Yesterday, rummaging through decades-old storage boxes, I came upon what has to be one of my very first photographs-for-the-sake-of-photography. My relationship with the young woman depicted evolved into an enduring forty-year friendship, through marriages and much other history for each of us, until her death in 2004. The print I found, in its scuffed and torn state, was scanned but itself represented a re-photograph of a small polaroid print that was made along with a number of others of my friend as part of a piece in which I had painted a roughly 2′ x 4′ full-figure silhouette of her as she stood on a beach. Then the silhouette was filled with a composite collage of portions of the many polaroids I shot, including the one below. While that piece is long gone from history (and perhaps thankfully so), it did mark an early conscious determination that photography was a medium I wanted to pursue.
(contemporary rescan of damaged 1970s print from re-photographed original 1964 polaroid print)