I hesitate about going too far down the nostalgia path but this phrase would come up often among us as we were younger: "let's go shooting!" As students, when we had a day with no classes and a deadline looming of having to show new work in class, we'd often join up to drive someplace or sometimes just drive, looking for things to photograph. I don't know that it ever occurred to us that this was so random as to practically insure failure but it was always definitely a good time. Our approach wasn't very systematic in those days. For me there weren't "series" or "projects" or specific places I would go to make pictures yet, there were just adventures. I would get going early, pick up a friend and off we'd go. 

Of course there were discoveries, we'd come across things and places that were magical. My friend Rob Gooblar found a whole parking lot full of Airstream trailers, their stainless steel curves irresistible in brilliant sunlight, I found an abandoned drive-in theatre, still there today,

on Rt 146 in Millbury, a junkyard in Cranston, gravel pits, abandoned buildings, Cape Cod off season, ski areas in May, developments under construction, over passes on highways, gas stations and small town main streets, fields of corn, Crane's Beach in a snow storm, the Berkshires and farther out, the Adirondacks, the reservoirs out Rt 6 from Providence headed towards Hartford, and on and on and on.

After we finished school this tradition of hooking up to go photograph continued. I also moved it into my teaching and throughout my whole career hauled students all over on field trips to make pictures. At Northeastern these were known as PFAYVA trips (Photographic Foundation for the Advancement of Young Visual Artists ), a members group co-created by Andrea Greitzer and Scott Merritt, both photo students. I did field trips at Harvard and New England School of Photography too. The PFAYVA trips at Northeastern were legendary. Membership wasn't hard: if you were in a photo class or you'd had a photo course you were a member. It grew in the 90's into real trips with weekends spent in Vinylhaven, an island in Maine, another in Savannah, Georgia and practically yearly trips to Martha's Vineyard and Block Island. One trip to the Vineyard was so large we took out the whole Youth Hostel early in the spring before they opened for the season.

My whole career I've photographed alone, sometimes for weeks or months on end, and sometimes with friends, students, former students, groups and just one or two. Then there is photographing with someone who's not a photographer. This can be harder and is usually not my favorite thing. I have also photographed with a guide and this can be wonderful as the guide knows the best places to go to. I advise this if you're in a new area and don't have unlimited time; best is a photo guide.

What would we talk about as two or three of us would take off for a day when we were grad students? Our teachers, the other students, and what photography we'd seen or wanted to see by this artist or that artist, of course. We'd always be pissed at what a teacher said or didn't say, whether they'd liked our work or were indifferent to it (this was the worst) or didn't like it, which actually conferred a brief notoriety followed by a "What the fuck do you suppose he meant when he said…..?"question amongst us as we drove by countless possibilities for pictures, things definitely not pictures and poor attention span meaning we could be going past photo Nirvana out there but we'd never know it as we were too busy talking talking talking. Great times and missed. Far better to have had the experiences than not to have had them. 

Van Morrison sings the lyric "take me back, way way back" over and over again in a hypnotic refrain that resonates like a chant.

A couple of posts ago I wrote one called Going Back about returning to California to make some pictures. Well, this new one uses "going back" to mean something a little different.

In this one we are going way way back, to when I was still a student and after finishing graduate school, roughly from about 1970-1975. What's that like, to go that far back into my past to look at the art I was making when in my early 20's? Amazing. This is the age some of you readers are now or even more amazing,  it means you weren't born yet! It's as though, on the one hand, these were made by someone else and on the other I can still smell the fixer on my hands, the sound of the solid thunk of the 2 1/4  SLR Rollei's shutter I shot with as I took a picture, see me cutting the mat board, trimming the prints and mounting this new work made over forty years ago in preparation for a class. 

 Looking at it now, it is characterized by being highly graphic, simplified and reduced. I don't think I was revolutionizing  photography very much. I also seemed to move in pretty close. It now has me wondering if I had figured out by then that I could arrange things in space with more air between them, to juxtapose content to make connections less physical and perhaps more figurative. Perhaps that came later.

I also learned that my pictures didn't change much after finishing school, at least not right away. It took me awhile to shake off the influences and experiences that had prevailed while studying and to find my own voice. 

In these early days I tried my hand at sequential photographs, as in these two:

although I didn't stumble into actual series work until 1981 with Nantucket. 

Finally, and there will be more of these early work posts taking us way way back, I have one from something very different, although the tools were the same:

I spent a couple of years with a 24 inch square frameless mirror with hooks stuck to the back of it in the trunk of my car. I would often hang it between a couple of trees with fishing line so that it faced behind me, or, as here, prop it up with a rock.

Whacked, I know. I got it in my head that I wanted to see, yes, forward as the camera always did,  but that I wanted some way to see in a different direction at the same time. I was frustrated by the tunnel vision that the camera produced. The pictures seldom worked out, but that didn't stop me from trying. 

So, now that it is really cold out (I am writing this in December in New England) and photographing outside is not so appealing I am printing work shot but unseen from the past year or so, including mining the five week residency in Iceland last summer for more work. You hope a residency will open some creative floodgates and the time in Iceland was major for me. But I also have been going back into my own deep past as a young artist when I was a student  in the early 70's. 

The result will be a few posts over the next month or so but this first one will key on something I noticed as I've been going through this earlier work. It looks different. Not better, but just different. This, of course is due to it being made with film and printed in a darkroom.

I want to reference this with one photograph, a print I found in a stack of my own work, unseen for years. In the midst of a group of 120mm square format mounted prints was a smaller 11 x 14 inch print by Susie Hacker, now Susan Hacker Stang. I don't know about if or when you were a student but we traded a lot in those days. Like someone's work you saw while printing in the lab? Wish you owned something pinned up in the crit session last week? Trade for it. A print for a print. We did it all the time.

We used to do that with Aaron (Siskind) too, one of the teachers in the grad program at RISD. "Hey, Aaron, can we trade prints?" Unbelievably, he'd say yes. This was early enough in his career that he wasn't that famous or sought after yet. That would come later. I would trade too over the years as a teacher. I felt that if a student had the stones to ask me I would usually trade with them. 

At any rate, I came across this print by Susan:

made in 1970 when we were both seniors at RISD. It's clearly 35mm and, if I knew the photographer back then, and where she was shooting I'd be willing to bet it was shot with a SLR,maybe a Nikon, a Canon or a Pentax K1000, or maybe even a range finder Leica as a few of us used them, with Kodak's Tri-X film which was rated at asa 400, and developed in D-76 for about 9 minutes, printed on Dupont Varigam or maybe Agfa's Brovira. It's a very good print, open in the  shadows with that lovely flat-yet-full look good printers get, with deep blacks where they belong below the counter and whites that are luminous without being harsh. We had good teachers in Paul Krot and Harry Callahan and Bert Beaver (yes, his real name) and we learned to print well. The picture pays clear homage to the work of Danny Lyon and Robert Frank in many ways, although Susan's is perhaps a little more empathetic in mood. 

I was able to reach Susan and asked her for permission to publish her photograph. She said yes and sent this along as well:

The story is that this past September I was in New York and found myself photographing on Times Square, where this photograph had been taken back in 1970. It was, I think, a Hebrew National Deli or Diner, something like that, full of chrome stools and tile walls, really classic. Because Times Square is now so built up and built upon, it is hard to picture what among the cluster of new buildings were the actual boundaries of old Times Square. I was trying to locate where this diner had once been and asked two policeman (who had grown up in New York) if they could pinpoint the spot. They remembered the establishment, but couldn't figure out exactly where the location would have been. I then noticed a bit of sidewalk 'architecture', a certain curvature, and realized that I had found the location. Funny thing, it was a building that currently, for whatever reason, had a Marilyn Monroe poster on the outside. Different, but still classic.

The print struck me as a strong advocate of all that is film. Funny that this was the look then as we had no way to compare it to anything else and knew nothing of the impending and momentous change that would be digital. For my own work I was never much of a fan of 35mm. It seemed too small, too restricting in print size, too grainy and too soft. But in the hands of someone like Susan, miracles were made. 

Sitting or standing at a counter, eating lunch in isolation from others doing the same thing, facing a dull stainless steel wall that failed to even reflect you back at yourself but looked like water with small waves rippling above the standing man's left hand. So cool.

Love photography and this use of it. 

Susan has had, and continues to have, a rich career as an artist and educator. You may see her work at: http: Susan Hacker Stang.

Thanks, Susan. I have no idea what you got from me in trade but I can only hope it was this good.