Judy Dater, Redux

Over the past few weeks, I have been communicating with Jim Friedman, a then-Boston photographer I met in a 1973 workshop with Ansel Adams. We continued to correspond and exchange prints for a year or two following the workshop, but gradually lost contact.

Then last fall I came upon some old unprinted negatives from that workshop, scanned them and sent the image files off to Jim, whose email address I discovered through the wonders of Google. He confirmed that he was indeed the subject in those photos and we have been communicating ever since, often reminiscing about people in photography we both knew or had been influenced by back in the 70s and since. One such person was Judy Dater, a most wonderful photographer who was then introducing us to large-format Polaroid. A few days ago, I sent Jim a link to an antithetical 35mm portrait I made of Judy at the time (and told him of my questionable rebellious approach in that period of my photographic life whereby I was prefocusing at a more or less fixed setting with a wide-ish lens, guessing at exposures with my meterless Nikon F, and pulling dense, contrasty prints out of negatives shot in “impossible” light). Today, I discovered yet another Judy Dater image from 1973, and Jim has confirmed, as I suspected, that he indeed in the frame, but obscured by Judy’s hand holding a Polaroid print. Herewith:

(Incidentally, I now know that Jim went on to a richly creative and brilliantly successful career as photographer and educator — including working as an assistant to Imogen Cunningham. See more of my pictures of the younger Jim and visit his site at http://www.jamesfriedmanphotographer.com.)

P.S. Don’t forget to visit the incredible site at judydater.com!


UPDATE 2/19/2019:  Judy responds to this post, saying “Hi Lawrence.  Fun to see that very much younger me.  A blast from the past. Thanks for sharing.”

 

 

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