Recently I started scanning old negatives, with an emphasis on selecting the very best images. Starting semi-randomly with 2007, of very roughly 4,000 negatives about 20 were scanned, and a few off those will drop out. Last night I went back to the beginning, looking through the really early stuff. I expect this will be mostly a winter project, something to do on rainy days and long nights. The system is in place now to facilitate that.

There's really nothing at that level to scan from the very earliest years. As a photojournalist it was a job, not fine art. Later I learned they aren't incompatible, but my early learning came mostly from the prior generation. Most of those guys were ex military photographers, ex photojournalists, guys from the Speed Graphic era of contrasty images and predictable subject matter. I was, literally, taught to put the emphasis on efficiency, to treat subjects as just one more assignment and not think too much beyond the essential technical stuff. Considering I was 15 when I sold my first photo, at first I didn't question that a whole lot. It was later, in my early 20s, that the rebellion came.

The first image that really stands out was taken in the summer of 1998. It was for a model composite, part of a series of shoots. I think the stage mom was in part trying to. set me up with her daughter, but there wasn't much interest on my part. Nice kid, pretty girl, not very interesting intellectually. She was a gymnast and dancer, relatively good muscle tone which meant, in 1978, she was a little ahead of her time. I was interested in that muscle tone, it was something different then and it lit beautifully, but she never made it past local sporting goods work as a model. Anyway there were a lot of technically competent images but with not a lot of spark to them. She wasn't real expressive and I hadn't learned to draw it out yet. The one really nice photo happened half by accident. I guess the location contributed and her pose had a dancer's grace, and she had a soft smile that appears to be natural. I think the framing between small trees on the left and right was an intentional part of the composition, what I didn't see til later was that the shrubs in the background, 20 feet behind her, when foreshortened with a short telephoto completed a darker circle. The model was centered in the lighter opening, and her extended fingertips just touched the darker edge of the outer circle which framed the border. At least I recognized right away on the negative that we had something special, and I made a bunch of prints of that one including some archival and selenium toned portfolio prints. The image also was one of three used on the composite.

So for those first years... from early 1971 through early 1981... just that one image stands out from all the rest, from probably a couple hundred thousand negatives run through multiple cameras on paid assignments plus a much smaller amount of personal work. That all changed in 1981.

What was new was that suddenly it wasn't just a job. When I took my first photos of the Chicago punk scene in December 1980, there was a new excitement, a new passion that hadn't been there before. It wasn't til early March that I did more photos, including my first band photos (Bauhaus and Da were on that couple of rolls from early March. A few photos from that show have been published and exhibited several times, and I selected two of them as standouts. Then in April, portraits of new friends in the alternative music scene. Three of them were special, two who became close friends and one I barely knew, and who died unexpectedly just months later. 

I've gotten only a little past that so far, there are a couple of July images selected to scan soon, and there will be several more in the balance of 1981 and 1982. Then it's going to skip some years, because after spring 1983 I burned out on the extreme intensity of the post-punk scene and mostly put the camera aside until the late 1990s. After that I was on a different path but one first inspired by those 1981-82 images, one that was much easier because of things first learned then. Part of the rejection of the materialistic values of the older generation of photographers (not all of them, because of course some of the earlier street and art photographers later became influences, but I hadn't found them yet) was very conscious and intentional... listen to the lyrics of the Joe Jackson song "Look Sharp" sometime, it resonated with some of us... although it went even deeper than I understood at the time.