n the Fall of 1969, my second year in photo school, I had been deeply involved in the intricacies of developing color negatives and printing paper prints. While I had shot lots of film and completed assignments, I had not felt engaged by the images. But in the last few weeks of December, I created images that became a major personal thread for the balance of the academic year.



Those images were culled for this book and arranged into two groups, the originals and the recovered:



Eighteen images are from the original exhibitions.



Sixteen images appear that were never printed or exhibited. Of these, six are negatives that had serious defects, such as scratches or other physical damage. They were recovered using Photoshop.



The other ten images, now labeled “The Organics,” had been exposed using 4x5 transparency film. I had no suitable options in 1970 to print these images. Photoshop and the digital workflow presented the solution.



Original titles accompany most of the exhibition images in this book, while I choose not to title the recovered images. I will not pretend I can go back and reconstruct my perceptions of forty years ago.