Dad's camera
My earliest memories of photography involve my dad and this camera. I remember him taking pictures -- family pictures, mostly -- but more than that I remember being allowed to join him in his darkroom. The memories are both visual and olfactory: rolls of newly- developed 620 film hanging from metal clips to dry...the smell of developer and stop bath...the red safety light...seeing negative images projected onto the enlarger table and then, later, seeing them magically emerge on paper.
I don't know how "serious" dad was about photography, but I know his interest was more than casual. For example, he used this camera to take long-exposure night photographs of the illuminated buildings and statues at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair. I have seen prints of those images, but unfortunately I don't know where they are now. When I was 10 years old my parents sold their home in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood in East Oakland and moved into an apartment, effectively ending dad's black-and-white photography and printmaking.
On this Father's Day, I am remembering those darkroom times with my dad. This early "exposure" to photography (pun intended -- he was good at that!) was the beginning of my current interest in making pictures.