Monday, June 21, 2010 first day of summer and my dad’s birthday

This afternoon Susan and I visited with the Lill's. I biked down. On the return trip I passed many young teenagers on skateboards going along the bike path. I discovered they were headed to the rink in Lincoln Park just north of Lawrence Ave. in celebration of National Skateboard day. There was a mob of the dedicated groupies there along with some participants in a competition that I grabbed some shots. Very difficult since although the Canon S90 is a fabulous camera it is not intended for this sort of thing. It has a shutter lag that makes it impossible to shoot a decisive moment. Even many DSLRs have shutter lags. In addition, although I have a 8GB class 6 SDHC card, it is not very fast at buffering, so when I shot multiple sequence shots, they all missed. I finally pushed the shutter ahead of the peak moment and managed to capture a few frames that hit the action right on. All the time avoiding having the skater land on me, which happened almost three times anyway – and that doesn’t count the skateboard!

Photograms and my vision of so called "photography."

I am a graduate of the Institute of Design in Chicago which Moholy established upon his coming to the USA after the closing of the Bauhaus in Germany. Unfortunately he had passed on by the time I arrived. I studied with photographers Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind as well as very fine graphic designers and graphic artists along with numerous visiting greats.

My apartment was around the corner from where Moholy originally lived in a charming Victorian three flat on Lakeview Avenue and Deming Place, in Lincoln Park. But, by that time, that too was gone, raised for a hi-rise. Only a plaque remains.

Moholy was a great inspiration to my thought process and vision.

I made photograms every year I studied there, finally realizing that photography does not need an object involved in its creation since, in it pure execution, photography only requires a source of radiating energy effecting a surface sensitized to that type of energy.

With that realization I began exploring sources of light and used them to expose colored 8x10 inch paper and later 8x10 Ektachome in 1961, 62 and 63.

In the end, I finally discovered sources of pure exploding light that I did on the above sizes of paper and film. I named these "dynagrams" (C).

I also coated my face with paper developer and pressed my face against fogged 4x5 and 8x10 sheet film for a minute or two and then ran the film through hypo - fixer. I named these "epigrams." (C)

I also explored other alternative energies such as heat (thermofax), x-ray and others.