Remember SLR cameras?
Film?
Negatives?
And remember contact sheets?
Seems like light years
ago, but I still have a few buried in a cardboard box in my upstairs closet;
this is a four-shot strip from a contact sheet made nearly fifty years ago.
I am twenty-two years
old; a long-haired hippie with a gold ankle bracelet (I no longer have all that
hair, but I still have the ankle bracelet) and a handsome boyfriend (I still
have him in my life, too) who took these shots in, roughly, 1968.
The strip is faded,
for sure, and it curls along both long sides.
It’s hard to tell
what’s what:
The first shot is of me and one of my
dogs, a total mutt named Ron; he had a good chunk of yellow lab in him, but the
yellow was nearly white and so he simply disappears into the background. There’s
a coffee cup in the foreground by my arm, and, in my upraised right hand, a Winston
filtered cigarette;
The second is
interesting (on the reverse of this shot, David wrote “legs,” which might give
you an idea of what was on his mind
in 1968); my gold bracelet is on my left wrist (it still is); it’s one of the
few photographs of me that illustrates the presence of Native American DNA that
showed up in my genetic testing;
In the third, I seem
to be trying to stand on my head (‘nuff said); and the fourth has some kind of
bizarre shading effect—half my face is light; the other dark. Beats me…
Hmmmm.
Maybe it wasn’t a Winston I was smoking—after all,
it was the 60s!
