12/2/2023 0 Comments Darkroom sinks![]() My stereo was always on (loud) and 1980s music was a constant presence in my life. My bedroom was tucked up in the attic where I had space to spread out with my various pet birds, my camera, and my music collection. ![]() We lived in an old Tudor house perched on a hill overlooking a hidden pond in Chappaqua, NY, an enclave of grassy and woodsy suburbs just north of New York City. I also scored 3 or 4 of those new-fangled Kodak Disc cameras that were all the rage in 1984 too! My AE-1 accompanied me everywhere I went and I burned through rolls of black and white film (usually Kodak Tri-X 400) and photo paper (usually Ilford 100), mowing neighborhood lawns to fund my passion. I received an upgrade for my Bar Mitzvah a few years later when I was gifted a Canon AE-1. They bought me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 100 at Disney World in 1977. My parents would often compete with each other to who took the best vacation photos, as delivered by the mailman a few weeks after we got home. Yet, within its walls lay a world of magic, a world where the right combination of chemicals, temperature, time, and agitation would transform the abstract into the tangible. Swayne was the gatekeeper of the darkroom, a mysterious space hidden behind a closet door in the hallway. My passion for capturing time was fostered by the school’s full-time photography department, which was led by the revered Glenn Swayne. I snapped them all: the teachers, the well-groomed preppies, the athletic jocks, the cerebral geeks, the free-spirited burners, the smokers, the eclectic new wavers, and even the hardworking lunch ladies. My role as the photographer for the school yearbook was demanding, but also very rewarding, as I captured the individuality of our campus and senior class through portraits that defied the conventional.
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