On the same 1964 trip as the last few posts, my parents stopped in San Francisco briefly (almost 9 years too late for the first reading of Ginsburg’s Howl). You can read about the story of these Kodachrome slides here.
Hope you’ve been noticing how many VW Beetles there have been in all these shots, stretching back to the mid-1950s…
Another of my father’s Kodachrome slides from 1964 (see original post here). Reno, back when it really was little.
Continuing with these Kodachrome slides my father shot in 1964 (see story here), we have 4 mountain views from the trip to Yosemite.
And now, for the next handful of posts, we return to my father’s Kodachrome slides, mostly from 1964 and the American West (see the original post about these slides here). That summer, while my brother and I remained with our grandparents in Sacramento, my parents and uncle buggered off to San Francisco, Reno and Yosemite National Park.
Another of my father’s Kodachrome slides in New York (read about the history of these here). This one was taken in Central Park between 1962 and ’64. That’s me coming down the hill on the sled behind what is now called the Diana Ross Playground (and was just the playground when I was little).
This one’s the first in a series of shots of some interesting street theater. This was kind of a precursor of today’s flash mobs. It was far less organized, more spontaneous and improvised and tended to contain a heady mix of anti-establishment satire, political protest and pop-culch references. We really felt like we were part of a movement that would change the world.
I’ll be travelling for the next several days so I’ll post some old images from the late ’60s and early ’70s in New York. In those days I headed out most weekends to Central Park carrying either my Voigtländer Vito C or, by 1970, my Minolta srT101 and headed for the Bethesda Fountain with my photographic partner and oldest friend, Woyman Ju.
In one corner of the fountain plaza a bunch of photographers used to hang out and we tried to pick up all kinds of lore from them. I bought my first enlarger from one of those guys and when I got my SLR he quickly got a woman in the area to pose for us (and pull up her skirt for the camera as well). At this period there were always crowds of kids with guitars, agitprop street theater, political demonstrations, and marijuana being passed around freely.
Unfortunately, my photographic skills were appalling. I rarely got focus on what I wanted, composed haphazardly and seldom aligned my metering needles for a decent exposure. Over the next few days I’ll share a handful of the images I was able to salvage from the wreckage of my photographic apprenticeship.
