DISCOVERING PHOTOGRAPHY

Discovering Photography
Age 24, Durham County & Apex, North Carolina, 1968
The cover photograph for this poem is one of my first candid photographs of people at a beach. The last two photographs are my first color photographs of the abandoned Holly Springs School in North Carolina.
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

You don't choose your art, your art chooses you.
~ Unknown Graffiti Artist ~

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.
~ Paul Klee ~

The sensation was hard to explain:

let's say it was like memories
I had thrown into a closet
until it was stuffed, overflowing

because I believed
what I had been told by my father
that I was not visual

so I had pushed the door shut,
squeezing scenes I had seen
all my life:
from the car's rear window at age 5
the snow on the mountain
the civil rights marches
the smiles of my friends
the nakedness of girlfriends -
I had to push the closet door hard
to get it to close

years later when I picked up a camera
I was only going to take
a few abstract photos
just for fun
instead the closet door popped open
and a thousand memories fell at my feet

One of my very first photographs.

then a few months later
in a darkroom I saw my memories
or whatever they were
- maybe dreams I had made real
maybe quiet moments I wanted to freeze -
become black and white in the developer,
while the pictures
like pieces of paper
in the pond where I grew up
floated gently in the tray

that first night after printing
I floated in my bed -
the scenes emerging
like ghosts from a forest

and then there were
those architectural pictures
a few years later,
my first foray into color:
the abandoned Holly Springs High School
with peeling paint
doors ajar
sun splintering through a rounded window
echoes of students running in the hall

in the ground glass of an old
Rollei twin lens reflex
I saw my past
about lost time, lost love
lost desires
at boarding school

later a painter told me
she had come to my photo exhibit
but had to leave -
the sadness of those
empty hallways
moving her to tears