What A Long Strange Trip

Perspective please! Yes that skinny little guy is me, 1974 Berkeley California at the Darkroom Workshop Gallery. The images around me are from a show I had up called "Nightside Of The Mind". I was exploring the alternate reality of the unconscious and the inside out of dream states in my work at the time. The image is a self portrait shot with a Graphic XL Superwide attached to an RB 67 roll film back, triggered by the shutter selftimer. I found this print in a box of 8x10s from that period. The paper is a strange thin kind of waxy Kodak paper long extinct, the only example of both the image and the paper stock in my collection. The negative I imagine is in my files but I have not bothered to research it. Upon examination I believe that I used a quarter inch border 8x10 Speed Easel and printed it at the Darkroom Workshop, perhaps as a publicity photo for press purposes. I am now one week into the third act of my life, this image is from the first act when as a young man I stood at the forefront of visual consciousness and challenged the photographic orthodoxies of the time and place. The most unusual aspect of this image is the fact that it is shot on a tripod and it is not blurred because at that time all my work was done hand held with slow film and small apertures allowing for long shutter speeds so that I could move the camera during exposure. Every negative that I felt was a success was not a literal representation but an abstract expression of my own experience, explosions of light and life.