Anonymity, Dark and Bright

I’ve led a fairly tame life, at least in terms of erotic encounters. In the “play party” period of my second adolescence I may not have known much about some of the people I met, but I always knew that they were known to other people that I did know well. And I always knew that I had to drive home alone at night.

As far as my writing goes, the excerpt below is the closest I’ve come to anonymous characters in a story, and that might be stretching the point. But the characters don’t exchange names, and they meet in an isolated wilderness setting, so maybe that counts after all. One is there for the fishing, and the other is there as a photographer obsessed with the “ephemeral art” of nature.

This is from one of my earliest attempts at erotica. I think it was my third time in a volume of the Best Lesbian Erotica series, which would make it 2001. I included it in the first collection of my own work, A Ride to Remember, from Lethe Press, in 2011, which seems a very long time ago, so it’s been kind of fun to revisit it.
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Of Dark and Bright
                                                                     
Sacchi Green

     How has it ever come to this? What am I doing here? The opening of my show, and I'm lurking high on a shadowed stairway looking down at the bright rectangles on the gallery walls, at my photographs, my visions, my studies in light and dark. And my whole bone-shaking desire is to step back into that sun and shadow, that scintillation of sky mirrored on rippling water, that light as it strikes so harshly even the smoothest of stream-worn granite, but flows like a lingering touch over the angles of your body.
     What I'm doing here is watching for you. Without any reason to think you will come, though you recognized the name of the gallery when I mentioned so casually that I sometimes show here. Or any idea of what I will do, if you do come. So much for the wisdom of age.
     Nature is playing tricks on me. Not that I'm complaining; a second adolescence is a torment I'm in no hurry to escape, and my body still gets me wherever I want to go. But where does this surge of raging hungers fit into life's cycle? Where's the archetypal progression from maiden to mother to crone? I've made it almost through the first two, not without joys, not without scars, not without clawing at the boundaries. You'd think some wisdom would have been gained, in all that time; but not enough to ease me through this turmoil. Or even through the next few hours. How will I bear it if you don't come? How will I bear it if you do?
           
     The first time you saw me, you retreated.
     I should have been glad. These few days to myself had been hard enough to pry from a life of too many entanglements. No matter how graceful the undulation of your line out over the stream, how elegantly precise the settling of your lure onto the water, barely creasing the tension of its silvered surface, you were an intrusion. Good fly fishing form, skilled hands, nice balance, but--go away, kid. You bother me.
     I watched, unseen, as you moved upstream, searching out the deepest pools among the rocks. No closer, I thought. Go back. Even at a distance, even before I understood, I was reluctant to let your serene concentration be rippled by a chance encounter.  
     My elkhound Raksha tensed on the opposite shore, gray fur blending imperceptibly into the rocks and driftwood. A low growl rumbled in her chest, a prelude to whatever menace might be required.
     I signaled with my eyes to be still, since my hands were occupied with balancing stone on stone, building structures to be photographed--some as cover art for a book set on a distant planet, some as a sequential study of "ephemeral art" showing the effects over time of wind and water and ice, and some for my insatiable obsession with aspects of light and dark. I should have wondered at how quickly she subsided, but I had forgotten, for the moment, that her savagery was reserved for unknown men.
     Then the trout struck. Your lean, intense face transformed with joy--and I knew. I watched you play the fish, draw it carefully, inexorably toward you, stoop to deftly grasp and then release your prize. The lines of your body revealed what the multi-pocketed fishing vest, the baseball cap over close-cropped hair, had at first concealed. But I already knew.
     The stream swirling past my hips might as well have rammed a log into my crotch. A hunger raw as pain, irrational as the jerk of a hammered knee, lurched deep and low inside me. I cursed at my old-enough-to-know-better self; and in that moment of distraction my balance wavered.
     One stone shifted, then another. I tried to restore the equilibrium of my construction, but the pebbles in the streambed turned under my feet. I staggered, and stones from the disintegrating tower bruised me on their way to the bottom of the river.
     You heard the avalanche of rocks and looked up. In a calmer moment I might have enjoyed your expression as your gaze traveled over the surreal array of stone circles and pillars, the camera and tripod on the shore, and Raksha observing you with a lupine grin. By the time you saw me I was pulling myself up onto a wide, sun-warmed boulder, and then wishing I hadn't, realizing how mercilessly revealing my soaked t-shirt had become, how inadequate my denim cutoffs had always been. Damn it, how far into the wilds did I have to go to be spared seeing myself through someone else's eyes?
     Expressions shifted across your dark-browed face like the drifting shadows of clouds on the mountainsides. I knew you were cursing the shattering of solitude, and considering what, if anything, of yourself to reveal. I saved you the trouble of deciding.
     "Raksha, stay!" I commanded, turning toward the shore, knowing that she had no intention of doing otherwise. I stepped from rock to rock until I stood beside her. Then, one hand on her shaggy neck, I faced you again, smiled, and nodded in casual acknowledgment of shared humanity.
     Your answering smile was brief, startled, and lit with a sweetness you would have cursed yourself for showing. You could pass, in the right circumstances, but never with that smile. Then you turned away. I watched you retreat downstream, leaping from boulder to boulder with a long-legged, impetuous sureness that sent a shiver of delight across my skin.
     So I've done it, I thought, gone completely round the bend. Fantasies, delusions...and delusions of what? I wasn't even sure which I wanted more, to fuck you, or, in spite of the scars the world could be counted on to inflict, to be you. Not that it mattered. My chances of one were about the same as of the other.
     But then, in the morning, you came back.
     Extension of my dreams or not, I went with it. Those dreams had left me sweaty, slippery, tangled in my sleeping bag, and utterly without relief. Raksha sniffed at my crotch with interest. I pushed her nose away and headed for the river.
     Mist rose from the water into the early coolness of the July morning. I eased into the deep cascade-fed pool between the largest boulders. The current here had often swept away tension, pain, everything extraneous to pure being; but I didn't even want it to cool this fever. Some aches are to be savored.
     Raksha stood above me on the bank, testing the breeze. I knew by her focused stillness when she caught a human scent. There, across the river, half-hidden by hemlock branches, you stood, watching her wolfish form, and watching me balancing breast-deep.
     This time I wore nothing but my river sandals. Fantasy, delusion, whatever; I chose to pretend that you cared. "Good morning!" I called across the rush of the water. "It's all right, I won't turn you into a stag."
     You grinned, not startled this time, and came down in easy strides to the riverbank. "You sure? Might be too late. Kinda feels like you already have, antlers and all. But I would've taken you for Venus, not Diana."
     "Venus?" I said. "That manipulative bitch?" If this were delusion, I'd make the most of it. Your deliberate drawl and uptake on the Actaeon myth made my skin tingle; your voice, low and with just a hint of huskiness, would have done the trick all by itself.
     "Nothin' wrong with a little manipulation," you said.
     Damn, why hadn't it occurred to me before that this could be fun? Whatever else it turned out to be. It was a gift you offered, your willingness to play the game, to take the risk of sharing this self with me.
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[Snipped: several pages on which more explicit fun and games ensue]
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I hear your voice before I see you, and the petulant reply of your companion. I struggle to be glad you aren't alone. I watch you move slowly through the gallery, studying the pictures, while she fidgets with her hair. Then you stop before the central work, the one that makes everyone stop. Your body takes on that blend of stillness and tension I remember so well; and this time you see it, too, in the photograph before you. You lie there on a wide, flat rock in midstream, leaning on one elbow, looking down into the rushing water. Sunlight slants across your naked, smoothly muscled back and buttocks, your long, lithe legs, but your head is in the shadow of a higher boulder and your face is turned away. The arm you lean on hides all but a mere, subliminal trace of your curving breast.
     Your companion pauses, says, "Ooh, sexy!" and moves on. She doesn't recognize you. No one could recognize you unless she truly knew you, truly saw you. You should be with someone who will always know you, always feel her heart jump and her breath catch at the sight of you, at your least movement, at your stillness, all through a long, long life. It can't be me, but it won't be her, either.
     You lean forward to read the caption, then turn and scan the gallery. I have retreated up around the curve of the spiral stairway, but you come unerringly toward me, and your movements as you climb quickly and easily up the stairs make something lurch deep inside me.
     I look into your face, watching for anger, half-wanting to see you angry, at least once--your anger could be as breathtaking as your joy--but never hurt. Though your expression is casual, detached, your dark eyes are intense. "Nice bunch of stones," you say, gesturing below.
     "I'll take it down," I say, "if you want me to. You could sue me for not asking your permission, but I didn't know how to reach you." I had deliberately refused to let you tell me how to reach you, for fear that I might descend into stalking. You, sensing that my life is not elegantly simple enough to be all my own, had let it go at that.
     "You might as well leave it up," you say. "Just another pile of stones."
     "No! That's not how I think of you!" My throat is so tight I can scarcely breath.
     You tilt your head slightly, considering. "Where did you get that title? 'All that's best of dark and bright.'" You glance down briefly toward the photograph. "Sounds familiar. From a poem, isn't it?"
     "Byron," I say. "'She walks in beauty, as the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies,/And all that's best of dark and bright/ Meets in her aspect and her eyes.'" I manage a slight smile. "On top of everything else, you've turned me maudlin."
     You give me that sudden, blindingly beautiful smile, and relax, and lean your shoulder against the curving wall. "So, will you be going back to get more pictures of those 'ephemeral' towers?"
     "Next month, over Columbus Day." I'm still far from relaxed, but at least I can breathe again. "I was hoping you'd ask."
     Your wide grin makes my heart leap. "I kinda feel an urgent fishing trip coming on," you say, ignoring the querulous voice from below calling your name.
     Then you're gone, leaving me throbbing from a quick, hard, incendiary embrace. And a promise.
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I feel kind of guilty doing nothing but posting an excerpt when it’s my turn at bat for this blog, but I have some urgent final editing to do on a second collection of my own work, Wild Rides, coming out fairly soon, so I really have to concentrate on that, having frittered away my time yesterday baking two birthday cakes for two family birthdays, and celebrating those birthdays today at a family gathering. As I said, I live a fairly tame life. It's a good thing I have writing to keep me sane--or, rather, to keep me from being too sane.  

The Color of Flesh

by Kristina Wright




Half my lifetime ago, I worked in photo finishing. I worked my way up in the retail world of one hour photo labs from an hourly employee to a salaried manager. Which basically translated to working 40 hours on a good week and 75 on a bad week, all for the same money. Retail sucks. But I learned a lot working in photo labs. More than you might think.

I learned everything there is to know about color in photo finishing. How to take a negative and print a perfect replica of the original scene. How to add or subtract magenta, yellow and cyan to balance the tones of a photo. How to darken or lighten an image to take the edge off a bright flash or bring a face out of the shadows. I could hold a strip of negatives up to the fluorescent lights and tell you if it was going to be a bitch to print. Outdoor scenes-- bright, sunny days with a clear blue sky-- were the hardest to print. A cloudless blue sky rarely looks the same in a picture as it does in real life. And dust specks-- tiny little things that you hardly notice when they're on the tip of your fingers-- look like giant snakes on a picture of sky.

I loathed summer because the beach parties and air shows would drive me around the bend, trying to get all the dust off every negative, trying to make the sky look the same as it did that sunny day. We always added cyan to sky pictures, making them bluer than they were in real life. People like their memories enhanced and no one never complained. If there were trees or sand (or people) in those pictures, they would sometimes take on a blue hue as well, and we'd have to go back and reprint the photo, subtracting some of the cyan. +3, -1, wasting time and paper on a picture someone was going to shove in a drawer and never look at again. You become a perfectionist in photo finishing-- or you find a new job.

I worked at three labs in South Florida over the four or so years I worked in photo finishing and I saw a lot of pictures. A lot. Personal pictures, things I had never seen before then. Some things I haven't seen since and would have to search for on the internet, if I were so inclined. The photo lab in the upper middle class neighborhood in South Florida was different than the photo lab near Fort Lauderdale beach. The neighborhood customers took pictures of birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, graduations and retirements. The beach customers were usually on vacation and their pictures reflected all of their vacation activities. And I do mean all. People on vacation get... wild. Luckily, I worked in the neighborhood lab before I worked at the beach location, so I had already had my eyes opened by people's photographic proclivities.

With the neighborhood customers, there would occasionally be a few nude shots in between a baby christening and a pool party-- the wife in the shower or wearing lingerie, looking embarrassed and flushed, smiling if she was posing for the shot, eyes wide if she's been caught by surprise. There were fewer photos of solo nude men, but they were there. Or at least their penises were. For some reason, the cock shots were often the last two or three pictures on a roll. I guess they didn't want to waste the film? The men would come from work in their suit or scrubs (there was a hospital nearby) to pick up their pictures, apparently oblivious that I had seen them in all their naked glory, assuming (I guess) that the machines did all the work. Or maybe they liked the idea of the young women behind the counter seeing their pictures, and those of their wives/girlfriends. I don't know. I never asked. These were men with money who drove BMWs and Mercedes and took two-week Hawaiian vacations. I was just the photo girl thumbing through pictures of their golf tournament to make sure the green was enough to impress a leprechaun and catching a glimpse of a green-tinted penis waving goodbye.

Generally speaking, people on a beach vacation take wilder pictures than those who live in the 'burbs. The beach customers would have entire rolls-- 24 or 36 shots-- of nude photos, with and without sex acts. I once counted five different bodies in a series of photos taken in a cheap motel on the Fort Lauderdale strip. The negatives were a jumble of limbs and creases and shadows and the final prints were a blur of pink and beige and brown. Close ups of sex acts are intriguing rather than erotic-- impressionistic images that highlight every flaw, every stray hair, every tan line or ashy patch, every dimple of cellulite and shiny puckered scar, every mole, wrinkle and freckle. I saw natural breasts and enhanced breasts and reduced breasts and breastfeeding breasts. I printed pictures of wild pubic hair and shaved pubic hair and--once-- pubic hair dyed hot pink. I discovered vulvas come in as many shapes and sizes as breasts and penises.

I hadn't even had sex when I started working in photo finishing, but I saw a lot of penises in photos before I saw one up close and personal. All sizes and shapes and colors and angles. I was fascinated and slightly repulsed by them, mostly because they were often disembodied appendages floating in a sea of pubic hair. Once I got used to the shock of seeing some guy's junk hanging out from the leg of his shorts, I was less disturbed. They'd still catch me off guard once in awhile-- those runaway penises are wily creatures-- but six months into my photo finishing job I was as jaded as a porn star saying, "If you've seen one, you've seen them all" when a wide-eyed new employee would show me what had just come out of the processor. And I still hadn't even had sex.

We weren't supposed to print nude pictures, but we did. I took over managing a lab where one of my employees kept a copy of every naked picture he printed. "Just in case," he said. In case of what, I never asked. He was older than me and resented working for a younger woman (or just a woman, period), and was-- do I even need to say it?-- a little bit creepy. He kept those naked pictures tucked in his lab coat pocket. I finally told him he couldn't keep a customer's picture even if it was an extra copy. He just grinned at me and went back to printing pictures. That was his only response. (So if you had nude photos of yourself developed in the late 80s in South Florida, there's a good chance a guy named Reid has your picture.) There was only one picture I was ever tempted to make a copy of and it was a stunning image of a bright yellow canary... that just happened to be perched on an erect penis. It was so weird and bizarre that I still laugh to think about it.

Despite my virgin status, I'd been exploring my sexuality from a young age and had read about plenty of sex, from Judy Blume to the trashy drugstore novels of the late 70s and early 80s with their foil-embossed covers and elaborately scripted titles. Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz-- they taught me about sex. Penises were referred to as phalluses and female characters were called bitch and whore a lot, as I recall. (Thought that might have only been Harold Robbins.) Working at the photo labs was my introduction to amateur porn. Hell, it was my introduction to porn, period. The only sex I'd seen at that point were the simulated sex acts in glossy magazines-- the airbrushed bodies of beautiful women contorted in pretend ecstasy while men with large but flaccid penises loomed over them-- and I hadn't even seen all that many of those.

The pictures I developed were of real people having real sex. It was more than a job, it was an education. I'd never realized how many different colors of flesh existed until I saw those varied colors entwined on glossy paper. It was ugly, it was weird, it was embarrassing, it was interesting. And it was exciting. This was the visual to go along with the words I'd been reading for years. This was the proof that all kinds of people have sex. Not just perfect looking people, but fat people and old people and pregnant women and hairy men and men who wore suits and talked in clipped, condescending tones because I worked in retail and women who were perfectly coiffed and manicured and made up. I learned to appreciate the aesthetics of the human body in all of its variations. I learned that penises and vulvas come in colors from alabaster to eggplant. That's not news in the age of internet porn, but it was news to me, the girl who had only read about sex up until that point.

I could hold a strip of negatives up and tell whether I was looking at a naked person just by how much of the negative was the same dark tone. Flesh in a negative isn't sexy or erotic, it just is. I learned to gauge by the negative just how much color I'd need to add or subtract. We had our own formulas for this stuff, based on the machine and the chemistry, though that knowledge is long gone from my mind. Perfectly colored sex acts of every kind cruised down the conveyer belts of those photo processors I operated. I saw everything I had ever read about, and then some. And my imagination ran wild.

We didn't those kinds of pictures every day (except at the beach location-- I swear, people are freaks on vacation), but Mondays were popular sex photo days (people get wild on the weekends) and summertime brought in a larger than usual number of naked photos and al fresco sex. A glimpse of nipple in a bikini top or an erection peeking out over the top of a pair of swim trunks would turn into full on doggy style sex by the pool. I slid curled rolls of negatives through the photo processor, watching the progression with a catch in my breath, debating which photos to refuse to give to customers. There weren't many. The few times I didn't print certain photos (or shredded them once I did print them), customers would argue with me. "Those are my pictures!" ""How do I know you didn't keep them for yourself?" "Is it illegal?" It wasn't illegal, it was just against company policy. And so, more often than not, I'd go against policy and print the pictures and hand them over to the customer at 33¢ a print. I wanted to avoid a confrontation, yes, but I also thought it was a ridiculous rule myself. If it wasn't illegal to do, it shouldn't be illegal to make a photo of it. Corporate would not have approved.

Not surprisingly, I became something of a voyeur during my time working in photo labs. Recognizing naked flesh on a strip of negatives held up to the light would make my pulse jump. Finally, the words I'd read in dozens of books were brought to life in color on 4 by 6 prints. For a few years, everything about my job was about color. Getting it right, duplicating reality. Printing art, printing memories. By the time I quit working for the photo finishing company I was 23 and getting ready to move to Virginia and get married. I'd had a few lovers and done some of the things I had only seen in the pictures I had developed. I would never have even contemplated photographing myself naked if not for all those anonymous strangers who bared their bodies, but I found myself wondering what I would look like with my far-from-model-perfect body.

Eventually, when I was brave enough, I found out. I was beautiful in the flesh.

"Hope and Gloria" a work in progress

A while back I wrote “Photographic Memories” a story about a damaged photographer trying to find his way back to happiness. He said: The camera is a machine for trapping time. Flypaper for moments of truth.

That thought was in my head when I saw the black and white photograph below. It got me thinking about when the moment was and what truth it captured. My imagination led me to the first part of a story. I’ve shared it here as an illustration of where my ideas come from.

The text is of course fiction and does not based on any factual information about the women in the photograph.

Like all fiction, it is only as true as the extent of your belief.

Enjoy.

Photograph by Hans Steiner

Hope and Gloria

© Mike Kimera 2011

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Ms. Denton.”

The researcher is young. pretty and dressed to display her athletic form without actually revealing any of it. I assume that the publisher thought I would be more open in the presence of this fetching ingenue. Sadly it seems that the girl herself has not been briefed on her role and, instead of flirting with me, she is speaking slowly in deference , I assume, to my great age.

“Agreeing to meet you seemed to the only way to avoid endless tedious phone calls with your boss. Is she always so anal about every detail? It seems to me that she is the sort of woman who would benefit from Rhett Butler’s advice to Scarlett O’Hara…”

I’ve clearly caught the girl off guard by attacking her boss and I’m fairly sure that she has never seen “Gone With The Wind” but one of the few privileges of age is being able to discomfit the young, so I look her in the eye, lower my voice by an octave and say: “You need kissing badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how.”

The poor girl’s eyes have gone wide. This one is as straight as a die, I think. There was at time when I would have taken that as a challenge, but not today.

“Do take a seat, my dear.” I say, as if nothing at all odd had happened.

She perches her tightly clad bum on the seat opposite me, crosses one leg over the other and leans forward in a way that may be meant to create intimacy.

“I’m sorry to trouble you with this, but my editor asked me to do some last minute verifications before your autobiography goes to press.”

Her smile takes her from pretty to adorable. I forgo the pleasure of asking her if she is accusing me of lieing.

“What is it that you would like to verify?”

“Well, the story you tell in Chapter Three is quite startling. My editor is excited, of course, but…”

“She’s worried that Gloria Smythe’s litigative descendants will try to sue? You can’t libel the dead, my dear. Your boss should know that.”

“Well, Gloria Smythe was the sex symbol of British Cinema in the 1950s. People have a special place for her in their hearts. We’re concerned that your story could attract a lot of bad press.”

“Don’t give me that ‘Nation’s Darling’ crap,” I say, allowing my irritation at the girl’s book-blub sentence to show. “Gloria’s relationship to sex was more than symbolic. She was a sexual omnivore with an insatiable appetite for the novel and the naive. The first time she ate me, I was both. Do you know, I think she only fucked me because my name is Hope and she couldn’t resist the opportunity for us to be Hope and Gloria?”

The girl actually blushed. Where do they find these people?

“The thing is, Ms. Denton, we would feel more confident in going to press if we had something that substantiates your version of events.”

My version of events. She makes it sounds as if having more than one version is a flaw rather than an inherent attribute of the human condition. Still, at least she had the backbone to raise the point.

“Well, Gloria is dead and her spineless excuse of a son burned any papers that he felt were inconsistent with his mother’s image. In those days we didn’t have the option of filming ourselves having sex and posting it to YouTube. Dear Christ, if we’d been able to do that, Gloria’s film career would have been much more interesting. All I can offer you is this.”

I hand her a photograph and a journal. True to the ways of her generation, she looks at the photograph first.

“That’s me and Gloria. We were drying off from our swim I’m the one looking at her. She’s the one looking into the distance.It was the last day of summer. The last day we were together. I was no longer either naive or novel. I didn’t know it then but Gloria had already lost her appetite for me.”

The girl, I really should have tried to remember her name, looks from the photograph to me and back again, trying find that young swimmer in my face. She’s wasting her time of course. That swimmer drowned in grief decades ago.

“You both look so young.”

“I don’t think Gloria was ever really young. I on the other hand was an absolute puppy. Look at me. Look at us.It is all there for anyone to see.”

“”Who took the photograph?”

Hah, this girl may be brighter than I thought. That’s an excellent question.

“My mother. At the time I thought she knew nothing of what Gloria and I were doing. Certainly she never spoke of it. But a picture like that is not born of ignorance. My mother was addicted to seeing life through a lens. She took her camera with her everywhere. She once told me that life without a lens lacked focus. She always shot in black and white. She said that it removed the distraction of colour and the pretense of documentation and presented each picture for what it was, a choice on how to show the world to others.”

I realise that, while I’ve been evoking my mother’s ghost, my little fact-checker has opened the journal at the place that I had bookmarked.

“It’s my mother’s journal of course. I found it after she died. I rather wish I hadn’t. It demonstrated that while I’d never really known my mother, she had known everything about me.”

The girl looks up at me. Her mouth is open. She looks stunned. “Your mother…”

“”…watched Gloria Smythe finger fuck me and then went back to her room and wrote it all down. Fascinating isn’t it?”

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

Ok-That’s as far as the picture has taken me so far. I hope that the next piece will be an extract from the Jounral. If it arrives in my head I will bring it to you.

In Love with the Lens

By Lisabet Sarai

My first lover P. was a photographer. He carried his camera everywhere and took pictures of pretty much everything, though he was particularly talented when it came to portraits. He took some of the best photos of me that anyone ever has - normally I'm the least photogenic person in the universe! But I can't post them here, because someone from my distant past might recognize me.

Our relationship inspired me to get involved with photography. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time. I bought a used Kodak Signet 35 camera, something of a collector's item even back then. It offered completely manual settings for film speed, aperture and shutter speed - requiring a bit of work but on the other hand, providing total control. I also bought a light meter. (Remember those? Many of you probably don't!)

Under P.'s tutelage - well, actually, I learned most of the basics on my own - I started capturing the world around me. I even taught myself how to develop black and white film, although I have to admit that I only did so once or twice. (It was the same when I got my first car, about a decade later. I insisted on knowing how to change the oil myself, even though most of the time I didn't.)

Unlike P., I seemed to gravitate to images that didn't necessarily contain humans. The photo above was one of my early efforts. It's a photo of my younger brother's bedroom during exam period. He must have been a freshman in high school; I was a junior. The picture captures a sense of chaos and yet at the same time, it's a still life. The frenzied studying is over, or at least has been interrupted. Without checking, one suspects that the box of pretzels is empty. A shaft of sun illuminates the tousled bed clothes, gilding the abandoned books and notes.

It's in some ways typical of the photos I took. I liked patterns, tricks of the light, reflections, details that spoke volumes. When I was reviewing pictures for this blog, I found a couple of others from the same period, which illustrate my tastes.

The interesting thing is that I'm still drawn to the same sorts of images in the photos I take now. Here's a photo (not black and white) I took while I was in Japan last November.

I don't really consider myself a photographer. A true photo-phile never goes anywhere without a camera (and yes, my cell phone has one, but it's so pathetic it's not worth mentioning). But when I fell in love with P., it seems that I fell in love with the lens, too.