The camera I learned to make photographs with was not mine. It belonged to my dad. And it got stolen from my apartment—along with a nice collection of his lenses—two weeks after I moved to Philly in 1993. That hurt. It was a sweet, silver SRT-101. Dad had bought it around the time I was born and he always brought it with him. I got this camera as a replacement.
I took most of the following pictures with it. Except for the weird ones. Those are from a plastic camera, contact print of a magazine page, and my first homemade wooden pinhole camera. I’ll let you figure out which is which. The last one was my favorite photograph from the early 90s. I poached it from the nuns’ garden at Tyler School of Art. This is back in the day, before Tyler moved onto the Temple main campus. We were supposed to stay out of there, but they had statuary, I was a gloomy kid, and well, you only live once.
