With tack-sharp clarity, I remember my first encounter with serious photography like it happened just yesterday. I was a 19-year-old sophomore business major at Moorhead State University in northwest Minnesota. It was January of 1974 and I borrowed my roommate's 35mm rangefinder camera, had him help me load a roll of black and white film -- probably Kodak Tri-X -- into it, and headed out into the cold, clear winter's afternoon to make some pictures in the Red River Valley.
Whatever prompted me to embark on the adventure that day has now faded with the years but I can still vividly recall walking along the shoreline and on the ice of the frozen river that separates Moorhead on the east from Fargo, North Dakota on the west. I made my way, boots crunching the snow underfoot, taking pictures of snow drifts and logs sticking out of the ice as the sun sank behind the bluffs in the mid-afternoon as it does on the short winter days there. But the cold had no effect on my body as the details I saw through the viewfinder together with the whole of the scene consumed me. Afterwards, I felt anxious with antcipation to see the prints when I had finished the roll of film and brought it to the camera shop to be developed.
I am quite certain those first earnest photographs had little artistic merit. I don't know what became of those images, but I do know that after that day on the snow and the ice, in the sunshine and shadows, my life would never be the same.
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