January 4, 2021

Spent Beauty #47
Wichita, Kansas
1974

I just finished going through all my old slides from back before I switched to digital photography. (That’s all of them unless I find another stash somewhere.) I tossed a whole lot of them and scanned the rest. After the cull, there were about 1200 that I scanned. At about 3 minutes a slide, that’s about 60 hours of scanner time. I spent about that same amount of time I imagine sorting them, labeling them etc.

The bulk of the photos are just records of the past–people I’ve know, places I’ve been. But a number of them are also results of my early attempts at using photography for artistic expression. I was not new to this effort when I was shooting slides as I had been working with black and white film for probably six years or so before I switched to color slides. Anyway it’s a fun exercise to look at those early attempts at art photography and compare them to what I do now. There have certainly been some obvious changes in my photographic style and skill over the years (as evidenced by the number of “artsy” photos from back then that I simply threw out), but there is a small set of them I’m still quite happy with. This is one of them, taken on a winter day in a park in Wichita.