1971 | Todd County, South Dakota
I had put this one on the cover of a little volume of photographs from my year and a half on the prairie. In 1974, back on the coast and after a few real paychecks, I asked my good friend Rex Heftmann to design the book, and he got it press-ready for his trusted local printing house in Chula Vista.
I learned a lot during that process — a pure sense of page space and typography from Rex, and a jolt of awareness from Doyle Blackwood at Crest Offset. When I picked up the finished books, and expressed my pleasure at the quality and price (a thousand copies at 71¢ each), Doyle responded, “It’s a nice book; what’s it about?”
When I got home, I realized that though we were close collaborators, our worlds were entirely different. Doyle’s job was solely to get each droplet of ink in the right place on each sheet — if he attended to the content on every page in every book, he’d go crazy. On my side of the counter, I was only interested on how those droplets conveyed my content.
I mailed copies out to friends and curators around the country, and a few more to offshore contacts. One went to Thomas Barrow at the University of New Mexico. Not long after, I received a note from Tom Johnson, on sabbatical at UNM, who had seen my book upside down across Barrow’s desk. He opened it up and thought to arrange a show of my work in his campus gallery at the College of Marin. We became good friends and stayed in touch.
A few years later, Tom had put together an intriguing series of his own color prints, which I arranged to exhibit in the gallery at Grossmont College. During that run, we invited him to visit for a photographer’s talk. He showed more work, beyond what was on the walls, projecting slides on our big auditorium screen. During questions afterward, a young woman raised her hand and inquired about the arc of Tom’s career. He answered thoughtfully, held a beat, then asked her, “And how long have you been a photographer?”
“Since just now.”