1970s: Early Photography Beginnings

The journey begins in about 1974, when I was about 11 or 12. Our elementary school class went on a field trip to the Fernbank Planetarium in Atlanta, Georgia. While we were there we had an opportunity to see all the exhibits including an Apollo capsule, which was very thrilling for me because I was a big fan of the space program (and still am). But it was when I visited the gift shop that everything changed. There I saw a camera for sale – a Diana F—what most people would dismiss as a cheap plastic toy, both then and now. But remembering how much my mother had taken family photos with her camera but never let anyone else touch it, I looked at it as a chance to be independent and take photos of my own. I had some spending money for the trip, so I bought it. It came with a roll of black and white film (in a size I later learned was called 120, the same as medium format cameras), and it had rudimentary instructions on how to use it. I loaded the film on the bus during the ride back to school, and tried taking some photos along the way and later after I got home. My mom seemed a little annoyed that I had seemingly wasted my money, and expected I wouldn’t use it for long because of the cost of film and processing. But my dad thought differently. He not only had my first roll processed, but he also bought more film for me to use. He was interested in photography like I was, and this was his way I think of encouraging me to “do something other than stick your nose in a book.” His interest was in shooting home movies of the family with his Keystone Super 8 movie camera.

I did keep using that camera for about a year, until the lens eventually fell off (the Diana was made of mostly plastic parts glued together), and it went into the scrap heap. But by then my interest in photography had taken solid hold and has been with me ever since.

Within a year or so, I acquired the first of what became several 110 cameras, many of them made by Vivitar. 110 was a very dramatic change from the Diana – the film was only a fraction of the size of the 120 rolls, and it was packaged in plastic cartridges that made loading and unloading super simple – just open the back cover and drop it in. I also first experienced using color film with the 110, where all my 120 rolls had been black and white. The Vivitar and other makes of 110 cameras were more durable than the Diana, but still prone to malfunctions from time to time causing me to replace them every few months. I continued to use these through the end of the decade and into my first year or so in college in 1980-81.

Around 1978, my father began letting me use his Keystone Super 8 movie camera regularly. This was the camera he’d used to document our family life on film, and now it became another tool for me to explore visual storytelling. I remember using it at a family gathering that year, capturing my uncles gathered together in conversation—a moment that became unexpectedly precious when one of them passed away shortly before I attended GHP the following summer. The Super 8 camera taught me that photography and film weren’t just about capturing images; they were about preserving memories of people and moments that wouldn’t last forever.

In the summer of 1979 between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended the Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) sponsored by the State of Georgia. Only about 600 high school students per year were selected from across the state to spend six weeks on a college campus participating in focused “enrichment” courses in subject areas they were nominated in by their teachers (in my case, I was nominated in Social Studies as I had a keen interest in history). When I saw Photography listed among the two-week electives, I signed up immediately. On the first day, the instructor introduced us to the tools we would be using, central of which was 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras. On top of that, we would be shooting with color slide film, and there was no limit to how many rolls of film we could shoot. The camera assigned to me was his personal Olympus OM-2, and he took great care in showing me how to operate it and get the most out of it.

I was over the moon with this opportunity! I took the camera everywhere with me – to class, meals in the cafeteria, concerts, recreational time, and just wandering around the campus. As the boxes of mounted slides started coming back, he would evaluate them and give me pointers on how I could improve my shots… and off I’d go again. I came up with a plan for the slides… We each had to present a final project in my Social Studies group at the end of the program, and I chose to use the slides to tell the “story of GHP”. I selected slides, wrote the script, and then presented it to the class. It was a huge success, with my instructors remarking that no one had ever attempted such a presentation that looked at the program itself before. I took the slides home with me at the end of the program and later made a presentation at my school to prospective GHP candidates.

But even more importantly than that, I knew what direction I wanted my hobby to go.