Looking Back...

Fourteen year ago today, many long and hard hours, blood sweat tears and chemical fumes, and countless takeout boxes of Chinese food from Wok-n-Roll consumed in a campus darkroom were all coming to fruition in the form of my senior show at the downstairs gallery in the Art Department of the University of North Alabama.

Here's a look back at what my soon-to-be BFA graduate photographer self was up to in those years.

All shot on analog 35mm and medium-format film using a Ricoh KR-10 and Mamiya C3 camera, mostly fed with Ilford Pan-F+ 5O or Fuji Neopan 100 stock as I recall. Printed on our old Beseler enlargers on nice, lustrous, silver-rich, heavy-weighted Ilford fiber paper—which my student-photographer self had decided at the time was THE ONLY paper worth using in this world...it still may be; it does render some drop-dead gorgeous black and white prints. Finally matted using black-core, archival mats lovingly measured and hand cut by yours truly, framed in simple, black metal, and hung at the appropriate one-third down from the top of the frame lined up with sixty-inches up from the floor eye level.

A true labor of love that forever taught me that analog, classically composed, scientifically zone-system-metered, black and white negatives hand printed in a quiet, solitary darkroom, is and always shall be the pinnacle of photographic ecstasy for this photographer.

I hope you enjoy this little walk down memory lane.