| He didn’t have any kids, actually. Didn’t live long enough. But he was a teacher, and a teacher has kids whether he wants them or not, and usually they do. This one did. |
| David was seven years older than his wife, Nancy, my high school classmate. I like to say that they were married about ten minutes after high school graduation. A small group had formed around Nancy by the end of our senior year, and we got David for free. It was just in time. |
| That time was 1965, and the world was getting way weird. Our parents—rooted firmly in their WWII history—weren’t much help at this confusing time, and we looked closer to our age for some guidance, even though we wouldn’t have said it that way. Then. |
| David was so many things, it was hard for any one of us to follow all his avocations. He had finished college as we began ours, and started teaching soon after. But at the same time he grew grapes, raised cattle, worked in a grocery store (my dad’s), wrote poetry, and was an excellent jazz musician. It just wasn’t fair—he wasn’t even very tall. |
| I’ve taken pictures of just about everything in my life, since I was about 12 years old, although that tendency has certainly waxed and waned throughout the years. My first picture of David was at a birthday party for Ross, one of the gang. I caught him and Nancy in a most unromantic clinch. Good thing that one disappeared. But my favorites were taken when I drove out with Dave to feed the cattle some vegetable Dave had scored somewhere. After we unloaded the green stuff, I got the idea to have Dave jump off the truck bed as if he were floating in the air. Of course, he cooperated fully, and the result was worthy of Mary Poppins. Only, Dave was real. |
| One summer—almost certainly the summer of 1967, Dave and his jazz group (Jim Molinari—his brother—and Mick, the drummer) played at the hot spot in Santa Cruz, California in those days—The Catalyst. I photographed the two sessions and, probably, the results gave Dave an idea: “Why don’t you photograph my school, and we can do some kind of coffee table book where I write some poems to accompany the pictures?” Sure, I undoubtedly said, Why not. |
| I see that the first pictures were taken in January 1968, and the last datable were from April of that year, my junior year at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was majoring in philosophy, so I had plenty of time for other things. |
| I know that I never printed more than a couple of the photographs (400+), and although I have a set of contact sheets I’m not sure they’re from that period. In other words, nothing ever came of the project. I have no actual memory of even being at the school (well, one or two), so I don’t recall anything we might have ever said about what I’d done there. After a busy summer, I moved onto campus, sold my car, and lived a rather secluded life. I must have seen David and Nancy over those months, but I joined the Air Force after graduation, and was out of the area until my marriage in June 1970. David and Nancy attended that—I remember them stopping by the reception at my folks’ place the next day, excited about driving to Canada for a vacation—and then David was killed in an auto accident on the way home. |
| I’ve known of these pictures ever since I took them, but life had much more going on for me in all those days that I found more interesting than printing and somehow arranging these pictures in some kind of meaningful way. |
| But as life has changed, so has technology. A few months ago, I started seriously “digitizing my life,” and after a month or so reached 1968 (haven’t gotten much past that point!). Time to finally bring out that coffee table book. |
Going through the collection
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| I recall no mission for that project. I wasn’t trying to show any particular thing. I just wanted to react to what I was seeing, which was the way I’d been taking pictures until then (and for the next 35 years). I knew there were some “good enough” pictures in the collection—they’ll usually jump out at you no matter who took them, but I didn’t know whether there were “enough,” whatever that might mean. |
| It was when I was trying to make sense of some shots of what appeared to be a 5th grade riot that I noticed something I’d not remembered: many of the pictures were part of some series or other. In other words, although I’d presumed some kind of collection of traditional photographs—it’s either good or it isn’t, in reality many pictures took on a significance totally absent when looking at them individually. They did this by being part of a group. The 5th grade riot was really a science demonstration, and when I saw that, and when I arranged the pictures in chronological order, the set took on an interest for me that, simply put, they did not warrant as individual photographs. |
| Henri Cartier-Bresson—the photographer who I like to think has most affected my own efforts—once described the “decisive moment” as the magical instant when a photograph is just right. Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Or, there can be. When you’ve seen a set of pictures that belong together, you’ve seen something more than when you look at them in isolation. |
Showing the pictures
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| Discovering the existence of sets ruined my “coffee table book” approach. Besides, I’ve never intended to physically publish them. You’re looking at my compromise. To make viewing them easier on the widest variety of people, I’ve organized them in the following manner. |
| First, there is the set of individual photographs that Dave and I might have selected for a book. There are about 50 of these. Only this set is “required” to say you’ve seen the pictures. Optionally, you can push the Comment button, to see what nonsense I might have thought worth writing about each picture. |
| Then, I developed a way of seeing the picture sequences with minimum effort on your part. That’s an optional trip. |
| And, finally, I offer the remainder of the collection organized in the categories that came to me as I worked with them: The Really Young (kindergarten, first grade), the Young (5th grade’s in here somewhere), and the Not As Young (mostly, this is David’s 8th grade English classes). A couple bonuses are Band, Outdoor, and Teacher photographs—too few of the latter, but it’s too late to go back. |
| I don’t even know where the school was. [Nancy tells me it was in Capitola, which is just south of Santa Cruz, California] Its name appears nowhere, although the mascot was Viking. Everyone was absolutely wonderfully cooperative with this project. Despite my having no memory of taking these pictures, that fact is evident from looking at them. I’m so, so sorry that those who appear in these photographs didn’t get to see themselves at the time. But maybe you’re one of them. It’s never too late, this or that wag is fond of saying. We’ll see... |
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