History Lesson

I've always been fascinated with photos. I remember as a small child, on the occasion that I got to handle my mother's 125, and the rarer occasion that I'd get to press the shutter, I would then stare at the produced prints, marveling that *I* had captured this instant, even if that instant was an off kilter view of a sofa with no one on it. I got my first camera when I was thirteen, a Kodamatic instant camera, and I had great fun with it until a lawsuit from Polaroid stopped production of the film. When I was fifteen, my parents got me a replacement, a Canon Snappy 35mm, and I went crazy with it. I spent all my allowance on film and film development, and I took hundreds and hundreds of pictures of everyone in my family, of trees, clouds that I liked, anything I thought noteworthy. The one thing I didn't photograph much was me. Mostly, I guess, because I was in that awkward phase in which it was pretty much guaranteed I'd hate anything I took anyway, but also quite possibly due to limitations of the camera itself.

In the fall of '96, I bought myself a Connectix Quickcam, the first webcam, which could only do black and white, and I quickly learned that the camera was really only good for taking self-portraits. And so I did, again, by the hundreds. It served as a surprising tool in the exploration of my sexuality, but that's a story for a different post. I don't know that these early photographs hold up at all, but as I was reviewing them tonight I saw the blueprint for pretty much everything I've done since. They're probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, because they tell a story, the story of the journey of the last half of my 20s, and despite all the time that's passed, I can relive the taking of almost all of these pictures.

The first set were taken in my bedroom, the bedroom where I grew up, in Beacon, NY, between 11/96 and 11/97. One was taken in the bathroom there.



The next set were done in Philadelphia, in the first of three rooms that I claimed as my office. One of these, possibly the most disturbing of all of them, I did in the abandoned dentist's office across the street which, for a while, I also called my office. These were shot between 11/97 and I'd guess 5/00.



The next group were done in the other room in Philadelphia that I used as an office, between 5/00 and 9/01:

And finally, my apartment in Brooklyn. I lived there from 9/01 to 9/02, but I'm pretty sure these were shot in Dec '01 or Jan '02. A little over a year later I'd acquire my first *real* digital camera, and everything would change.