CONTACT SHEET...

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!