Gobbling and Goofing

The camera is starting to find moments of form and feeling. It's aiming everywhere, all the time. Sun, snow, moon or noon, the new Pentax is getting a workout. There is little sense yet of an artistic stance or mission. Life is simply appearing through the viewfinder.

The rain, the moon, and anything in my path. 

Al Fuchs, Professor of Psychology, a course I never took. After flunking all courses in my first freshman semester, I made Dean's List after a year of becoming a working parent and stayed there as long as I was at Bowdoin.




In the 60s there was downhill skiing at Sky Hi in Topsham. Hard to imagine in this warming century, but it was a busy place.

This post wanders because so did my eye in early 1965. I was having fun. Don Beckwith, with whom I wrote our hit record, came by for a photo session.

Don and Lorel do their own cigarette ad. This sort of fun was silly and helped sharpen my lighting skills. But things got a bit stranger when it got toward Halloween with our neighbors. Across the street, at the AWG Fraternity of the NASB boys, Ted Schnieder took me out to the graveyard to get in the mood. Ted was a constant cutup, later an award-winning editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Here he's just a Navy guy in the middle of a college.

I joined in on the fun. Halloween was a major holiday for the AWG boys. Their tradition was "trick or drink." and they did plenty of both. Drinking was the party paradigm. No one knew any different, except for a few beatniks. One of these lived in the adjoining apartment. Pat O'Haverty was the first real beatnik we met. She grew ganja in the back yard at a time when people believed it was just an "Isreali herb," and told us about her morning glory seed concoctions. She never offered us anything, but in her outrageous dramatic behavior showed us what weirdness could be like.









These images are one of the many discoveries in this journey through celluloid. After 45 years, Pat O'Haverty still makes a strong impression. See how wide her pupils are.

The lighting appears to be the old Smith-Victor kit. Without tutoring, I was able to make it work. Formal studio training would not come for several years yet.

We'd never seen anyone do the lotus position or did we have much idea about what it meant. Pat was not a person to instruct; her style was to dramatize. She and her husband would sometimes fight with their cars in the driveway, bumping them into each other while we watched from the window.

In the midst of her squabbles and scenes, Pat did not seem to us a model of enlightenment, so her psychedelic prescriptions were of little interest. It would take a far different kind of person to lead us over that divide two years later.

There was one other reference I had heard to psychedelics, and that was Biology Prof. Gustafson. who mentioned the "interesting experiments" being done with "LSG," which a student corrected to LSD. First time I ever heard of it, right there in the classroom.

So here this goofy, wandering post ends. Pat O'Haverty and Professor Gustafson, the first heralds of the revolutions to come. We are yet innocent, still tied to our childhood community and its customs. The camera is seeking what it can find, but as yet no theme, project or cause has emerged.















One must be mature to see those distant times in their full shining light. Here are the sixties in their early oblivion, dancing to Wilson Pickett, staging comedy, drinking Bud. Barely out of our teens, we thought we knew so much and had so much to learn. Not every day was a great day at the car wash, but times were good. We were in college. Little Brad was the center of attention, child of a thousand uncles.

We had thousands of miles to travel.

Intimations and Yearnings

We came to Brunswick in the winter. This is where we lived for three years. Nothing much more than what you see. Bed on right. Tiny bathroom off to left and Brad's room beyond. Doorway in photo leads to tiny kitchen. The woman is one of Tom's girlfriends. I probably took this shot to test out the strobe unit, but now it captures many details of this period.

After the usual family and academic obligations, my top priority was to set up for photography. Bowdoin in 1965 had no active camera club, no course in photography, no studio and no darkroom. The latter was essential, and it took my friend Tom Brown and I a bit of running around until we found a dank spot in the basement of Adams Hall. We set the lab up with sink, safelights and homemade PVC film tanks.

I started with the old Rollieflex. Bob Duncan considered the 120 format the smallest format a pro should use. He often shot his group shots with a Graphic Press 4x5, so that the negatives would be "sharp as a three-peckered billy goat." These are some of my first images coming back from New Hampshire.

Tom Brown was my ally, compatriot and lens brother as we cleared out a bit of space for photography at Bowdoin. More than hardware, we were also making space in our heads for new influences. With no formal course to guide  us, we dove into Steigltiz, Weston, Adams, Callahan, Siskind, White and many more photographers. With the speed only college sophomores can achieve, we became instant  experts in the fine art of photography.

Reconsidering Duncan's admonition, I got myself a 35mm Pentax and was amazed at the sharpness one could get with that tiny negative. In this early test shot I've got the pipe I smoked from the time I quit cigarettes in 1964 after the Surgeon General Report until I took them up again along with grass in the later phases of the 60s. Don't worry. I gave up tobacco for good in 1972.



































Those were eager days. I would go into blizzards at night with the Pentax wrapped in a plastic bag. The camera went everywhere as I aimed indiscriminately at anything or person of interest. My eye was drawn always to abstract form, especially in its natural mode. From the very first. my work divided itself between a personal search for form and a social interest in people.

The great awakening came in the person of Professor Tom Cornell. Unable to take a course in photography, I signed up for Studio Art 101. The professor assured me that, despite his total unfamiliarity with photography, he would assist me in any medium. I was soon to learn that his teaching sometimes appeared to have little to do with art at all.

In 1965, Tom Cornell was a wunderkind of the art world. having stunned it with his Monkey Book and etchings of Frederick Douglas. More artist than academician, Tom took a bohemian stance before his class of budding lawyers, stockbrokers and economists. He took on the task of challenging every comforting suburban, Republican, Episcopalian belief we had. Today it seems he merely presented the beatnik liturgy, from Zen to Marx. His suggested readings came from John Burroughs and Alan Watts.

What may have been intended as invigorating salt to his students came through to my unformed fetus of rebellion as nectar of the gods. Suddenly, I found whole new ways to construct the universe. God was no longer even a joke; the Tao, Yin and Yang, Satori, Nirvana, Enlightenment... Tom went far beyond the old models I knew.
Hadn't I seen any of this in the coffeehouses of Cambridge back in 1959? Reading the history of those times, I can see that this knowledge was seething around our little preppie world. But all we cared for was the music, sex, cars and alcohol, on the parents' model. Little did we suspect the reason for Kweskin Jug Band bassist Fritz Richmond's little blue glasses. Hardly could we imagine we'd be casting the I Ching within a few years. It up to Bowdoin College and Tom Cornell to bring this dissident, beatnik, artsy world into focus. In rich irony, my parents paid for me to become a beatnik and find out about drugs.

Cannabis would not happen for two years yet in the sheltered world of Brunswick. In 1965, the very concept of a Zen reality was a mind-blower. So was the blissful embrace with nature as described by John Burroughs, and the light in Vermeer, ancestor of the chiaroscuro I saw through my viewfinder and in my prints.

Tom lived on the same block, his studio just a few steps from our back yard. In photo sessions for the Alumni magazine, casual encounters and the intensity of my first exposure to free thinking, we became friends. This year (2010) we are making an incredibleMAINE show (see link) about Tom's art.

Many things were happening at once. Captivated by Weston's Daybooks and his uncompromising stance, not to mention the beauty of his severe 8 x 10 contact prints, I found myself a used Maine State Police 8 x 10 view camera, complete with tripod, case and a bunch of large, heavy film holders. The rig, loaded with film, dark cloth, exposure meter, notebook and lunch must have weighed forty pounds. Undeterred and possessed with the strength of youth, I hauled that monster out to the beach and everywhere else. At present, my I cannot scan the negatives, but I hope to rediscover this work as we go along.

As artistic sophistication kicked in, so the clothing got kicked off and I began to see the model as pure form. The nude series continued through the 60s and ended with the divorce in the early 70s. Never again would I find a model able to devote the time nor have the ability. Lorel was also model to a number of other artists.

Drawn to the formalism of nature and the nude, I also found delight in human faces and situations. Though one of all-male Bowdoin's few married students, I retained connections to the TD house and became active in documenting campus life for the yearbook and later the alumni magazine.

Living off campus created ties with the community. Across the street lived a bunch of Navy photographers from Brunswick Naval Air Station, who developed film of Russian subs in the large base that dominates the eastern side of the town. These were the guys who didn't get to go to a fancy liberal arts college, but they still knew how to have a good time.

Rich is just faking his anxiety here, but at his notary-office wedding, it's for real behind the brave smile.

During the summer I discovered that actors will pay for pictures of themselves. So I hung out at the Summer Music Theater and did a brisk business.

John Cole, Editor of the weekly Brunswick Record, gave me my first publication credit, soon followed by Peter Cox at the daily Bath Times. They kept me busy with local stories.

The camera was always aimed at the family. This blog, while a personal story, is not a family album. The family of an artist is rarely immune from being involved in the work, and mine was no exception. The images are selected for inclusion here because they are part of my artistic development. This is not about family history except as it inevitably intertwines with the art.

 A lot of irons in the fire? I was insatiable.