part 1

What I would be without photography, I am not sure- be it better or worse than the person I now am. But I do know that the lifestyle that I both chose and was born into has saturated my existence, a marriage that I will never be able to turn my back on, for it is memories and seeing that is a cornerstone of my living, colors so vivid they can be seen from many years away.

The first color in my memory is a pale blue of fourteen: the color of my room, the color that my first print was framed with, my father's eyes, the dusty color of the sky behind school bus windows. It was the walls my personality was kept in- confidence kept too long wilts into painful shyness.

And for a while, I closed my eyes and didn't see at all. And when I opened my eyes, the world was crimson. I took photography as my own, tied its mask around my face to hide shyness, and became the grown up I would never be. I watched the people around me live their lives, or when I became tired of that, wrapped myself in the darkroom. Photography was never something to brag about, the same way you would never brag about your skin or your way of walking, it was always just there.

At the end, when the color started running and melting into a more concrete color of orange, I accepted the fact that I should be social. I spent my time with a writer and two musicians, all who brought new dimension to both my photography and social aptitude. I fell in love with the Bruch Concerto for Violin, and simultaneously fell in love with the idea of color in music- an idea that began to run over into other aspects of my life. But this happy light of friendship was always that of twilight, for at the end of that summer, we all left for college. But the color stayed the same, for again I closed my eyes for many months, making photography but a chore, raking the assignments into piles instead of treasuring every opportunity to make other pictures.

But I saw again, on the eve of a life heaped with late night skateboards, ice cream, laughter, seven o clock light, bike rides, and talking about making photographs- the latter, a thing I had never had the opportunity to do before outside the classroom, talking about the image itself and the psychology behind it. And the world became a yellow- pale, the color of sunshine filtered through windows.

------------------end of part 1-----------------------------------------------------