internship award he at received at MOMA in the photo area.  Gary arranged the meeting with Szarkowski for me.  Szarkowski was very kind and encouraging as he looked through my work which included portraits of Gloria, and street photographs inspired by Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, two photographers Szarkowski had championed and exhibited at MOMA . 

 

Gloria Portrait Series, 1968 NYC 

NYC Parade, NYC 1968

Gary Metz was quite a character.  Eccentric, brilliant, a poet.  He lived near me in Greenwich Village, and we would often take walks across town in the evenings to relax and cool off.  While visiting Gary at MOMA one time, he showed me a poster they had just received advertising the MFA Photography Program at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. They were offering a full Teaching fellowship in the program headed by photographer, historian and teacher Van Deren Coke.  I had been thinking of ways to get out of NYC at that time and New Mexico sounded great to me after having lived in NYC for nearly a year in a job I hated and with no money.  Gary encouraged me to apply for the Fellowship and I did.  I sent my book Kraus as one example of my work, and I asked Aaron Siskind and Nathan Lyons to write letters of reference for me.  

1969 : Full Teaching Fellowship Award  UNM offered me the full teaching fellowship, which included full tuition and a living expense stipend and required that I teach two Introduction to Photo courses each semester.  It was a three year MFA program, and of course the Fellowship was a true blessing, in so many ways, but most especially because the experience I got teaching those three years really was an extraordinary education in itself.  That teaching experience helped me get my first and last teaching jobs, and the dreaded, required MFA thesis paper that I ended up writing changed my life in ways I never could have imagined. 

1969 : Marriage Proposal  After I was offered the full Teaching Fellowship at the University of New Mexico I asked Gloria if she would come to New Mexico with me.  We discussed the problems we would face with her family if we lived together in New Mexico unmarried.  It became clear that we would need to get married if she were to come to New Mexico with me.  So Gloria accepted my proposal and we got married in August, 1969.  (Gloria was able to transfer her credits from Pratt to New Mexico and complete here undergraduate studies in ceramics at the University of New Mexico while I worked on my MFA.) 
    
The Accident  About two months before we got married, Gloria was hit by a car in Brooklyn when she was crossing the street near a grocery store near her apartment.  She had gone shopping for some food and when she didn't return I went looking for her. When I got near the small grocery store I saw flashing lights, policemen, and a crowd that had gathered. There had been an auto accident.  I saw a pool of blood inside a chalk drawing of a figure on the sidewalk.  Gloria had been the victim.  ~  She survived the accident but suffered a serious concussion, broken bones, cracked teeth, black eyes.  It was a horrifying experience but we nonetheless were able to get married and move to New Mexico on schedule. (see my story #15 in Death, Art, Writing.)  
  
August 1969 : Gloria and I Married & Moved to New Mexico  
Gloria and I were married in August, in Rochester with her large Italian family all in attendance.  However Gloria's concussion bothered her for more than a year after the accident.  She would often slip into a kind of daze, as if day dreaming, with a look of absence in her eyes.     

Gloria Portrait Series, August, 1969

I had started a series of portraits of Gloria in NYC and I continued to make portraits of Gloria while we were in New Mexico.  The image above was made just after we were married and traveling to New Mexico with all our stuff in a U-Haul van.  (Gloria stopped smoking in New Mexico when she discovered she had become pregnant.)  

The Lockington Dam, Ohio  1970   A solarized print published in the The Print, aTime-Life book     

1969-72  Graduate Studies in Photography, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque
At UNM I studied photography with Van Deren Coke, Ray Metzker, Jim Kraft, Beaumont Newhall and Richard Rudisill.  I taught two courses of Intro to Photo each semester as part of my responsibilities as a Full Teaching Fellowship recipient.  ~  The first year there we found a house we could rent--near the university--at an amazingly good monthly fee.  It had a very nice basement and we rented it out to John Mulvany and his wife Mary.  John was also in New Mexico for his first year in the photography program.  ~  Later I would cross paths briefly with John in Chicago.  (More about that later.) 

In the portrait of Gloria, above, she is standing before the Lockington Dam which is near Piqua, Ohio where I grew up as a child.  I took the photo  while visiting my mom in Piqua.  After Blacky died she moved back to Piqua and purchased a used trailer in a trailer park.  ~  When I was a little kid my mom and my Grandma Ball would take me berry picking near the dam, and they would always talk about how several children who were swimming near the large structure had accidentally drowned.  It was like a ghost story which had always haunted me.  ~  The image I made of Gloria in front of the dam took on a double meaning for me.  Gloria's ghost-like presence in the image--which was due in part to her image being thrown out of focus in the camera, and because I had locally flashed and solarized the print in the face area of the image--references (for me) both the death of the young swimmers at the dam, and Gloria's near death experience in 1969 when she was hit by a car in Brooklyn weeks before we were married. 

I had started using local flashing techniques in some of the portraits I was making of Gloria in NYC.  I'm not sure how I got started with that technique, but when I came to study with Van deren Coke in New Mexico I was amazed to discover how articulate and inventive he had become using the solarizaton techniques in his own work.  I had purchased a little paperback booklet of Van's Nature Mori series at George Eastman House when I was a student at RIT, but I was not aware of his solarization work.  

Van showed our first year graduate class how he dramatically solarized his prints: he exposed his negatives on high contrast #6 Agfa Brovira paper, then while the print was developing up in the print tray he quickly exposed the print to raw light.  When the image started transforming in the developing tray, changing tones, fogging . . .  he would quickly slam the print face down into the fixer bath to stop the print from getting any darker.  The print would come out differently each time, and with all kinds of subtle tone and color changes and stains which could be hauntingly beautiful.   

Van liked the way I was using local flashing and solarization in my portraits of Gloria and he helped me get the image I had made (above) of Gloria in front of the Lockington Dam published in the very first Time-Life Book Series on Photography, entitled The Print.  I suspect Van was asked to submit one of his own solarized pictures for the book, but instead he me if he could submit my photograph.) 

At UNM I developed a very close friendship with Richard Knapp, a fellow MFA photo student who, while there, received a National Endowment for the Arts award for the photo collages he had submitted.  I really enjoyed my relationship with Dick and his wife Bess.  Dick had an intense passion for art and the creative process, and he was very interested in depth psychologist Carl Jung's theories of the unconscious, dreams, and symbols.  Through Dick, I got me very interested in Jung myself, and some of the modern painters, like Paul Klee.  Dick influenced my work in Grad School in many important ways, but particularly in the way he got me interested in ideas in the visual art.  Up to that point I had relied totally on intuition.  My motto before UNM had been "Think less and enjoy it more."  

As I have already mentioned, UNM required a major written MFA thesis as well as an exhibition of photographs.  My written thesis The Symbolic Photograph : A Means to Self Knowledge was about Jung’s ideas, his research in medevial Alchemy and its Creative process, symbols, and synchronicity.  As I studied the literature I began to realize there were many direct relationships between Jung's ideas and my Creative Process in photographic picture-making.  For example, I had come to New Mexico already interested in the concept of the Equivalent photograph which Alfred Stieglitz had introduced to the art world in the 1920's, and which Minor White later elaborated upon through his teaching in the 1950's, quarterly publication Aperture, and into the 1970's.  Jung's ideas gave me a deeper insight in the concept of the Equivalent and expanded my way of seeing my own personal creative process. 

After Dick got me interested in Jung through our many personal discussions, I enrolled in a graduate level mythology course based in a Jungian perspective.  Prof. (of English) David Johnson taught the course, which really excited me. I asked David to serve on my MFA Thesis Committee along with Beaumont Newhall and Jim Kraft.  He agreed. (I could not ask Metzker, who was a Visiting Professor at the time, to be on my committee.  I found him impossible to work with; he was just too controlling and unwilling--or unable--to talk about my work in any interesting, meaningful way.  I totally respected him as a creative, inventive picture-maker though.  The work he did after leaving New Mexico had a lasting impression on me.  I told him how inspiring his work was to me when I saw him in Chicago later--when he was teaching at Columbia College-Chicago and had a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art.)

The required MFA written thesis was both the death of me, and the awakening to a new life for me.  Once I started working on that 110 page paper I had practically no time or interest in making pictures.  Writing was (and remains) quite difficult for me; it becomes an all consuming struggle.  But the research on Jung's ideas and the writing I did and how I could apply it to my creative process helped me to grow intellectually, and prepared me for teaching my advanced level photo courses when I got my first teaching job, in 1972, at Georgia State University, Atlanta.   

(NOTE: more importantly, to me, and in ways difficult to explain, my thesis paper had helped prepare me for my meeting with Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and Siddha Yoga Meditation fifteen years later, in 1987.  See my 2020 essay Contemplating Symbolic Photographs.)    

Besides Jung, another major influence on my work at UNM was Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space--a truly wonderful book.  The three photographs below, which were made in New Mexico, represent the three aspects of picture-making I was pursuing while studying for my MFA degree in New Mexico. 

Above two Photographs are from my MFA visual thesis

  New Mexico Landscapes & Interiors

This image is from the Bachelard inspired project 

Intimate Space, New Mexico

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Regarding my Creative Process  It's interesting that I would exhibit three distinctly different bodies of work for my MFA visual thesis requirement, for indeed this is how my Creative Process would go throughout the remainder of my career as an artist.  I liked making different bodies of work every year or two, and that tendency has continued to this day. (In 2020-23 I would be creating a new blog project every 4-6 weeks!)  I have always felt that it was my duty to allow my creative process to unfold freely--to go where It wanted or needed to go.

And I have always considered myself something of an experimentalist and an traditionalist.  Though I have truly loved my intense and ever changing involvement with my Creative Process, this tendency surly made things difficult for the galleries that would later represent my work, for there is no easily recognizable style or involvement with a particular type of subject matter that can be identified with my name.

I have always felt a tremendous inner pressure to be out photographing or in the darkroom printing even as I was enjoying the other roles I was playing in my life: teacher, administrator, father and husband, part of the Center leadership at the Milwaukee Siddha Yoga Center.  It has always felt as if I had to complete something extremely important before I died.  And that pressure continues to this day, as I write this newest (2023) revision of my Personal History project as a retired professor.  

NOTE: after I retired from teaching in 2007 and moved from Milwaukee to Canandaigua, NY in 2008 I actually wondered if I would continue to have exhibitions, or even continue making photographs.  But in 2010, after my son Shaun encouraged me to start a blog about my photography, the desire to make pictures all came back with an increased fury.  The digital process speeded up the tempo of my creative process.  

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1972   April--our son, Shaun was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico  Gloria was told by a specialist that because of a medical complication she would most probably not be able to have children.  However, after a spontaneous, mysterious grace-filled encounter Gloria experienced in a church in Albuquerque--which I have discussed in full in my project New Mexico Photographs : Landscapes & Interiors--she did indeed get pregnant.  Our son Shaun was born two months before I graduated from UNM with my MFA degree, and fortunately I was offered my first teaching job by Georgia State University, Atlanta.

1972-75   First Teaching Job, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Gloria, Shaun and I traveled to Atlanta in the summer of 1972 where I joined John McWilliams and his photography program in the Art Department at Georgia State University.  In my second year in the program, we initiated an innovative teaching program where we "Team-Taught" each other's photo classes each week.  
    
1973  Co-founded Nexus, Photo-Coop Gallery in Atlanta 
In 1973 John McWilliams and I, some graduate students, and a few other photographers in the city founded a cooperative photography gallery named Nexus.  The storefront gallery space was operated (and financed) by its members who were wanting a place to show their photographs.  At this time in--in Atlanta, and many other cities around the country--the question was still being debated as to if photography was a fine art, or not!

1972-73  Traces, exhibited at Nexus



Emergence, Atlanta 1973 exhibited at Nexus

Emergence, Atlanta 1973

Nexus began in a storefront space in a quiet community away from the downtown city center, and then over time it grew (after I left Georgia) into a larger space that became a Community Arts Center.  It became for some sustained time a destination for photographers wanting to publish artist books with offset printing. 

In its earliest years, I exhibited in the storefront space several different projects:  my 1972-73 project Traces, my 1973 project Emergence, and my extra-very-special "One Man-One Child Exhibition" which consisted of my 1974 black and white photographs from The Georgia Woods Series, along with some very colorful paintings and leaf collages that my son, Shaun, had made when he was just two years old.  The exhibit received some great reviews.  

NOTE: later, after I moved to Canandaigua, NY I changed the title from The Georgia Woods Series to In the Woods when I made a revised digital version of the project for my blog archive.  The digital version was an homage to the New York artist Charles Burchfield.  There is a wonderful museum in Buffalo dedicated to Burchfield that I would have loved to exhibit my photographs in, but they showed little interest in the project, or any of my work.  As I will explain later, it was very difficult for me to break into an established photography/art community after leaving my own in Milwaukee and Chicago.

The Georgia woods project involved two transformative techniques: multiple-exposure in the camera and local solarization of the silver gelatin print.  The project was the first in what would become a series of three technically related projects , thought each varied dramatically in subject  matter.  

Georgia Woods Series 1974  exhibited at Nexus with my son's paintings 

                 In the Woods : Homage to Charles Burchfield  1974/2010 

1975   January, our daughter Jessica was born in Atlanta
Gloria gave birth to our second child, Jessica, in January, of 1975.  A half year later she would be joining us (her mom and me and Shaun) on a road trip to our new home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  

In the spring of 1975 the great photographer and philosopher Fredrick Sommer visited Atlanta for three days to jury a photo exhibition and present a lecture, and arrangements were made for him to stayed at our house, which we were renting, and which in the spring was oftentimes damp and slightly moldy.  Fred got fearful that he might catch something, but he carried on with our visit like a trooper, mostly thanks to the fact that he had just published his new manifesto-booklet The Poet Logic of Art and Aesthetics, and we spent all the time we were together in the house talking about his ideas, which he was very passionate about.  It was quite an amazing experience being with him for three days.   I have the utmost respect for his photography and his writing. 

I left Georgia State in the summer of 1975 to create my own photography program in Milwaukee at the University of Wisconsin.  I of course brought my experience of Nexus with me to Milwaukee, and a few years later Milwaukee had it's own cooperative photography gallery, named Perihelion which eventually became an art center space for all artists.

Before I left Georgia I was able to complete the second of three projects which involved multiple exposure in the camera and local solarization of the print.  My subject for this project was urban space and urban travelers.  The project was entitled the Atlanta City Series, 1975.     

Atlanta City Series, 1975

Atlanta City Series, 1975 

Interestingly, an old friend from my RIT days, John Gould, visited us by surprise one day while I was working on the Atlanta City project, and when he saw some of my prints he got quite excited and proceed to tell me all about a book he had just read, The Seth Material, by Jane Roberts.  The book (and several others authored by her and Seth) fascinated me and definitely influenced the Atlanta Series project, and the third project in the series as well--The Persephone Series--which would manifest in 1976-77 in Milwaukee.  ~  John Gould's visit is a perfect example of synchronicity, which I had written about in my 1971-72 MFA thesis in New Mexico.  (To learn more about the Atlanta City project, visit the hyperlinked title above.)

1975   Summer : moved to Milwaukee 
The Art Department in the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee hired me to create and actualize new curriculums for both an undergraduate and graduate photography program.

NOTE: interestingly another photographer, Charles Traub, was offered the job first, but he decided to take a more lucrative and challenging situation at Columbia College, Chicago.  A year or so later he moved to New York City and became the director of Light Gallery and then headed the photography area at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.  When Traub left Columbia College-Chicago he was replaced by John Mulvany, who had lived in the basement of a house Gloria and I were renting in Albuquerque the first year we lived there.  (It's a small world.)  

Milwaukee presented me with an exciting educational opportunity.  I loved the students who came to our program, mostly from Milwaukee's working class families.  And I was excited about being close to (but not living in) Chicago again.  I was hoping to find a way to enter into its arts scene.  Chicago was less than two hours drive away from Milwaukee, and my good friend from RIT days, Larry McPherson lived and work in Chicago as a photographer, which was an extra special bonus for me as well.  

It turned out that Milwaukee, itself would become a thriving art scene.  And after my photography program got rolling, complete with a new photo lab (that was in the process of being planned when I arrived in 1975) photography became the most popular and well attended classes in the Art Department for many years; and all the more so after Leslie Bellavance joined the photography program in 1983.  Leslie was the perfect compliment to my teaching perspective; she brought a more conceptual and feminist perspective to the photography program, she initiated the color photography course which became a requirement eventually in the photography curriculum, and years later Leslie also facilitated the transition to Digital Photography that eventually unfolded with a fury all over the nation.  

NOTE: the transition to digital photography was a big challenge for the Art Department due to financial and space issues that existed in the Art Department and the School. This then created a conflict within the Department faculty. The older faculty feared what computers would do to the world of art as they knew it.  Indeed, I had my own resistances to the digital transition that I knew was inevitable.  I realized I had to learn Photoshop for my students' sake.  When I broke through the difficult learning curve with Photoshop I came to love the extraordinary possibilities that the digital world had brought to my creative process.  

The Persephone Series, 1975-76  Milwaukee 

The Persephone Series 1975-76 

1975-76  The Persephone Series  The first winter in Milwaukee (1975-76) was an extremely challenging one for me and Gloria, Shaun and Jessica, who would turn one year old in January, 1976.  As I began the third and last project in the series of multiple-exposure and local solarized print projects, a project that involved photographing my family, and especially the kids at play, Jessica became quite ill and then nearly died.  That project, which came to be entitled The Persephone Series 1975-76, is an intense and darkly mythic body of work about a "child-god" who was abducted my Hades and taken to his underworld--the word of death.  I had no idea about the mythic backstory to the work that was unfolding within me from a pure intuitive, synchronistic place within my creative process.   It was a literary friend of min who recognized the mythic narrative in the work when he saw it just as I was finishing up the project.  His insights about the work helped give that body of work its title.  I have written a very detailed explanation about the whole project in its blog version.

NOTE: I had submitted examples of the Persephone Series to the Wisconsin Arts Board in 1977 for the jurying of its biannual Visual Arts Fellowship Award.  The $2,000 dollar award could be used to support a Wisconsin Artist's future project.  I received the Fellowship, and I was delighted to learn that the invited outside Juror that year was W. Eugene Smith, the photographer that had inspired me in High School.  His visual style was the basis of all the pictures I made for my Senior English project, a "scaled down" version of the Family of Man exhibition. 

After Jessica got better and I was able to conclude the Persephone project, I was happy to at last get outside into the sunlight and walk around in our Milwaukee Eastside neighborhood and see where we lived.  I then began a new, less emotionally intense project: The Steve Lacy Series, a project inspired by the improvised solo music of Steve Lacy, an important project for me in terms of how it opened doors for me in Chicago's art world.  (more about this, below)  

I was being told by the Art Department Chair, in no uncertain terms, that I would have to begin getting major exhibitions in respectable art galleries and art museums outside of Milwaukee if I wanted to get tenure.  However, when I began the Steve Lacy Series I certainly was not thinking about Chicago; rather I was thinking about how to generate a photography cooperative gallery in Milwaukee.  The photography community was already beginning to thrive in Milwaukee and, as in Atlanta, there was no place for photographers to show their work. 

1976  Co-founded Perihelion, a photography co-operative gallery in Milwaukee The idea of a photo-cooperative gallery excited many people in Milwaukee, and there was a division between the members: those based in the UWM School of Fine Arts, and those based in the more conservative private art school, at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  We met often in the beginning and had many heated discussion about how to proceed, etc.  

We were forced to moved from one space to another quite frequently until we at last was able to settle in at the Knapp Street School building which was turning into something like a Community Art Center.   Perihelion was very active, once we settled into that space, putting on solo exhibitions of members and other invited guests nearly every month.

When Perihelion became firmly established in the Knapp Street School building, we started inviting other kinds of artists to present their works along with our photography exhibitions, such as performance artists, video and film artists, and installation artists.  Our openings became major art events in the City.  ~ Tom Bamberger coordinated most of the events, I was sort of in charge of making sure the photo shows got hung properly, and Ken Hanson, an excellent professional designer and photographer, created all the excellent PR announcements for Perihelion.  Other members included Dick Blau, Dennis Darmek, Jim Brozek and Steve Close.   

Steve Lacy Series, 1976-77

Steve Lacy Series, 1976-77 

1978: the Steve Lacy Series Exhibition, Renaissance Society Galleries
I had gone to Chicago in 1977 to begin showing my work to as many people as I could.  I needed to get exhibitions in Chicago to insure that I could qualify for tenure at UW-Milwaukee.  When I showed my Steve Lacy photographs to David Travis, Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and explained to him my proposal for an exhibition, he immediately got me connected with the Renaissance Society Galleries at the University of Chicago.  I first showed my work to Leslie Travis who was working as an assistant to Susanne Ghez, the very savvy director of the Renaissance Society Galleries, which would soon would be internationally recognized as the cutting edge art gallery in Chicago.  

I had proposed that the Steve Lacy photographs--which were a visual response to the solo jazz music of soprano saxophonist, Steve Lacy--would be installed as a "musical composition" to which Steve Lacy would then be invited to respond musically to the images and the installation in a solo concert within the gallery.  Leslie Travis and Susanne Ghez both liked my ideas and Suzanne actually contacted Steve Lacy in Paris to see if he could come to Chicago and perform in the galleries.  Lacy had been booked for the entire year so Suzanne invited musicians from Chicago's AACM to perform at the opening. (Click on the link above for a full explanation of the project and to see many more pictures from the Steve Lacy Series.)

The exhibition and the opening's concert was quite a success, and there were many favorable reviews by Chicago art critics, including Alan Artner, of the Chicago Tribune who was just beginning to date Carol Ehlers.  Carol was the director of the Frumkin Gallery, and after seeing the Lacy exhibition invited me to show my photographs in her Gallery space, which I believe at the time (1978-79) was the only commercial gallery showing photographs exclusively in Chicago.

It was all grace as far as I am concerned.  I knew nothing about the art world, especially the Chicago Art World.  But despite that so much began happening for me between 1977 and 1982 that my head was swimming.  And it all came to a peak in 1982 when David Travis presented a 100 print solo exhibition of my work in the newly renovated photography exhibition space at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The show included selected works from The Persephone Series, The Steve Lacy Series, The Negative Print Series, The Intimate Landscape Series and The Lake Series.  Here is a listing of all my shows between 1978 and 1982:

1978-82  Solo Shows 
1978:   Renaissance Society Galleries, University of Chicago
1978:   Nexus, Atlanta The Steve Lacy Series
1979:   The Bradly Gallery, Milwaukee Negative Prints, & watercolors by Larry Rathsack
1980:   Frumkin Gallery, Chicago
1982:   Perihelion Gallery, Milwaukee
1982:   Swen Parsen Gallery, Northern Illinois University-Dekalb
1982:   Young-Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
1982:   Art Institute of Chicago (l00 print retrospective 1975-1982, curated by David Travis)

1978-82  Group Shows (invited) 

1978:   Kohler Arts Center : Midwest Photographers
1978:   Milwaukee Arts Center : Wisconsin Directions 2
1978:   Syracuse : Documenta  with Dick Blau and Robert Muffoletto
1979:   Art Institute of Chicago: American Photography of '70's
1979:   Madison Arts Center, 4th Presidential Invitational Exhibition, Madison, Wi.
1981:   Walker Art Center, Miniapolis: Fourteen Mid-Western Photographers  

1981:   Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography: New American Photography  

Negative Print, 1978-80

The Negative Print Series, 1978-80

The Intimate Landscape, 1980-81

The Intimate Landscape, 1980-81

The Lake Series, 1981-82

The Lake Series, 1981-82

Self Effort  I loved teaching, I loved making photographs, but I disliked taking my work around to galleries and museums, and having to face the public at exhibition openings--it terrified me and I would become very uncomfortable when I could tell that people did not really understand my work and were being insincere with me.  But I needed to get tenured and so I made the effort.   And when I look back at the experience with some distance,  it seemed like most everyone I contacted responded with real compassion for my situation (the need to get tenure) and interest in my work.  All I ever wanted to do was make photographs, and in that regard I have surely been blessed, and I am grateful to all the people who helped make my work available to a larger audience both in Chicago and, shortly after the solo show at the Art Institute, in Milwaukee as well. 

My work never sold well.  Perhaps because I had no connections to NY City, and perhaps because I never settled into an identifiable style, committed to a particular subject matter, or conceptually was leaning too strongly toward the spiritual in art.  However my most popular and likable work, the Lake Series photographs of 1981-82 certainly sold well in the Carol Ehlers gallery.  And the Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Art Institute purchased several Lake Series photographs for their collections including the Lake Collages.

Dream Portraits, photo-collage, 1982

Dream Portraits, 1982

Photo Collages
I first got the impulse to make photo-collages while working on the Lake Series project.  I was listening to the music of Charles Ives and I saw how his musical collages could relate to the repeating horizon lines in my Lake photographs.  After the Art Institute retrospective I decided to continue with the idea of photo collage for my next project, which was the Dream Portraits, 1982, though in the Dream Portraits project I started introducing vertical collage bands.  That project for the most part is about the anxiety I was feeling at the time.  All of the exhibitions I was having in those years between 1978 and 1982, including the Art Institute retrospective, along with teaching, dealing with Perihelion, and trying as best I could to be a father and a husband . . . it all felt overwhelming to me.  ~  Then I was approached by the Michael Lord Gallery, in Milwaukee, who offered to represent my work.  

1983  Michael Lord Gallery Exhibition:  Images of Eden & City Spaces   
My 1983-84 project, Images of Eden was an attempt to escape, find some peace and quiet, slow things down a bit.  The series was inspired by the Milwaukee County Parks System and the work of Eugene Atget, the great photographer of Paris and its Parks.  

      

Images of Eden, Milwaukee County Parks, 1983-84

Images of Eden, 1983-84

City Places, 1984-85 

In 1983 John Sobczak, a past art student who had studied photography with me and now was working for the Michael Lord Gallery in Milwaukee, came to me asking if I would like to be represented by Michael Lord.  Michael showed mostly blue chip New York art and a few local artists.  Of course I accepted the offer; the gallery spaces were beautiful, modeled after New York galleries, and this offer would allow me to show my work locally in an upscale, beautiful space.  ~  As it turned out, Michael would be amazingly generous with me.  He allowed me to show whenever I wanted, whatever I wanted, and he paid for all the framing, the announcements, the opening refreshments.  He even allowed me to use his frames in my Chicago shows with the Carol Ehlers Gallery.  (Who could ask for anything more?)  In 1985 I began having regular solo exhibitions of my newest work every other year in Milwaukee and then in Chicago.  

My first exhibition at the Michael Lord Gallery, in 1983 consisted of two related projects: the Images of Eden series, photographs of Milwaukee County Parks, and the City Places series, photographs made in downtown Milwaukee that attempted to deal with a spiritual idea about Place : Makom, an important concept that pervaded all of my work between 1978, beginning with the Negative Print project and includes my Family Life project, the Garage Series project of 1999-2001/2006, and my Meadow Photographs which I began making in Canandaigua, NY beginning in 2008, plus certain images in my (2020-2023) Pandemic Inspired Photographs and projects.

   

City Places,  (Milwaukee) 1984-85

The Thing Centered Photographs  I have already mentioned how important Gaston Bachelard's book The Poetics of Space was to me.  Another, equally important book, Robert Bly's News of the Universe (a 1982 Sierra Club publication) is a collection of poems edited and introduced by Bly that tries to show how poetry reflects the changing of human consciousness and culture as time unfolds into the future, and how that consciousness gets reflected out in the changing attitudes that culture has toward the natural world.  It's a very special, important book, and my project, Family Life, 1985-88 was certainly influenced by Robert Bly’s wonderful essays, and in particular his introduction to the book and and the selection of poems he provided for the chapter entitled Object Poems.  

During the Family Life project I began consciously making what I called Thing Centered Photographs which gradually became an obsession of mine for the next several years (and, actually, that obsession has continued into the present time, 2023).   

Family Life, 1985-96

Family Life, 1985-88

1985-88  Family Life  I worked on this project while my wife Gloria went back to school to get her graduate degree in School Social Work at UW-Milwaukee.  We both agreed that we couldn't send our kids to college on the salary I was making teaching photography, and the sales of my photographs just barely paid my photo supplies expenses.  So the plan was for me to spend more time with the kids, getting them breakfast and sending them off to school, getting dinner ready at night, and keeping them preoccupied and away from Gloria on the weekends, when necessary, etc., so that Gloria could focus on her studies and get the degree that would allow here to work with kids in the public school systems near us.  

Again, grace was with us.  Gloria got through school with flying colors, and amazingly she got a school social work job immediately after graduation.  After Gloria started working full time I continued helping out with the kids and cooking etc.  It was a major time of change for me and Gloria, and we both were the better for it in multiple ways.  We were able to get the kids through undergrad school, and they went on and found ways to get through graduate school.  Jessica became a Montessori teacher in the Milwaukee Public School System; Shaun is now teaching at RIT, heading up a program specializing in computer animation and virtual reality.  

1987 : Gurumayi Chidviasananda and Siddha Yoga
While I was still working on the Family Life project, in the summer of 1987 Gloria and I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and experienced her grace and her teachings.  We both were deeply touched by our experiences of Gurumayi and her grace  we began doing the  Siddha Yoga Meditation practices daily.  Siddha Yoga became yet another major turning point in my life, and in Gloria's life as well. 

We had taken a two-day meditation Intensive with Gurumayi in August, 1987 at Shri Muktananda Ashram in South Fallsburg, NY.  The intensive was a gift from Gloria's sister, Florence, who had been practicing Siddha Yoga Meditation since 1980 or so.  The experiences I had in that Intensive changed my life completely, and in many ways  Siddha Yoga saved my life as well.  I cannot adequately express how grateful I feel for having Gurumayi and her grace, her Creative divine Power, as an integral part of my life.  Though August 1987 is the beginning point of my conscious awareness of her presence in my life, I believe that her grace had been guiding and supporting me long before I took that first Intensive.  I can feel her presence, her grace in the very best of my photographs, those which function for me as True, living Symbols.  

NOTE: It's been 36 years that Gloria and I have been practicing Siddha Yoga Meditation, now, in the year 2023.  However, I feel strongly that the epiphany I experienced in August, 1955, just days before my dad died--in which I knew I would be a photographer when I saw those little square prints in my cousin's hand--was based in my connection to Gurumayi, even though I would not meet her physically until 1987.  The connection to a true meditation Master is mysterious beyond saying, but it is real, and it transcends time and space as we know it in the ordinary realm of our dualistic reality.  See my project Photography and Yoga which provides the full details of what I experienced during the 1987 Intensive.

The River Songs, 1988-89

River Songs, 1988-89

After I completed the Family Life Series, and began practicing Siddha Yoga Meditation, I embarked on my first project in color photography.  River Songs is a wistful homage to the Tradition of English Pastoral Music, headed by such great composers as Vaughn Williams, Frank Bridge, Fredrick Delius and Granville Bantock.  The Michael Lord Gallery produced a Boxed Portfolio of chromogenic prints from this project, in an edition of 10, all of which I printed myself.   

I had avoided color photography long enough; I knew I needed to learn the color chemical process for my student's sake if not for my self, even as the chemical process would soon be replaced by Digital Technology!  Interestingly, in 1990 I received a 10,000 dollar grant, from the Milwaukee County Individual Artists Fellowship, for the River Songs project, a project which did have some social-political-environmental implications to it.  

The project is focused on the Milwaukee River which runs through the very center of the city, and though it had become so horribly polluted by industries that were on the edge of the river and dumping toxic wastes into it that almost nothing could live in it, the pictures I made have the pure beauty of Heaven on Earth, as if I were re-imagining this poor, polluted, nearly dead river running through a supremely beautiful Eden-like hidden landscape.  In fact, that was the truth of the situation: where I had photographed, the Milwaukee River was quite beautiful and yet little known to most city people because the place was hidden though right underneath their noses. 

NOTE: I am happy to report that the Milwaukee River was later cleaned up to a significant degree thanks to huge efforts put forth by the Urban Ecology Center of Milwaukee.  The river has been cleaned up, new parks have sprung up along the river.  Many wonderful things have happened thanks to the Urban Ecology Center.

Color Diptychs, 1990-92

Color Diptychs, 1990-92

The Color Diptychs project, my second project in color imagery, consists of dusk and evening photographs in which I am looking up through trees in the city.  It was influenced by Chopin’s Nocturnes; its a visual and textual meditation on death; and its a meditation on the space between the two photographs and the "silent dialogue" occurring between them.  ~  Near the completion of the project my mother died.  I was able to be with her when she passed, and I experienced Gurumayi's presence quite strongly in my mom's hospital room the day before my mom passed away.  (See story # 19 in Death, Art, Writing.)
     

Thing Centered Photographs, 1992-93

Thing Centered Photographs

1992-94, the 1980's, et.al 

The Collected Thing Centered Photographs Link  I have collected together, in this one link, all of my blog projects which are dominated by Thing Centered Photographs.  The basic concept is that every Thing has a consciousness, or is pervaded by the same living consciousness that pervades human beings and the entire universe.  As such, Things have something to say to us if only we would listen.  Each Thing Centered Photograph is a visual meditation, an act of putting at the center of my attention an isolated object.  Each photograph, then, constitutes a kind of "listening" to what the thing is wanting to "say" to me.  ~  In some of my thing-centered photographs I have suspended objects in black space--which represents silence.  In the other kind of thing-centered photographs, in which a thing is seen in its environment, the photograph is often about the thing, first, and then its relationship to the place it is being seen in and the things that constitute that place.   ~  I credit Robert Bly's book News of the Universe for the idea which led me to the Thing Centered Photographs.  I read News of the Universe in 1983-84 and it influenced my Family-Life project, the very first of the ongoing series of Thing Centered Photographs projects.    

After meeting Gurumayi in 1987 and I began practicing Siddha Yoga daily--which included reading and contemplating essential yogic scriptures and Siddha Yoga teachings--I discovered that the yogic teachings affirmed my earlier intuition that manifested as the Thing Centered Photographs, photographs that had initially been inspired by Robert Bly's writing and his selected "Object" poems in his book News of the Universe.  The basic teaching in Siddha Yoga is "God dwells within you as you." & "See God in Everything."  In other words, everything in the created universe is pervaded by the same Light of Consciousness, the same One Creative Power of the Universe, which is often referred to in Siddha Yoga as Kundalini Shakti and the "Supreme (inner) Self."  

Studies photographs, 1994-200  "Thrown Strawball"  3.5" square

The Studies projects, 1994-2000  to the Present

1994-2000  The First Studies Project  In 1994 I began making photographs inspired by miniature piano pieces.  The silver prints I made for the very first Studies project were miniature in size (snapshot in size): 3 1/2 in. square.  Many Studies projects have followed over the years,  including one that emerged in 2020, entitled Seeing the Blackbird and in 2023 I created a four Book project entitled the 12x12" Studies project.  

The Studies projects are in part about an attitude of seeing photographically, spontaneously, almost gesturally or improvisationally.  The piano jazz improvisations of Theolonious Monk were an important influence in the early Studies projects, (click here) as were with the New Etudes by William Bolcom.  You will find many Thing Centered photographs in the different Studies projects.

Garage Series, "missing tooth"  3.5x3.5"

Studies I 1994-2000 & the Garage Series

                                                  

The Garage Series, 1999-2000  This unexpected project emerged at the very end of the first Studies project (1994-2000).  The Garage photographs were made with film and printed as miniature silver prints 1999-2000.   As I contemplated the images I realized they were somehow related to the music of Morton Feldman, which I had begun listening to.  The realization was surprising to me because Feldman's piano music is about as far aways from miniature format as you can get.  His piece Triadic Memories, for example, can run over 100 minutes.  

I decided to give the collection of garage images its own independent project title.  And I often say that the miniature garage photographs are simultaneously a Studies project, a Thing Centered project, and the very first of three Morton Feldman-inspired projects which would eventually materialize over twelve years time.

I tried making a set of larger silver prints, 10x10" in which the garage image remained around 3.5" suspended in black space.  Later in 2006 I made 18x18" digital versions of selected garage photographs suspended in black space.  I thought of the garage images as gently luminous sounds, musical notes suspended in black space (silence) then decaying back into silence.  

Digital version of the Garage Series 2006  18x18"

Digital Garage Images, 2006

The larger 18x18" digital inkjet prints of the garage photographs especially function for me as thing centered photographs even as, at the same time, they function as visual metaphors for music.  In most of Feldman's solo piano music, such as Triadic Memories he liked to allow his notes to become suspended in space and decay slowly into silence, just as the many garages I photographed were in a state of decay and slowly dissolving back into the earth.

Earlier, when I was making the individual miniature silver Garage photographs (which I liked very much) I tried placing five of them together--into what I called Garage Quintets--in long window matts to simulate the experience of walking down an alley at night amongst garages illuminated from within themselves and suspended in black space.  Though I was charmed by the concept, the images insisted on interacting with each other in ways that distracted me from the power of the individual images.  I found it frustratingly difficult to find five images that worked together in just the right way, that looked and felt articulate to me, and not overly dramatically active.     

 

  Matted silver prints: Garage Quintets  3.5x3.5" each 

2002-03  Triadic Visual Poems and Vertical Quartets
After working with the Garage Quintets I got the idea of making "visual poems" using the small 3.5" square Studies prints.  I had about a 1,000 miniature Studies prints (not to mention the smaller garage photos) so in 2002 I just started playing with the miniature prints, putting them together in horizontal sequences of three, in both purely formal non-narratiave sequences and in brief figurative narrative sequences that to me had open-ended meanings.  That is to say the "poems" that look narrative are nonetheless open to interpretation.  They had no intended meanings as far as I was concerned.   I would never expect a viewer to come up with some meaning that I had "intended" for them to "get."  ~   I like what the great Spanish composer, Mompou, said about his music: "Its all free."  That is to say, let every one (performer and listener) interpret the work in a way that is right for them and their capacities.  

I also made several "vertical" poems in 2002 which I called "Vertical Quartets."  Then in 2004 I made 15x27" digital versions of the triadic poems, in which the three images were suspended in black space.  The digital "visual poems" were included in a large multi-chaptered project in homage to Morton Feldman entitled Triadic Memories : The Repetition Series Photographs (2003-07)

    Matted gelatin silver prints: Triadic Visual Poem 3.5x3.5"images, 14x24"

Matted gelatin silver prints: Vertical Quartet  3.5x3.5" images, 24x12"

"Visual Poem" #90   Triadic Memories project  15x27" digital print 2006

Triadic Memories : The Repetition Series Photographs 

                                  
2001 : 9-11  and the Loss of Gallery Representation
My last show with Carol Ehlers, at her Carol Ehlers Gallery, in Chicago, was in 2001.  After the 9-11 disaster the economy started to collapse and Carol decided to close her gallery and take a secure job offer at LaSalle National Bank as curator of their photography collection.  I am grateful to Carol for representing my work for so many years, beginning in 1978 after seeing my exhibition of the Steve Lacy Series at the University of Chicago.  

Following 9-11 I had two more exhibitions with the Michael Lord Gallery before he closed.  In 2002 I showed the miniature silver print triadic poems and the Vertical Quartet Visual poems, then in 2004 I presented my first (and only) major digital inkjet print exhibition of Triadic Memories.  It was a multi-event exhibition, something quite special to me.  The timing of the exhibition in the gallery was coordinated with Louis Goldstein's piano concert of Morton Feldman's solo piano work Triadic Memories, which was presented at the UW-Milwaukee Music Department recital hall.  The writer Clark Lunberry, who was working toward his PhD at UW-Milwaukee had helped to set up the concert with Louie.  When I discovered that Clark was interested in Feldman we talked about Feldman and his music; I told him I was making photographs in response to Feldman's music, and I asked if he would write a commentary on my Feldman inspired work.   To my great delight, at the Michael Lord Gallery opening of my project Triadic Memories, Clark gave a major lecture about my work in relation to Feldman's music.  Then a few nights later we listened to Louis Goldstein's live piano performance of Triadic Memories in the University's music concert hall.  The entire experience of exhibition, gallery talk by Clark, and the concert by Louie was just wonderful.  We tried to sell a package consisting of the triadic experience for many years via my blog.  David Travis was interested but warned that such a package could never succeed in traveling.  And clearly he was right.     

After Carol Ehlers closed her gallery, I showed my work around, again, in Chicago and an excellent gallery, the Fassbender-Stevens gallery, tried showing my work for a few months, in 2003.  They even featured my "visual poems" in a group exhibition, but the gallery closed shortly thereafter.  After Michael Lord closed down his gallery in 2004 everything came to a standstill for me.  I would not have another solo exhibition until 2012 in Rochester, NY.  It became clear to me that this was the time to jump into digital photography. 

2003 : I began making Digital Prints & the Triadic Memories project

I had resisted the computer and the Digital World of photography as long as possible.  But my students were needing my technical input and I was not able to teach them from my own personal experience with the medium: digital cameras, Photoshop, computers, digital inkjet printers . . .    

I had a difficult time breaking away from the silver print, and the learning curve with Photoshop was very difficult for me, but then of course later I came to love working with Photoshop.  I do miss the aesthetic presence of the silver print, and I still have a problem, which I don't know how to resolve, with the ability and tendency to get things (too) perfect looking with Photoshop.   The control over every aspect of the image is fascinating, challenging, and provides amazing opportunities, but there is also a loss of presence that the silver print can have, and which I miss even today. Its as if the silver in the film and paper had its own voice, its own light, and the artist's task was to somehow align his or her voice with the silver's voice.  

I eased my way into digital imaging by making a lot of digital versions of favorite silver print black and white images with the small Epson 2200.  I scanned the film negatives and made digital prints from those scan files.  Interestingly there is a presence (though diminished) of the silver particles in those digital prints made from scanned negatives.  

I then became fascinated by the ease with which I could replicate the same image with digital technology, which is something Feldman did a lot in his music, though in his music the repeated phrases would come with subtle changes.  I got the idea of repeating the same photographic image three times horizontally, then later vertically.  Most of the work in my first major digital project, Triadic Memories : The Repetition Series Photographs consists of digitally revised images from black and white and color print works, using repeating imagery in varying ways.  The project consists of nine "chapters," each a separate project in itself with its own separate blog page.

The Departing Landscape project, "Faint Photographs"  2007-12

The Departing Landscape Project

2007 -2012  The Departing Landscape project

The third and final project inspired by the music of Morton Feldman consists of an introductory chapter and ten separate projects which relate to the theme "The Departing Landscape," a phrase Morton Feldman used to refer to the phenomenon of sound decaying into silence.  Feldman often talked about the way "sound leaves us in our hearing of it, like a departing landscape," words all the more poignant today for me because of the constant unsettling news I'd been hearing about Climate Change.  Someone recently (July, 2023) said we should change the phrase "Climate Change" to Boiling Change." 

I began the The Departing Landscape project in Milwaukee, in 2007, the last year I taught in Milwaukee.  By the following year I would be retired and relocated to Canandaigua, New York where I initiated my blog, in 2010, giving it a title that was inspired by the project I was working on at the time.  I completed The Departing Landscape project in 2012.     

2007  Retirement from Teaching & Travel to Italy  Gloria had been fighting breast cancer for three years, beginning in 2003, and her particular kind of cancer was very aggressive with a frightening statistical chance of recurrence and a frightening statistical chance of not surviving the recurrence.  After chemo therapy was completed and she regained some strength, we decided we must go to Italy to fulfill our dream of visiting the land of her ancestors while we still had the window of opportunity available to us.  

At the same time my colleague, Leslie Bellavance, had opted out of much of her teaching in the Photo Area to become Assistant Dean of the School of Fine Arts.  I think she was unhappy with the way the Art Department was treating her and the Photo Area, and perhaps because her personal life had suffered a blow (that I knew nothing about until years later).  Clearly Leslie had been wanting to leave UW-Milwaukee altogether, and even though I agreed to do some things that would encourage her to stay at UW-M*, she ended up taking an important administrative position in another university, anyway.

(*I agreed to move the photography faculty and curriculum to the Film Department; and once that was arranged, Leslie left UW-M)

Now I was left alone in a Photo Area that was no longer in the Art Department (though I was able to hire two really great, young visiting faculty to replace Leslie and her classes); Gloria's health was quite worrisome to me; a few of my personal friends were becoming increasingly a problem for me; the economy was collapsing; I had no gallery representation; our Siddha Yoga Community in Milwaukee had lost its Center Space and in the process of trying to reestablish a new space the Center had to dissolve; then I learned that our excellent Dean, Bob Bucker would be leaving the School of Fine Arts at the end of year for another position in California.  

Everything in my life seemed to be in a state of dissolution, and once I learned that Bob was leaving the University; and given the fact that my colleague Leslie Bellevance had left too; and given the tentative state of Gloria's health . . .  it became quite obvious that it was time for me to leave the University too.  Gloria and I scheduled the trip to Italy for late October, 2007, and I announced my retirement effective the end of the spring semester, June, 2007.  

(I can't tell you how happy I was to be out of the University situation I had been caught up in, and yet I hated to leave my students, including a wonderful group of Graduate students.  I felt very guilty about that too.  But at least Gloria and I were able to go to Italy; and gradually her health remained stable and free of the recurrence of the cancer that had bee predicted by the medical community at that time.)

I really respected and personally liked Dean Bob Bucker; he genuinely loved visual art as well as music, and every few months we would get together with Polly Morris in his office and have a great time looking at my work.  I certainly don't blame Bob for leaving when he did; he had accomplished a lot in his six years at UW-Milwaukee.  ~  I think it may have been Polly Moris who initiated a process to ask the faculty in the School of Fine Arts to make donations to help purchase a print (from me) that was then given to Bob as a Thank You gift at a School Wide party for him at the end of the spring semester. (Bob came to my studio and chose the image he wanted, and he personally purchased another print from me as well!)  

Italy Project 2007  Digital Print 18x26"

Italy Project  2007 

Gloria and I left in October, 2007 for our two week Grand Tour of Italy.  It was wonderful in every way for us.  As I have already mentioned Gloria did survive the cancer, thanks to grace and her strong willful desire to live and to see her children and grandchildren grow and thrive.  She personally did some very in-depth research to find ways to make her body stronger and healthier and to fight the possibility of a recurrence of cancer . . . which thankfully she never did not have to experience (as of this writing in July, 2023 though she remains fearful of that possibility and continues to work very hard to keep her immune system has strong and healthy as possible). 

2008  Moved from Milwaukee to Canandaigua, NY
When we got back from Italy, Gloria agreed (reluctantly) to my urgent plea to move out of Milwaukee.  I needed to get away from all the people and problems that had been building up in my life in Milwaukee.  ~   We were able to sell our house quickly (just before the housing collapse) to a married couple, professors who taught at the University just two blocks away.  Again, it all was a matter of grace, I believe, and somehow we ended up in Canandaigua, NY in a house with a grand view of a wonderful meadow, with two ponds, and a tapering woods beyond it, which I fell in love with when I first saw it, and have photographed regularly for the past fifteen years.

North Meadow and pond, The Meadow Series  2008 - ongoing  

The Meadow Series  2008 - ongoing

2008 - The Meadow  Once we moved into our house in Canandaigua I began doing a study of the Meadow and its constantly changing display of color and light and atmosphere.  I have continued the project to this very day (July, 2023).   

In 201o Gloria and I became aware of the threat--to New York State--of a potential environmental disaster that might ruin the beautiful Finger Lakes Area that we live in.  The oil and gas industry was trying to get permission from the State to drill for gas using their aggressive, toxic drilling-explosion process called hydrofracking, which uses huge amounts of valuable fresh water mixed with deadly polluting chemicals.  (I began having terrifying images in my mind of the meadow filled with drilling towers, trucks, and toxic waste laying all about.)

Fortunately the anti-fracking movement in New York State was incredibly powerful and smart; it included many passionate scientists like Sandra Steingraber.  Gloria and I did all that we could to join the fight against permitting hydrofracking in New York by going to protests, hearings, writing comments to the DEC; you name it.  Gov. Cuomo played it very cool, holding off the Gas and Oil Industry for years while we did all our protesting and providing the necessary scientific evidence to prove that hydrofracking would be a disaster for the State in many ways.   

Eventually Cuomo used the science we presented as his rationale for not allowing fracking in New York State . . . though he did not completely cut ties with the powerful industry in other ways that I remain very unhappy about.  ~  Despite New York saying "No" to the Gas and Oil Industry, the monster has continued leaking its toxic presence into our State, and it has been ruining our country's land, water and air in many other states, all of which which has contributed tremendously to the current global climate crisis (which Trump, as "president" completely denied).  

Seeking Exhibitions in New York State   I tried to show my work to galleries and museums in Rochester and in Buffalo, but I discovered that when you are "the new kid on the block" (an out-of-towner) in a region which has its own, long established, rooted artist community, it's very difficult to break into that world; indeed, the art communities in Rochester and Buffalo seemed to be very territorial.  

Though I had an early history of involvement with Rochester, I felt like a stranger in the community that Nathan had created through his Visual Studies Workshop, and I have had little respect for RIT's photogaphy program.  And despite my work, and my exhibition record in Chicago and Milwaukee, there was very little I could do to get other artists and curators and gallery directors in the Rochester and Buffalo area interested in showing my work.    

2010 :  My Blog!   Solo shows are what artists really want, for themselves, and its what they mostly want to see in the way of art exhibitions in general.  It had gotten to be a long spell for me since I had exhibited my work, and nothing seemed promising for me on the horizon.  I felt lost in the World of art,  and I was no longer teaching; I had left all that behind me when I left my long established roots in Milwaukee and Chicago.  

Then in 201o my son Shaun suggested I create a website or blog for my photography.  In November 201o he helped me launch TheDepartingLandscape.blogspot.com and I soon realized that my blog could serve me in many useful ways: it became my solo "exhibition space" for all the new digital photography projects I created; and it became a space in which I could create an online visual archive of my earlier silver print photography projects, complete with new or revised introductory texts.  

 At first I was slow to approach digitizing my earlier silver print projects; that required scanning the smaller prints on my flatbed scanner or photographing the larger prints with my digital camera.  Each file then needed to be fine tuned tonally with Photoshop editing tools so that it looked good as a published image on my blog.  I also produced larger files that were suitable for making digital inkjet prints if I ever wanted to do that later.  

Gradually I found re-working the earlier silver print projects digitally as yet another interesting creative opportunity for myself.  I revised some of the images I used for the blog projects; I edited the images more conservatively, and rewrote my texts associated with the early projects. Revision was always an integral part of my creative process anyway, and now I found that as I translated the silver and color print projects into digital form, I could revise the way 
I wanted to present those images, both visually and conceptually for my blog archive.  In many cases I consider the digital revisions of my older photographs an improvement over the original silver and color prints. 

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I started this Personal History of Photography blog project in 2011, and I really was struggling with formatting issues and other blog technicalities.  I knew I would have to face going back to this project someday and give the project a huge overhauling.  And here I am, first in 2020, and then again in 2023, revising and updating, adding and improving what I had tried to do soon after to moving to Cananadaigua in 2008 and creating the blog in November, 2010.

I have come to realize something important about my blog:  it has provided me with more than a place to archive my photography projects.  The blog page has become for me an intimate forum in which I can carry on a very personal dialogue with myself about my work, my ideas, my spiritual experiences and longings . . . everything that is important to me that relates in some way to my creative process in photography.  

As a teacher and an exhibiting artist I felt I had to keep that kind of very personal material subdued because it could put me at risk with my colleges at the University, and perhaps some of my friends, and the gallery and museum directors.  Now that I am retired and getting to be a "elder" I have became more willing to take risks both visually and in my writing.  The blogging process opened me to new levels of intimate relationship between myself, my creative process and my imagined viewer . . . which it turns out (from a yogic perspective) always was my very own Self.  Indeed, perhaps most importantly, I have been able to use my photography and the writing that goes with it, as a form of yogic practice, a means of contemplation and visually exploring certain yogic teachings and spiritual ideas, especially associated with Sufism which I truly love in addition to Siddha Yoga. 

Today, in July, 2023, I am happy to say that my blog archive of earlier silver gelatin print projects is now complete (or complete enough).  

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NOTE: visit my blog's Welcome Page, the section entitled "The Complete List of Photography Projects."  Each project includes a representative image, and the projects are listed in chronological order, from the most recently completed project to the earliest.  Some of the projects are multi-chaptered.  In those cases, the listing of chapters, each of which has its own hyperlinked title, will be found under the representative photograph for the project and its hyperlinked title.  ~  I also encourage you to see the section from my Welcome Page (copied below) that is entitled Collections of Theme-Related Pictures & Projects.  The "click on" links are alive, here below, so you can open any of the links to the project titles that interest you.   

Collections of Theme-Related Pictures & Projects

The Photograph as a True living Symbol  click here

The Symbolic Photograph  click here  

Coronavirus Pandemic Inspired Projects  click here

("Finding Light In the Darkness")

"Studies" projects  click here

Music Inspired Photography Projects  click here
Composer Morton Feldman, Steve Lacy, Thelonious Monk, Charles Ives, Chopin, Liszt, William Bolcom, Delius, Vaughn Williams, Frank Bridge, Wagner, Valentin Silvestrov,  Frederico Mompou . . . 

Sacred Art Photography Projects  click here

Symmetrical Photographs ~ Images, Projects, Texts  click here

Death-Themed Projects  click here

Angel Projects, Photographs & Texts  click here

The Blue Pearl  click here

Landscape Projects   click here

WATER Projects   click here

Snow Photographs Projects  click here

Thing-Centered Photographs    click here

Bird Photographs: A Collection  click here

The Meadow  click here

Stone Photographs: A Collection, with Commentary  click here

Makom : the Place  (and the Milwaukee "Place" Projects)   click here 

Intimate Space (Interior space) Projects  click here 

Postlude photographs  click here

Window Pictures (a three part project) click here  

Still Life  click here  & Revisiting Giorgio Morandi  click here  

Portraits, Faces, Figures & Visual Poems  click here

Multiple-Exposure Projects (3)  click here

Homage Photography Projects  click here

Travel Themed Projects  click here

Hydrofracking project  click here

Writings  by Steven Foster     click here

Contact Info, Resume, Gallery Representation, Brief Bio  click here

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2011-12  Solo Exhibition in Rochester  Bill Edwards (of the famed Light Impressions company in Rochester, NY) opened a new business Lumier Photo in Rochester that offered digital processing of photographic images, various kinds of photographic supplies, storage materials, etc. and in the center of the store he installed a very nice exhibition space with professional exhibition lighting.  I learned of the gallery, which he named Spectrum Gallery, in 2011 when he opened an exhibition of Ralph Gibson's work there.  I liked the exhibition and the space so I met with Bill and showed him my work.  It turns out he was one of Nathan Lyons' first students at the Visual Studies Workshop.  He liked my work and immediately offered me a exhibition, which opened on January 12, 2012 and ran for six weeks (see this link for an online version of the Spectrum Exhibition).  

No prints were sold and nothing developed from this exposure within Rochester's art community.  However the exhibition helped me to briefly reconnect with Nathan Lyons and I met Carl Chiarenza for the first time.  It was all very awkward, being back in my old territory after 33 years away, after having created a history of my own as an exhibiting artist and teacher in the Milwaukee and Chicago region.

Bill retired in 2017 and closed Lumier Photo and the Spectrum Gallery. click here  I am grateful to Bill for all that he has given the Rochester photography community over the past 40 years he was so very active as a student of photography at Nathan's Visual Studies Workshop, a businessman, offering archival supplies to photographers, and a gallery director.    

2011-13  Travel to Turkey & "An Imaginary Book"
After meeting Bill Edwards in 2011 and setting up an exhibition date for January, 2012, Gloria and I traveled to Turkey.  I had read so much about how Morton Feldman's music had been influenced by the Turkish rugs he had collected; and I have always loved the poet saint Rumi, and his Shrine, in Konya was included in our tour along with the added opportunity to experience an evening of Sufi music and swirling Sufi dancers.  The trip was much more than fun and enjoyable; it turned out to be a pilgrimage for me, a life transforming inner journey and an experiential introduction to Islamic Sacred Art, and indeed, the very idea that Art could be Sacred.

The highlight of the tour (for me) was a visionary experience I had in a museum in Istanbul.  I had wanted to go to that particular museum to see its world-famous collection of Turkish rugs, but as we were walking through the various parts of the museum we unintentionally happened onto an amazing exhibition of illuminated Qur'ans.  While looking at a particularly attractive illuminated page, I had a very intense visionary experience.

I have written about the experience, and other experiences related to our travel in Turkey, in a project entitled Prayer Stones which is the first chapter in a large multi-chaptered project entitled "An Imaginary Book" that was inspired by our trip to Turkey and my experience in the museum.  If you are interested in learning more about the project I encourage you to first visit the Preface to "An Imaginary Book" before looking at Prayer Stones ; and you might also find it useful to view this Brief Introduction to "An Imaginary Book".

from the project "Prayer Stones" chapter one of "An Imaginary Book" 2011-13

2011-13  "An Imaginary Book"

Part of the revelation that came from the trip to Turkey had to do with a question regarding the nature of Sacred Art.  I was stunned to realize I didn't really understand what the term meant to me or how it related to various religious groups or my own creative process.  The Islamic Sacred Art that I saw in Turkey inspired me to make my first symmetrical photographs (see the Symmetrical Snow Photograph image immediately above).  And that, in itself, helped me to better appreciate how Feldman's music related to the Turkish rugs he collected.  

I devoted over a year to the study of sacred art in general, but I finally concentrated on the teachings, ideas, and art associated with Islam, and especially Sufism, and the writings of Rumi (who is so often quoted in Siddha Yoga talks and writings).  As "An Imaginary Book" progressed I discovered the remarkable books authored by Henry Corbin and Tom Cheetham.  I especially appreciated Cheetham's 4 books about Henry Corbin and Corbin's ideas.  I introduced those ideas in the later chapters of the "Imaginary Book" project, a project that took me two years to complete. 

NOTE: if the Corbin material interests you, I suggest you begin with Tom Cheetham's The World Turned Inside Out : Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism.  And if later you want to try reading Corbin directly, start with Alone With the Alone.  I found Corbin very difficult reading, but there moments of clarity and revelatory insight that are stunning and truly inspiring.  Alone With the Alone is probably Corbin's most accessible work for a beginner.  But again, reading the four books by Cheetham is I think the best approach to Corbin's own writings.

 

Symmetrical Photograph, 2018 from the project Symmetrical Snow Photographs : 
Homage to Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White, the Equivalent, and composer Valentin Silvestrov

2013 - 14  :  Still Life  Homage to Giorgio Morandi 

This was a very important project for me.  I can't say how much I learned about myself and the great Italian painter as I worked on this project.  I really feel kindred in spirit with this guy!  (Later, two additional Morandi inspired projects followed.)  There are over 12 chapters to the Still Life project.  It is a huge project and I loved every moment of working on it.  

Morandi inspired still life, Chapter 1, #24 Nocturne, Tray, reflection of tea kettle, lamp

2014 - 2017   The years following  "An Imaginary Book" & "Still Life"
After I completed "An Imaginary Book" I became very preoccupied with the symmetrical photograph and began making projects that continued to explore the idea of Sacred Art in a more expansive way.  Indeed there was a surprising  explosion! of projects and I have collected those Sacred Art projects and listed them (chronologically) at this link:  The Sacred Art Photography Projects.  Each of the projects has an abundance of Introductory text, quotations, and commentary, and I feel no need to highlight and elaborate here on most of those projects in the 2014-17 time-frame (though there certainly are many).

Symmetrical Photograph, 2015  from the project Photography and Yoga

However, it is now 2023 as I write, and I feel I must mention a few other important projects that I chose to skip over in 2020, the first being the project Photography and Yoga.  I like most of all the first chapter of the multi-chaptered project, entitled Seeing the Self Everywhere and In Everything  It covers a lot of territory in terms of my early years' involvement with Siddha Yoga and my first meetings with Gurumayi Chivilasananda, our beloved Yogic Saint (Sadguru) and Meditation Master.  I have included lots of yogic teachings in the various Chapter headings, but I made the mistake of trying to provide the texts with images; and too many of the images are too forced, not quite appropriate to be placed next to such powerful words, yogic teachings, it seems to me now.  I wish I hadn't included most of them, but I feel I must allow the project to stand as is.     

Gloria and I continue to practice Siddha Yoga together and there is a Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Rochester, NY that has many long time devotees who have worked hard at keeping the center going despite the difficult time during the Pandemic when we couldn't meet there and yet the costs of keeping the space became a very challenging issue for the Center's community.

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Another important project:  in December, 2015, I created a series of symmetrical photographs using the colored leaves of Vermont as my "source" subject.  I was in a particularly deep intuitive creative flow during that visit with relatives and close friends who live near the beautiful Broad Brook.  Visit the project Field of Vision.  Some of the images are quite remarkable.

Symmetrical Photograph, December 2015  from the project Field of Vision

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Related to my mention of Broad Brook, I must point out an intensely made project: Broad Brook Photographs : 9-10 & 9-11. 2016 .  All the pictures were made on my birthday, September, 10 2016 while visiting friends and relatives in Vermont and celebrating my birthday with them.  I decided to make some pictures in the brook on my birthday and I got so excited by the first day's shooting that I did a follow-up camera session with the brook the following day, which was 9-11, that day filled with such horrifically tragic memories for me an our entire nation.  This year, for a change, photographing on the day which follows my birthday made total sense to me.  Those two days work was published on October 1o, 2016.  Visit Broad Brook Photographs : 9-10 & 9-11. 2016  

After I completed that project, which included only "straight photographs," I decided to make symmetrical photographs using the images published in that project as source images for the symmetrical images.  The result was to me astonishing; all the symmetrical images were published on November 15, 2016 as the project Death : A Meditation in Photographs & Texts

Symmetrical Photograph, November 2016  from the project Death, A Meditation

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Another very important project for me was Creation-Dissolution of a World, published February 14, 2017.  The pictures were made on an amazingly foggy day with sun shinning down into the fog.  I was photographing in an amazing state of mind as the day's photography ended up becoming a contemplation on a major yogic teaching inferred in the project's title.  

I have made several large photography projects inspired by other artists.  Through the months of July, August, September and October 2017 I worked on a project I that had become completely obsessed with.  Homage to Giacometti.  Its an astonishing collection of images and texts in the sense that I discovered part of myself in Giacometti.  I was enthralled with his life, his work, his intuitive instincts and visionary experiences.  

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2017 - 2019   Invited Back to Milwaukee

I thought my exhibition days had come to an end with the 2012 Spectrum Gallery exhibition in Rochester.  And I was very content with that because I had become very happy with how my Creative Process was unfolding in the context of publishing new work on my blog, especially after I had returned from my trip to Turkey and began working on "An Imaginary Book"  and began a huge series of projects that began to explore the idea of Sacred Art.

Then out of the blue, in January, 2017 John Sobczak, the director of The Alice Wilds, a new contemporary art gallery in Milwaukee, sent me an email asking if I would be willing to allow him to exhibit my work at the Alice Wilds.  He had been looking at my blog and talking with a another young artist, Jon Horvath about possibly working together with him on a mini retrospective of my work.  

John Sobczak had been one of my very first photography students at UW-Milwaukee (when I started teaching there in 1975), and it was John, who worked at one of the best art galleries in Milwaukee, and in 1983 to invited me to exhibit my work at the Michael Lord Gallery.  Jon Horvath was one of my favorite undergraduate students, and when I retired from UW-Milwaukee in 2007 he was in the graduate photography program pursuing his MFA degree.  When John and Jon got be be friends and discovered that they had both had known and studied photography with me.  When John initiated The Alice Wild he and Jon began talking about a show of my work.  

John and Jon's efforts to invite me back to Milwaukee is an important story to me, which I have explained in full detail in the first and the fourth projects in a series of four related projects.  I have provided below the illustrated links to the first of the projects, The Rising Sun, and the fourth project in the series, Postlude To An Exhibition.  

NOTE: I will also provide the links to the second and third projects here: 2) Snow Photographs : Homage to Harry Callahan and All My Teachers, and 3)  Symmetrical Snow Photographs : Homage To Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White, the Equivalent, and composer Valentin Silverstrov.

    

The Rising Sun ~ Prelude To An Exhibition

March 9, 2018     Part One of a four part series

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Postlude To An Exhibition: 

May 21, 2018 / revised January 14, 2020 

Part Four of a four part series

Installation view through The Alice Wilds gallery window
(L) The Digital Garage Photographs  18x18"  (R) Miniature Studies Garage silver prints 3.5" sq.

The Postlude To An Exhibition project, first created in May, 2018 underwent a revision in January, 2020, and now includes an Afterword which explains how I was invited once again back to Milwaukee, in late October, 2019, this time by Jon Horvath.  Jon was serving on the Planning Committee for the Mid-West Regional Chapter of The Society for Photographic Education, and the Committee asked him to contact me to see if I would agree to be the Honored Professor for the the 2019 Conference, and would I give a talk in the last, evening session of the Conference.  (The Conference was being hosted by UW-Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, where Jon teaches.)  

Also, during the SPE Conference, which would be taking place in the unique Saint Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, there would be an exhibition of photographs in the Hotel's MoWA  DTN Gallery which, like a luminous jewel, is located in the center of the hotel's lobby.  The exhibition would be curated by Tyler Friedman, from the Museum of Wisconsin Art.  

Tyler had been speaking to John Sobczak (director of the Alice Wilds Gallery) about my work.  Tyler was very interested in my 1978 Steve Lacy Series and its special 1978 installation at the Renaissance Society Galleries at the University of Chicago, pluse the concert of improvised music that occurred at the opening in response to the photographs and their installation.  Tyler wanted to re-create that 1978 event in the DTN Gallery during the time of the Conference.  He knew a great Milwaukee jazz trumpeter, Russ Johnson, and wanted to invite Russ to improvise to the Lacy photographs, document the performance on video, and then play the video continuously in the gallery.  Tyler wanted to place my Lacy photographs in the front half of the gallery, and he would pair the Lacy exhibit (which he wanted to select and install himself) with another solo exhibition, in the back half of the gallery--an installation of photographs by Tomiko Jones from her project A Place to Rest.  The two exhibits would be entitled Sound / Asleep.

Well, to make a longer story short, I agreed to all that Jon and Tyler proposed, and it all came to pass in late October, 2019.   

Tyler also organized two gallery talks during the Conference in which Tyler, myself and Russ conversed about the exhibition, and the relationship between music and the visual arts.  And, during each gallery talk Russ performed live improvisations to my photographs.  

Installation shot, Steve Lacy Photographs, MoWA DTN Gallery, Arts Hotel, Milwaukee

Snapshots: Stories of My Life In Photography & Teaching was the title of my talk on the last evening of the Conference, and this link includes a revised, expanded version of my talk plus installation shots of the gallery and a link to the video of Russ's improvisations to the photographs and Tyler's elegant installation. 

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After I presented my talk on the last evening of the Conference, October 31, Halloween, 2019, there followed--surprising to me--an awards ceremony in which Tyler Friedman accepted, on behalf of the Museum of Wisconsin Art, a gift from the SPE Conference Planning Committee: two framed silver prints from my Garage Series.  (The Planning Committee had purchased the prints from the Alice Wilds Gallery.)  Tyler then explained that the prints would become part of the Museum's permanent collection, then he made a public announcement (which I also knew nothing about) to the 300 people in the SPE Conference audience.  He said the Museum had decided to do a retrospective exhibition of my work in 2021, and publish a catalogue to go with it.  Their plans also included traveling the show--something they had never done before in the history of the Museum.

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It certainly looked like I would be having another major real-life exhibition in the near future, and in Wisconsin, the state I had left in 2008 feeling like the university, my colleagues, many of my friends . . . and in general most other aspects of my life . . . was in falling into a state of dissolution. . . . .  

Then a few months after that announcement was made the Covid Pandemic hit the United States and . . . everything seemed to come to a standstill, including the plans for the Retrospective Exhibition, etc.  I have heard nothing directly from the Museum of Wisconsin Art since the October 31, 2019 surprise announcement.   In March, 2022, I did hear through my gallery director John Sobczak that the Museum was still intending to go forward with their plans, and that the proposed date for the Exhibition, etc would probably be sometime in 2024.  ~  As of this date, July, 2023 I have not head a word from the Museum of Wisconsin Art or from John Sobczak about the Retrospective.

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I worked on a large Thematic project on Water Photographs from late September, 2018 thru March, 2019.  It consists of nine parts, and one of the most important aspects of the project was a new set of pictures I had made at Niagara Falls, just two hours drive from Canandaigua.  Visit my Falling Water project.

from the Falling Water project

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Gloria and I celebrated our Golden Anniversary by taking a tour of Alaska.  It started out great, and shortly thereafter an accident forced us back home.  Visit Alaska

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 On December 11, 2019 I published on my blog Makom : the "Place".   This is a project I have always thought about doing and never got around to.  But the time was right.  It is a project about the experience of one's self in (something like) a visionary experience of space.  In graduate school I had first read about the concept Makom in Thomas Hess's book Barnett Newman (1971).  I then made many photography projects inspired by the idea, but, out of fear that talking about such spiritual things would threaten my art world connections that had been established in the early 1980's so I let the concept dissolve into silence until I published this project on my blog in 2019.

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In June, 2020 I began a totally revised version of A Personal History of Photography which I had initiated shortly after I created my blog.  Now, you are reading another revision of this expanding project which I started working on July, 26, 2023.

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In April, 2020 I was working on yet another snow project, then the constant news about the Pandemic began to have an effect on me.  By June, 2023 I had created 19 projects which was directly or peripherally related to the Pandemic and those projects can be seen as a collection of hyperlinked titles at this one link:  The Pandemic Inspired Photography Projects with the subtitle "Finding Light In the Darkness."

(Ghost Ship of Souls)  from the Pandemic Inspired Photography Projects

Among my most favorite of these projects is the August, 2021 project The Light Of Memory, in which I revisited Giorgio Morandi inspired by a new biography by Marilena Pasquali.  I was fascinated by the stories she tells of Morandi's experiences during Italy's involvement with Word War I and Mussolini's rise two power.  I somehow identified my experience during the Pandemic with his situation.  Certainly most of my photographs are very dark, but each in its own way represents my effort in"finding" the "light."   And immediately fallowing that project I created another project about Morandi and his unexpected brief encounter with Thelonious Monk.  The project is entitled The Letter Morandi Wrote to Thelonious Monk.   Its an odd photography project and something like a "love letter" to two of my most highly regarded artists:  Morandi and Monk.  

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An equally strange project that was completed in July, 2022, and which I have included as a Pandemic Inspired project, is Nocturne a rather mysterious homage to Fryderyk Chopin and his wonderful Nocturnes.  I was so grateful to reconnect to this remarkable music when it came back into my life after dealing with so much darkness associated with the Pandemic.  

(Angel of Tears)  from the project Nocturne

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The concluding Pandemic Inspired photography project, The Pandemic Inkjet Prints includes the story of how my old 7600 Epson printer died in 2022 forcing me to purchase a new printer and computer so I could begin the process of re-making some inkjet for the project I had made about a year earlier when my old printer began presenting some serious problems.  

I had reached a point, in 2011, after getting my blog set up and running smoothly, where I decided I no longer needed to make prints for the new projects I was publishing on my blog.  I always made large print-size files for each of the published blog photographs just in case I might later want or need to make some inkjet prints.  I was so prolific I could see no point in taking the time and the money to make prints of all my project photographs like I used to do before I set my blog.  I was making a project once a month and producing an overwhelmingly high volume of printable photographs.  

Then, it occurred to me after the announcement in October 2019 about the Retrospective, that I would need to make lots of prints, probably, and that I should become more concerned about my old printer.  It was still working pretty good, but I was having a lot of problems with nozzles clogging on me.

Then when the Pandemic came, and there was no mention of an exhibition, so I questioned if that would ever really  happen and stopped worrying about buying a new printer.  Buying a new printer would be very expensive, in part because I then would have to buy a new computer, and it would be very time-consuming getting the equipment and then getting everything coordinated and working well between my computer, the printer and my online Photoshop subscription.

When I felt finished with the Pandemic project, the idea occurred to produce a collection of my most favorite works from the 14-15 Pandemic projects.  It would begin the process of preparing for the Retrospective (if it ever did happen), and I could see if my old 7600 printer (which I purchased in 2005) could handle the job.  As it turned out, first I could not find Epson inks any longer for the old printer, and then the substitute inks I purchased in Canada kept clogging my old printer's nozzles causing streaks in the prints.  Then my old printer started presenting a special code that meant soon it would be inoperable. 

So I decided to buy a new printer in January 2023 to reprint the images for the Pandemic Inkjet Print project.  Also, I had moths before made plans to have both my eyes operated on for cataract removal.  Also, mixed in to this scenario was my a growing feeling of frustration and impatience with the lack of communication from the Museum of Wisconsin Art.  

Getting the new printer, setting it up; getting the new computer and getting it running correctly; and then getting Photoshop set up for the new equipment, etc. . . . all that did indeed take a lot of time and money, but the prints I started getting were wonderful, and the new printer, the Epson 6000P made prints much more quickly than my old printer.  I actually enjoyed making prints again, and I finally got the Pandemic Inkjet Print project completed and revised.

Regarding My Eyes

Then, as I began making a few other prints, some ideas emerged for two new projects.  However, printing became complicated when I began showing symptoms in my left eye, symptoms typical for retinal tears, which we soon learned had indeed occurred as a result of the stress the cataract surgery had placed on my overly long eyeball (which is usually the case for people--like me--who are extremely near sighted).   

I found that I could continue printing, even with a gas bubble in my left eye (used to hold the repaired retina tight against the wall of the eyeball), if I wore reading glasses and looked through a 6 inch in diameter 2x magnifier held up to my right eye.  ~  Then shortly thereafter I started showing very similar symptoms again (for retinal tear) in my right eye.  I was immediately checked and on the same ay operated on for the retina tear, and this time I chose an oil bubble placed in my right eye which would allow me to see through that eye while my retina was healing.  The oil bubble choice required a fifth surgery, because the oil needed to be removed surgically, unlike the gas bubble, which simply dissolved and disappeared in my eye.  

In total then, in the months that followed my two cataract surgeries (in January) I experienced five eye surgeries: (For a more detailed story about my five eye surgeries, printing with my new printer, and printing with eye bubbles in each eye, see my introductory text for my  Pandemic Inkjet Prints project.)

*

Despite all the eye problems, including some permanent damage to my left eye, and the unfortunate and the spatially disorienting situation in which both eyes are seeing differently (the damaged eye produces a darker, smaller and distorted image compared to what I see with my right eye) I have been able to remain productive, and my brain is making some progress in adapting to the differences in vision between my two eyes.  ~  And being productive, making the prints and coming up with ideas for new projects has helped me get my head pretty cleared out about the lack of communication from the Museum of Wisconsin Art. 

(I did learn, from John Sobczak, that Tyler Friedman had gotten married during the pause created by the Pandemic, had a baby and moved out of Wisconsin because of his wife's job situation.  So a new curator has to be found, or some special arrangements may be in the process of being negotiated with Tyler about his following through with the Retrospective, etc. from out of State as a part time curator at MoWA.  I don't know.  I would suspect that perhaps the Museum's financial situation, being impacted by the Pandemic may be a factor as well.)

The yogic teachings say "if it happened, it had to happen" and "if it didn't happen, it wasn't supposed to happen."  There is self-effort and that attracts grace; then there is always one's destiny working in the background.  ~  Having said that, I must be clear about how grateful I feel that the Museum of Wisconsin Art had even made plans to do such a huge project in regards to the photographs I have made throughout my life.  Many institutions and businesses have suffered because to the Pandemic, so I can wait and watch and see what happens next if anything regarding the Retrospective.  In the meantime, I have my life to live and pictures to make. 

* 

After completing the revised printing of the Pandemic Inkjet Prints project, I began making a collection of large prints of some of my favorite digital images which had never before been printed.  Also, I printed all the images for my recent project Blue Angles, and after making the prints I was inspired to revise the blog version of the project.   And making all those prints seemed to have generated ideas for two new projects.  I made prints for all the images in the new project Silent Dialogues and, at this writing, (July 29, 2023) I am on the verge of publishing the printed images for the final, fourth Book for the new blog project 12x12" Studies.  

These new and revised projects are too new for me to comment on right now.  But the process of making the prints before publishing the images in a blog project, have had an important impact on my Creative Process, and probably all the more so because of all that I have been through with my eyes.  I have gained a new sense of gratitude for the gift of vision, the ability to see beauty and mystery and meaning in the apparent, visible world.  The photographs, in printed form, give something like a "living tangible substance" to the images that function for me as True, living Symbols.  I have gained a renewed sense of commitment to the importance (for me) of making photographs and photography projects that celebrate the mystery and revelation of The Oneness of Being.  

I am particularly grateful to my wife Gloria who has been so supportive of my photography and my inner need to create images and, since retiring from teaching, making blog projects.  And I am grateful that Gloria and I share the same love for Gurumayi and the Siddha Yoga Path. Gloria understands that photography has become for me part of my meditation practice and a means of staying connected to Gurumayi's grace, her Shakti, the Creative Power of the Universe.    

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Epilogue

___________________________________________________

Recognize your own inner Self
in all that you behold

*

You are the seer and the seen,

and the process of seeing;
the creator, the creation,
and the act of creating;
the knower, the knowledge,
and the process of knowing;
the meditator, the object of mediation,
and the act of meditating.

Swami Muktananda, from his book Reflections of the Self,  SYDA Foundation, 1980/1993

Self Effort & Grace  
I want to close this revised (June 2020/July 2023) version of A Personal History of Photography with a few more words about my Creative Process.  The primary purpose of my blog from the very beginning was to archive the fruits of my continuing, unfolding creative process, and share it with others in a forum that makes the work available to a larger audience.  

I then discovered that the blog provided me with an Intimate Space in which I could conduct an ongoing meditation and dialogue with my own inner Self.  Whenever I addressed my hypothetical "viewer" in regards to whatever I was writing, it gradually felt more and more to me that the "you" I was addressing was really something universal and not just my own personal self.  My practice of Siddha Yoga and my practice of photographic picture-making have indeed merged and become inseparably One.   Indeed, the truth is that each and every one of us is part of the entire Universe as a Whole; we each share the heartfelt connection with that unimaginal vastness . . . 

The following two poems are by the Bengali poet-mystic, Tagore (1861-1941), poems #42 & #43, from his Gitanjali (Song Offerings)  trans- Coleman Barks

Early in the day there was a feeling that you and I  

would sail out in a boat                            

                    on a pilgrimage to nowhere on a shoreless ocean.

My poems would come to us there as free                    

 as the waves, and as wordless as waves.

Is it time now for that setting out,                                  

or is there more do do here?                       

With evening shore birds flying to their nests               

 can we not like the sunset                            

  vanish with them into the night?                 

____________________________________________________________   

There was a time when I was not always                      

waiting for your presence.                           

You came to me anyway, a king disguised                    

                     as a commoner, and pressed your signet ring              

                        on my small moment, eternity imprinting time.             

I look back now and see so clearly                                   

         how you did not turn away                                    

        from my childhood playing,                                  

        those forgotten days.                                                

You were with me there in the backyard,                        

 as you are with me now                                    

                             in the great spaces between stars.                                               

____________________________________________________________      

The true nature of the Symbolic Photograph--images which function for me as True, living Symbols--is its Imaginal power of revelation, its ability to awaken the awareness, the recognition, the remembrance . . . of the Oneness of Being.   Symbols are the fruit of an experience of grace, of seeing with the "Eye of the Heart."  Symbols, True, living Symbols, are the visual affirmation of the Sacred that dwells in the inner, invisible space of the Heart.  Symbols are radiant with an interior light, the grace that has manifested the entire visible and invisible Universe.  In the world of yoga, that interior light is the Light of Consciousness, the Light of the Self, the Light of Shiva, Shakti, God . . .  all the different names of the same One ineffable Being. 

This Personal History of Photography has made me aware of how grace was always been a constant companion, always guiding me, showing me how to navigate through this complicated world which is--at the same time--beautiful, strange, complex, fascinating and sometimes quite frightening.  

So many of the stories I've shared in this Personal History are ultimately about the interconnectedness of things, the play of grace that brings things synchronistically together in meaningful and transformative ways.  It is grace which brings the inner and outer worlds together into a revelation of Unitary Reality, and photography has that ability to give these brief momentary glimpses of revelation a visual form.
                              

Despite all this talk about grace--and it is very difficult and awkward to write about such an ineffable phenomena--Life's palpable, mysterious presence never ceases to astound me and attract me.  That mystery is what I long for; it is what I am most interested in as an artist and as a student of yoga.   

Who can possibly understand any of this, really?  The intellect simply is not equipped to deal with such transcendent phenomena.  But the photographs I have made--those which function for me as a True, living Symbols--have helped me to look more closely and deeply into my life, most of which is visible only to the Eye of the Heart.  I have been learning to recognize, in snapshot like glimpses, the way grace manifests in my life and transforms me and my world. 

Images that function for me as True, living Symbols assure me that below the surface of appearances, in the depths of my Heart, there is Light that can be experienced and revealing.  The whole of my life, the whole of my creative process, and Gurumayi's presence has given my life meaning, direction, courage and conviction to continue making the effort to live with love, with gratitude, with grace. 

This project was first initiated in 2011,
and then revised periodically throughout 
the following nine years.  In June, 2020 I revised the 
project quite extensively.  In July, 2023 I again updated
the project as a whole and added new material covering the

period June, 2020 to July, 2023. 

Related Links:

Snapshots: Stories of My Life In Photography & Teaching

Death, Art, Writing : Personal Stories

Seeing the Grand Canyon : Perception=Projection

Personal Stories : Encounters with the Sacred

The Symbol

The Symbolic Photograph : A Means to Self Knowledge

Contemplating Symbolic Photographs

Welcome Page  to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.

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