Richmond, Virginia, early ’70s

I got my first camera when I was a teenager, a Nikkormat 35mm with a 50mm lens. I had bought it with my savings and hid it away for a year because my parents were not enthusiastic about my “hobby.” I surreptitiously shot black and white film for a while and had some small glossies made. I was pretty good right off the bat. At some point I ran a roll of Kodachrome through the camera.

The photo above was from that roll. I was, perhaps, 16 or 17 years old. I remember that it was taken in Richmond, Virgina, which is an hour away from Williamsburg where I grew up. It’s a fully realized image. I knew somehow what I was doing, maybe a mixture of luck and intuition. The photograph doesn’t mean anything necessarily, though such lantern jockeys were common in those days, especially in black face, and I may have been thinking about the social significance of such things.

What I see is a vigorous composition of lines and colors incorporating a vernacular street object, an eyeless blank gaze, the raw earth of a construction site, a shovel slightly out of scale in the rear. For a number of years afterwards, I tried to make black and white pictures do what this color slide does. I did all right, of course, but I don’t think any of my photographs were as good as this early one. It was only in 1976 when I began shooting color in a systematic way that I found–or re-found–my way.