RIDGE
I’m old enough that I think of Bill Cosby jokes sometimes and wish he hadn’t turned out to be a monster. He had an album called, “I Started Out As A Child”. It was good, and my brother and I pretty much memorized it. I’m also old enough that I assume other people want to hear an old man tell them amusing tales from when he was young.
I started out as a black & white photographer. Color, when I was beginning to take photography seriously, was definitely just for tourists, and maybe William Eggleston, Elliot Porter, and a few others. Many photographers of my generation and even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago, fell in love with the medium while watching the latent image come up in the tray of developer, under the red light in the darkroom trays. I didn’t start photographing in color till the late 80s, post-grad school (after I had a job that paid well enough to shoot color).
Today we have digital color. Back then we had Kodak and Agfa color, and later Fuji color. I mention this because those films, like digital now, had their own palettes. Agfa was warm and red. Fuji blue and cool. Kodak was Kodachrome. Digital is worlds better, in the color world at least. But it feels wrong to me to take a digital image and make it black & white. But that’s what I’ve been doing, and did for this set of pictures, which I think of as a zine. Another new thing that didn’t exist until a few years ago, mostly.