Beginning today, photographs by yours truly will be on public display at Gallery East in Price, Utah—just three blocks away from the house where I came of age way back in the Nineteen Fifties. Assuming anyone in my distant past is still alive, they’ll remember me as the geek with a camera—which in those days was either my Kodak Signet 40 or the high school’s Rolleicord. How did I get my tiny hands on the high school’s TLR when I was still in middle school? Well, turns out nobody in high school knew how to use it. That is, except for Jimmy Stagg.
Jimmy was the official high school shutterbug and my mentor. To say I admired the guy is an understatement. I worshipped him! Unlike me, he had an actual darkroom that was dark even in the daytime, complete with running water and an Omega D2 enlarger, whereas all I had was an Arnold D Sunray and chemical trays precariously perched atop a folding card table in the corner of a basement bedroom I shared with my two older brothers, neither of whom loved the smell of stop bath in the morning.
Neither Jim nor I was popular—more like social outcasts, actually. Prior to Antonioni’s movie “Blow-Up,” no cameraman had ever been cast in a starring role. Instead of getting the girl, he was the first to be eaten by the giant vegetable from outer space played by future leading man James Arness as “The Thing.”
After Jimmy graduated, I assumed the role of official school shutterbug, which allowed me to associate, however briefly, with teens of a higher social rank—think athletes and cheerleaders.
Though I had none of the requisite accoutrements of popularity, such as cool clothes and a record collection, I was nonetheless on hand to document the acquisition of same in the housewares department of the Price Trading Company.
Come the annual Preference Ball, no one preferred me, so I took my camera to the dance and photographed young couples at fifty cents a pop. Following Jimmy Stagg’s sage advice, I insisted on being paid up front. My mantra: “Someday your prints will come.”
Just about every couple at the dance that night ended up getting married. It’s how things play out in small town America. Your destiny is determined even before you graduate from high school, and I suppose the same could be said of me. Turns out my boyhood inclination toward observation shielded me from nettlesome emotional entanglements—and continues to do so to this very day. In the immortal words of Chauncey Gardiner, “I like to watch.”
