Tag Archives: Webster University

LIVE, photography, WORK

E6


fullrez

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.

LIVE

bttf


Last night the ole Alma matar hosted a screening of Back to the Future with introduction and Q&A session with writer / producer Bob Gale,…. who… happens to also be a native St. Louisian.

There was a pissy wine and cheese reception beforehand just for alumni which we didn’t make it to… but it was nice to sit in the “privileged” alumni roped off seating toward the front of the auditorium…. I asked the usher if there was super-special seating for the alumni who’ve paid off their student loans… The 19 year-old didn’t get it.

I hadn’t seen the movie in about fifteen years – it was a nostalgia trip. (They also got two DMC-12s and parked them out in front of Webster Hall complete with smoke machines.)

The “real” trip was watching this movie about the comic contrast between 1985 and 1955,… in 2005,…. nearly the same contrast as the plot premise of the movie.

Then I looked around the the back half of the auditorium which was filled with students and was really struck with how young they all looked. Of course… The underclassmen in the room were BORN when this movie came out.

We all have an “internal age” – the age you see yourself as regardless of your biological age… For me – I’m internally about 20 to 22…. Walking through campus felt like I was just there last week going to classes.

The time period contrasts of the movie, noticing the students who I thought looked to just have all gotten their drivers licenses and healthy doses of nostalgia walking through campus put me in a weird, (but not unpleasant), head-space for the rest of the night.

Q&A was interesting and discovered some Easter-Egg St. Louis references in the flick – although Gale’s recurrent plugging of the three-DVD box-set lent a sleazy, whore-like aire to what would otherwise be a semi-snooty academic discussion.

But come on – you can only deconstruct a movie like Back to the Future so much.

It was (is) bubble-gum.

Meanwhile this is (was) never a blog.

LIVE, photography, WORK

woodwork

Günzo (photo credit: unknown)

So I notice the little envelope icon blinking on my cell phone. I missed a call.. Not an uncommon phenomena since I’m a real air head when it comes to keeping the damn thing charged.

I retrieved a voicemail from my mom… “Honey, someone called here and left a message looking for you, a Doyal somebody… his numbers are #########.” I damn near dropped the phone.. I hadn’t “heard” the name in nearly a decade, though I’ve thought it many times.

Flashback to 1994 – I was a senior photography student at Webster University and by way of knowing a few people I was invited to participate in a “Command Visit”, a United States Marines program which brings high school / career councilors and writers out to tour and witness boot camp.

I can distinctly remember the exhausted nervous feeling driving in the wee hours of the morning to get to the small mid-missouri air-base where everyone was to meet. Since I was going to do a photo essay which would put me out of the actual “tour group” I was assigned my own escort to take me anywhere I wanted to go. Sgt. Haynes, a marine photographer, came up and introduced himself: “Hello, I’m Sgt. Haynes, I’m going to be your chaperone for the next ten days – everyone calls me Günzo.”

Günzo was built like a moose, his stature would intimidate but his “aww shucks” country boy dialect and small-town Texas manners made him less scary.

We boarded a military plane and left for The Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego and began what would be probably the biggest adventure of my life.

A couple of days into following these wide-eyed kids around I pulled Günzo aside: “Hey – when you’re in boot camp do kind of get this constant knotted stomach anxiety feeling?” He explained they run these boots hard in the first stages of training, very little sleep and the D.I.s need to shock them out of civilian thinking and to get them to think like a group.

I was empathizing “too” much with my subject material. I started feeling constantly on-edge and ready to barf… I needed to step away for a little while. Günzo nabbed me, threw me into the civi-car the Marines provided us and got me off base and drove me around. It was then the ice really broke and we got to seriously photo-geek bonding… Trading darkroom secrets and him recounting his photo antics in Desert Storm.

For the rest of the trip we were good buds and I barely saw the “organized” group which I had come with. He took me around and showed me ever nook and cranny of the base, and then shot up to Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego to see more. Being of typical gung-ho marine mentality – and a little bit of a rebel being a military photographer, he risked getting into trouble more than once for the sake of thrill seeking.

Antics I recall and smile about include going off-roading in our rental Toyota on the tank course blaring “Kids in America” or running out to the beach which was reserved for amphibious landing maneuvers (which weren’t scheduled for that day) and hanging out. “Get out and get your feet wet! This is the biggest stretch of deserted, private beach in all of Southern California!”

I returned to Saint Louis to have the first solo student photo show at Webster consisting of 21 images, all of which were digitally printed. (unspeakably progressive for 1994). Günzo flew out to the show and covered it for Navy magazines and later the images were boxed up and shipped out for a tour to be displayed at bases around the US… (world?) – I never saw them again. I can only hope that they’re hanging proudly somewhere and the dye-sublimation prints haven’t broken down.

Günzo and I kept in close touch for the next year or so. We enjoyed one of those real naturally tight friendships. I looked up to him like a big brother. He even damn near talked me into enlisting in the Corp’s Officer Training Program (designed for guys going into the military who have their degree).

Time passed and we fell outa touch. He retired from the Marines and moved with his wife and two kids to Florida. I went on to pursue a career in graphic design and came out. I’ve always coveted the photo he gave me of him when he was stationed in Korea and keep it in a small shrine I maintain of photos of people who are dear to me who have either fallen into obscurity or have passed away.

We caught up with each-other briefly on the phone but we were both en-route to somewhere and couldn’t chat long. We exchanged abbreviated versions of our lives for the past decade. I got really uncomfortable when he asked: “So, ya married and have kids?” – suddenly I was 22 and deeply closeted all over again. I awkwardly dodged the question, changed the subject and told him I’d email him a URL for this thing called a “blog” where he could catch up with every tedious detail of my life from the past year.

I don’t know why I would give him a link to a blog that I don’t have… For if I “did” have one – I would have spent the entire early morning digging through my scrap-box digging up artifacts from that period in my life and getting all nostalgic. I’d probably also be bummed that I could only find some of the original scans on disc. Thankfully I’ve got all the negatives still.

Hmmm… Note to self – see ifi chrisglass was serious about wanting to go in on a negative scanner with sinnabor and a few other LJ-folks so we can archive our film.