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Patchwork
Lyndon, Kansas
circa 1973

I believe this photo is of the side of one of the two barns on my grandparents’ farm. One of those barns (my favorite) burned down after a lightning strike and the other was dismantled by a barn wood collector when the farm was liquidated when my grandmother moved into town after the death of my grandfather in 1983. (This image is from a color slide scan that I converted to black and white.)

Sasreria Mendoza
Mazatlan, Mexico
1981

A selection from the many old slides I’ve been scanning lately.

Hold On Abe, Help is On the Way
Washington, DC
2009

Kiwi Crossing
Bozeman, Montana
2020

An intrepid kiwi crossing some rough terrain on the windowsill of our mountain house.

Frozen Motion
Bozeman, Montana
2020

The relative lack of snow here this winter has made it easy to get up to our mountain house once in a while. Last week the wind had blown what little snow there was off of a section of our pond revealing these bubbles trapped in their ascent from the pod bottom by the steadily forming ice on the surface.

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.

Bare Tree #67
Rural Virginia
2009

Bare Tree #66
Rural Virginia
2009

She Was Just Seventeen
Rural Virginia
2009

She’d be 28 now, unless she was born on January 1, then she’d be 29.

Ghost Rider
Bozeman, Montana
2020

I swear I can see guy wearing a cowboy hat in this horse’s shadow. Hopefully it’s the ghost of 2020 getting the heck out of Dodge. Don’t let the door hit you in the caboose on the way out! Happy New Year everyone!