I’m the guy with the round head and ten toes in the swing. My Uncle Joe, whose profile is so nicely framed in the dark rectangle on the side of the porch, is trying to get my attention while my mom snaps the picture. What a wonderful contrast of textures is presented in this image, between the horizontal slats of the porch siding and the shrubbery behind my smooth baldie. Uncle Joe, however, doesn’t know that I’m already looking directly into the lens as revealed by zooming in on the image with my computer. Even then, with less than two years served on the planet, I seemed to be interested in the process of picture-taking. One of my first memories, sometime around when this image was made, took place upstairs, on the floor above where my grandmother was standing on the porch: I’m fooling around on the kitchen floor with my mother’s camera, the one that took this picture. I’m looking through the viewfinder, trying to figure out why when I look down through the top I can see out through the front of the camera. “Of course, silly,” I say to myself, “it’s a twin lens reflex with an F 3.5 anastigmatic coated 60mm lens and a waist-level viewfinder!” Thirty five years later I buy a Mamiya with similar specs and use it to shoot my first book. Tonight, forty-nine years after this picture was taken, my mom’s camera is here next to me on the shelf in the studio as I write.
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