201 | Giant Photo

2013 | India Street, San Diego

I always enjoyed visiting Alfred Pagano in his shop; it was full of interesting pictures, and he delivered the best work to all of his clients. The selections hanging everywhere were different every time. Since this picture was made, Alfred moved the shop inland and then recently passed it along to new owners after a long career of service to imagemakers.

I hope that Alfred will take well-deserved time to look into his own archive now, which has been growing in spite of his long commitment to printing other people’s work. Interesting photographs were already piling up when I first met him in 1973.

199 | Japan

2002

Eighty years after the terrible events and the following animosities, I have the deepest appreciation for the the cultural grace and hospitality of the Japanese people. They’re infectious.

198 | Work in Progress

2003 | Grapevine, California

My late colleague Thomas Johnson, a true Northern-Californian, often used to say, “Southern California will be a nice place, if they ever get it finished.”

197 | Mis-Apprehended

2021 | Point Reyes Station, California

I made a picture much like this one fifty-three years ago on a windy day near Half Moon Bay. My friend Rex and I were hunched over my Bronica, trying to load roll film into its rather technical magazine. We were busted by a local sheriff (Rex had longish hair, and it was 1968, so we were suspected to be addicts shooting each other up.)

This would not be the only time we were ‘arrested’ for walking around with our cameras; after we were interrogated by an 18-year-old MP, trying to look older and braver than us, on the abandoned Camp Elliott base, Rex said that he would not go anywhere with me again if we had our cameras along.

I made a print of that one, and it ended up on the wall of Jef Raskin’s faculty office in a repurposed Quonset hut on the repurposed Camp Matthews base, where he taught in the UCSD Music Department along with a computer graphics course for artists.

The noted critic Barbara Rose was visiting the campus to give some talks for the Visual Arts Department, and I was introduced to her in Jef’s office. She took a look at my picture and said, “You should go to L.A.” I was in my first year of graduate study then, and CalArts would open that fall, having drafted my department chair Paul Brach to head Art, along with the fine painter Miriam Shapiro, and my filmmaking advisor John Baldessari, so I went.

At CalArts, the move paid off – I met Ben Lifson and was struck by his deep commitment to words, paintings, and photographs.

This recent picture, more assertively juggling the same kind of elements as the old one from Half Moon Bay, somehow brings that entire story back to me.

196 | Truer Perspective

2000 | San Diego

…is what I am grateful for today – a slow but steady awakening.

Some years ago, a friend gave me a bushel of rocks from his gravel bar along a fine river in Oregon. I piled them into my car, and when I finally got to San Diego, the heavier ones had jostled this one into two pieces. I was disappointed for a short time, but I went to work bulding a planter, set a fine little gingko in place, and then put the fractured rock where it might do some good.

It was my astute friend Rick who suggested that it might have a greater value un-unified.

195 | Avalon

2006 | Avalon, Santa Catalina Island

It’s quiet in the little town of Avalon; most people are on the beach, or in or on the water. But there’s always something happening along the eminently walkable streets.

193 | “Knuckle Mountain”

2021 | View East to Black Mountain, Marin County, California

I learned to swim here as a child, as did my son just 34 years ago, and we both have sailed here since our respective childhoods. I took up rowing last year, for many remarkably good reasons, and last week he made his own debut in a single scull.

For me, rowing is entirely different from the practice of photography, which is all visual and intuitive. Rowing is all kinesthetic and counterintuitive. I do my best work in both activities when I can set my mind deep into the background.