Girl on the Grass

This was one of those 8x10 prints hiding in a box for I guess 35 years, and I still really like the image. Strange how the memory works, because as I looked at it last week slowly the name "Carol" worked its way up throught the murkiness. Today, when the image first came on screen my first thought was "she's British" then "Nathan" popped up. Carol Nathan is her name!

And now a bunch of details have shown up, seemingly out of nowhere. I'd gotten an assignment to shoot a story of another young woman who was an active member of the Church of Scientology. I'm trying to rememberher her name but can't. I do remember, though that I attended some sort of meeting and took some photos. The light was dismal and I was shooting with a 19mm f/3.5 Canon on my M4. I used the little Leitz tabletop tripod pressed up against the ceiling to shoot at maybe 1/4 or 1/2 second. I should look for those negatives. They're in one of the boxes marked "1971".

Anyway, through that contact I met Carol. She was a few years older, maybe 34 or 35 at the time, and called me to say that she wanted me to take some photos of her. I shot a few rolls of 120 in my Minolta Autocord, very conventional pictures, and then she said that we should "do something different". We went out from beneath the shade of the ficus tree in my back yard so I could get some strong shadows. She was the one who wanted to get down on the ground. The pose was pretty much her idea. She liked this one best out of the 12 or so I shot out in the sunlight. I guess I ran into her a few more times in the next year or two, then lost touch.