On perfection
In 1976 I bought my first 35mm camera, a Pentax K1000, along with a 50mm lens. It served me well for several years, but when it quit working I didn’t replace it. I shot mostly slide film because in 1976 that’s what you did. I had a projector that came with handy “slide cubes” that made storage a breeze. Even after the demise of the Pentax I hung on to the slides until I realized that no neighbor or family would ever endure a slide show of my photos, mostly family, our children, life at the Clarkdale Dairy.
A couple of years ago I bought a slide copier that fit on the end of a lens and digitized what I considered the best ones. Here’s one of them. You can see it’s not perfect by any measure: blown highlights on both thumbs and the right index finger, noisy, a little blurred, and dirt specs everywhere. But.
These are the hands of John Ricker, who, along with his wife Virginia, became good friends in Kearny (Mary had known them before I entered her picture, and I was the beneficiary). Both John and Virginia were truly creative people (Don’t get me started on today’s “creatives.”) John was proficient in woodwork, soapstone (shown here), and a master of scratchboard. Virginia, “Ginny,” knitted and worked in clay. I especially remember a house full of clay children, each with its own personality.
I made this photo in 1977 or ‘78, before we were married, when we spent a long weekend with them at a cabin in the mountains. It had snowed and was cold, so evenings we spent inside in front of the fire. John almost certainly had a lighted cigarette dangling from his lips, the smoke drifting up into his face causing him to squint through his glasses. He holds the soapstone in his left hand, which was minus the ends of two fingers, the result of back-to-back power saw accidents, and whittles with an Exacto knife in his right hand. I remember watching him —- fascinated at how he brought the stone to life by subtraction —- through the lens of the camera, shooting at the fastest speed I could manage, hoping to capture something worth saving.
Mary mentioned this image a few weeks ago, how much she liked it but couldn’t recall where it was. I knew, and so I found it and made a 4X4 print that hangs, matted and framed, in her music room. So now it’s a photograph.
I like it for many reasons, including the noise and the blur and the dirt, but also the background, the action of the knife, the firm and gentle grip on the stone, the flecks of firewood bark caught in the sweater. More than anything, though, it’s the memory of these now-gone friends on a cold night in Pinetop before a glowing fire.