My old friend Duffel pinged me on iChat the other day and asked if I had a couple of minutes… I gave my normal distracted, noncommittal: “yeah sorta.. what’s up?”
The next message from him was a file transfer request.
I accepted.
He should have asked – “do you have a couple of decades?”
The file transfer completed and up popped an image I hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was a print I’d made for him back when we were in college. I just sat there in silence and let the memories unfold out of my head.
The original shot was taken as part of an assignment for my first color photography class. We were instructed to reach into a hat and pull out a slip of paper – on it would be a color. Whatever we drew – we had to go out for the next week and shoot that color where we could find it.
I drew orange. This was obviously the starting point for my obsession with and love for the color.
The clay outside the garage of my childhood home would appear vibrant orange  terracotta when mixed with water. So I grabbed the garden hose and my boots and splashed together a trite composition.
The image was shot on 35mm E6 transparency film.
It and the other shots I took passed the crit and I moved on.
The next year I’d take a technical and scientific photography class as part of my major. One of the lab workshops was learning to make a black and white silver print from a color slide.
For whatever reason – I grabbed that shot…. Made what I think was called an interpositive, made the print, passed the crit… and moved on.
Later that year Duffel would stop on that print while flipping through my work and carry on about how cool he thought it was.
I didn’t hesitate in pulling the print out of my book, dated it, signed it and handed it to him and said “here – you can have it”.
Now here nearly twenty years later – the image has found it’s way back to its creator in a most curious timely fashion.
The shot itself still doesn’t do a lot for me – I was really just fulfilling an assignment in my mind.
But all the extra stuff is what gave me serious pause… The memories…
Learning to see orange.
My favorite jump boots. (think think they’re burried in a closet somewhere still).
Susan my Color Photo prof… with her coke-bottle thick round glasses.
Joe my technical photography prof with his stories of shooting for Penthouse.
my fingernails turning dark in the sun from the D76 (tongs were for pussies).
The smell of glacial acetic acid.
an unbridled, youthful enthusiasm for making images.
I couldn’t have imagined that this casual gift to a friend would come back twenty years later – as a regift of sorts… with so much personal relevance.
Thanks for scanning this and sending it to me Duff.