In the Fall of 1969, my second year in photo school, I had been deeply involved in the intricacies of developing color negatives and printing paper prints. While I had shot lots of film and completed assignments, I had not felt engaged by the images. But in the last few weeks of December, I created images that became a major personal thread for the balance of the academic year.

Those images were culled for this book and arranged into two groups, the originals and the recovered:

Eighteen images are from the original exhibitions.

Sixteen images appear that were never printed or exhibited. Of these, six are negatives that had serious defects, such as scratches or other physical damage. They were recovered using Photoshop.

The other ten images, now labeled "The Organics," had been exposed using 4x5 transparency film. I had no suitable options in 1970 to print these images. The school had no facility for processing reversal paper. Cibachrome was around, but difficult to acquire in consumer quantities. The Ektachrome paper process, used by some commercial labs, had a tendency to excessive contrast and a blue shift. The option of using InterNegatives never appealed to me, as I did not like results. Photoshop and the digital workflow eventually presented the solution.

My outlook in 1970 was definitely locked into the extreme close-up. I used an old Calumet view camera with 22-inch bellows. I found these images in much the same way I do now. I wander in my environment, maintain an open mind, remain receptive and avoid thinking.

Original titles accompany most of the exhibition images in this book, while I choose not to title the recovered images. I will not pretend I can go back and reconstruct my perceptions of forty years ago.

The book is available from Amazon and Blurb.com.