Little Adventures

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Match Shot

When I was fourteen, my father gave my brother and me an old Argus 35mm camera. He showed us how to load it and how to use a separate light meter to get good exposures. Later, when we had taken some pictures, he showed us how to mix chemicals and develop our rolls of film; how to enlarge our negatives and make prints with an old fashioned enlarger; and how to use a very hot chromium plate to give a glossy surface to the finished results. In the weeks that followed, we made hundreds of pictures, but they are all now lost and gone.

In 1968, I spent a year camping out at a place called LZ Bayonet, in sunny South Vietnam. I worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week, calculating how to point 105mm howitzers at the enemy. I had little to do in my spare time, except fill sandbags against the next mortar attack. Then one day a USO Photography Lab showed up in camp. I bought a Minolta SRT 101 at the PX in Chu Lai and began taking pictures and making prints again, for the first time in ten years. I still have a dozen or so prints that I made back then. Looking at myself in those old pictures, I know that I will never be as lean and tough again.

When I got back to the states from Vietnam, I switched to color photography and no longer made my own prints… why bother when there was a Fotomat on every third corner. I took lots of pictures in those days when I lived in New York City… Wall Street in the rain, the Brooklyn Botanical garden in full bloom, and cityscapes from the Staten Island Ferry. As the stacks of prints grew, I began to tire of taking pictures just for the sake of having them, and my interest in photography slowly died away.

Ten years later, Pam and I were living in Delaware, but two or three times a year we would drive up to Clarion to see my parents. On one such weekend, I read in the Clarion News that an original copy of Caldwell's Illustrated Atlas of Clarion County was for sale. This book, published in 1877, contains hand-colored maps and drawings of houses and farms in the county. Local history buff that I am, I wanted to buy the book, and that is how we met Fanny Elliot.

Not only was I able to purchase the book from her, but Miss Elliot, who was frail and in her late eighties, allowed us to drive her out into the country to the farm where she was born… a place that she had not visited in twenty years. When we got out there, she talked of her girlhood and told us what had changed about the farm. We then consulted my old atlas and compared the farm with what it had looked like one hundred years earlier. I was fascinated, and so tried to take a picture which matched, as closely as possible, the drawing in the atlas.

When the picture came back from Fotomat, and I placed it next to a copy of the drawing from the atlas, I knew that I wanted to make more of these "match shots". Photography had suddenly become interesting again.

That same weekend I found my first "triple match"… the one you see above. The views are from 1877, 1900, and 1977. Today this old house is home to Erma's Place, where you can purchase fine furniture and oriental rugs. When Spring finally comes, I do believe I will take a fourth picture of the place, and thus make my first quadruple match shot.