A Will Of The Whisp?

No, it wasn't a visitor from the spirit world. The kids were enthralled by the July Fourth fire works, which were plainly visible from their back yard in Boston in 1963.

Leica III-CK, 35mm f/1.8 Canon, Plus-X developed in Acufine for enhanced speed.

Rene Ricard ~ 1962

I have no idea what the occasion might have been, but Rene didn't need an occasion to be dramatic. I know that the shoe towards the upper right corner of the photo belonged to Ben Lackey because you can see all of him in some of the frames on this strip. I know that it was winter in Boston. A few other frames show people trudging through the snow.

Back then I was shooting with a Canon II-S rangefinder camera with a 35mm f/1.8 lens. Even back then I liked Tri-X, although it was a much different film than today's Tri-X. It had a bit finer grain than the Ilford and Agfa films of the day. I was a also less knowledgeable of developing back then, and probably underexposed the film as well. Oh well, contact sheets are to see what's there, a visual file of all your photographs. I was never really careful about making comtact sheets look like finished prints and this scan was off the contact sheet, not printed from the negative. I'm sure that the negative could be printed on a higher contrast paper and look just fine.

Rene went on to fame and fortune as a poet, author, actor in Andy Warhol films, and art critic. I never could figure out whatever happened to Ben.

Sue Simonsis ~ An Email From Her Daughter Forty-Four Years Later

People tell me that they like this blog because they never know day to day what's going to show up, everything from current local political commentary to pictures from my wilder twenty-something days. Some folks tell me they enjoy the stories that run with the photos. I get emails telling me that they were at such and such a rock festival also, or the photo and caption reminded them of another festival they attended. In one case a self described "very fat grandmother" remembered me from when I did some photos at a Christian drug rehab center and she was a good looking sixteen year old in the program. I think she'd just smoked pot but her parents had freaked!

This photo is different. Beth sent me an email yesterday. It seems that she ran across some photos of her mom and dad, Sue and Wayne Simonsis, in my blog. She wanted to know if I had some other photos of them from way back in the winter of 1965/66 when my wife Stephanie and I had an apartment in the same building in New Bedford, Massachusettes. Fortunately I'd scribbled the negative number on the back of the print. Now I can easily go through the files and find the rest of them. I've even got an 11x14 of a different picture of Sue that's been framed and hanging on my wall all of these years. I'm waiting to get another email from Beth. Sue would have been about 19 in the pictures. Now Beth might have grandchildren that age!