The Inventor…

Interior, Old Saybrook, Connecticut

My best friend Rob, was an amazing inventor. He was the one who showed me the process of photography for the first time when I was 16. I have vivid memories of processing film in his parents’ bathroom sink in their old beach side home, reveling in seeing the processed film emerge from the developing tank. Here in my hands were little visual witnesses that I created!

He had an innate talent for being able to take anything- I mean anything- apart, review its construction, possibly improve it, and then put it all back together again. He did this over and over.  His need to know simply fueled my own fire of curiosity.

 When I was 15, my father enrolled me in a subscription to an educational-based company called “Things of Science” that each month would send you a science kit in the mail. Each month the kit was about a new topic: weather, plants, etc. One month it was about light and photography. In it, you built your own pinhole camera. Its shutter was nothing more than a flap of cardboard you moved out of way and then replaced. Of course, this was too crude for Rob, so he reconfigured the camera, building me an adjustable shutter out of balsa wood and rubber bands- it worked perfectly.

 In my photography, I often think of him and his relentless need to find out, to understand and then go further. The image above is a testament to his energy and drive. Its not something I had done before, but I ventured into unchartered territory and arrived at something that stretched the possibilities with this sometimes noncompliant camera.