While I was in Maine I went through a box of all my old photos. In it were all the prints and negatives from photos I took in the 1970s when I lived in Virginia, and in the 1980's from high school and college photo classes.
I found all the mounted prints from 3 of the photo classes I took while at Harvard. My mom is going to mail the boxes to me in Kodiak so eventually I will get them all properly scanned. But in the meanwhile I used my camera to just take pictures of all the prints in case the box gets lost in transit.
Originally all the prints were toned and carefully exposed and printed, and a lot of this is lost in the 'pictures of pictures'. My camera did a poor job catching the subtle colors from the toning and catching the exposures (I am noticing that there is not a true white in my digitised versions). But they are still pretty cool.
I did mostly street photography capturing street scenes with people I did not know in them. I did a final project of what it was like in Boston Logan and I remember going there to spend the night in the terminals and take pictures. I'll post some of those in the future. I also had a project documenting my step father George, and another of just people on the streets. I found 4 final projects so maybe I took 4 and not 3 classes?
The photos in this post are from the last photo class I took while at Harvard. It was an independent study photo class project with Elsa Dorfman (click here for her wiki page). She is famous for her HUGE polaroid posed family photos. I used to meet with her one on one at her house near my dorm. I remember she had huge nude pictures on the wall of famous people like Allan Ginsburg and Bob Dylan. And she told me some amazing stories.
Anyway, early on we decided that rather than taking my usual street photography pictures with people in them that I would concentrate on architecture and urban landscapes. I started out with just doorways, and moved on to back alleys and buildings. I see that there is a person in the top photo too, but in general I kept people out of the photos entirely. Elsa and me both generally like people in our photos so it was kind of a challenge to just do 'urban landscapes'.
We'd meet and drink tea and decide which pictures worked and which did not. At the end I carefully printed up a bunch of them and toned and printed them. They actually got put on the wall of my dorm, Mather House, as sort of a mini exhibition. Below are a few of the ones from the box in Maine. I am only posting the ones I still like today!
Patrick
