The tag for this blog is "recent photographs" and generally I've stuck close to that. Thing is, for a variety of reasons that aren't interesting to anyone else, I've only done a few 'photo walks' since the first of the year, so have run out of recent pictures to post. I thought I'd turn things around (the blog tag also says "© 1969-2022") and for a few days I'll go all the way back.
Junior year of college I won an invitational scholarship to be a member of the International Honors Program, a group of thirty students from a dozen and a half universities and three professors drawn from three different schools (with some of their family members as well). We traveled around the world, staying for 3-8 weeks at each of our stops, mostly living with local families a bit like exchange students do, but without the exchange. The IHP entity reimbursed the volunteer families for, essentially, having a boarder.
There's an intensely tight edit down to 12 pictures from this trip on my website. You can find it over in the sidebar links if you like. I did the edit in 1990, twentieth anniversary, went with the edit when I made the site gallery many years later. There are other pictures that are good. As I was rummaging around in the proof sheets a couple years ago heading into a 50 year reunion where we were all trying to share snapshots from the trip, I wanted to find snapshots (that's not what I do, much) in my proofsheets that would interest the rest of the group because the pictures were of group activities. I had settled into doing my thesis project, which was a words and pictures study of religious ritual in the places I had access to on our itinerary.
Apart from the thesis, I spent every minute I could find to just try to make pictures of the places we were and find myself as a photographer.
As far as I know, I was only one of two in the group (the other wanted to be a writer) who intended a career in the arts.
We spent a long time in Japan, because for one of the profs, the official leader, it was his speciality. Eight weeks, divided between Tokyo with families, something like a week at a Japanese rural communal societiy, then another one, and then on to Kyoto where I stayed with an ambitious buisness man's welcoming house, in Kyoto.
This picture was made, early evening, about ten seconds after I walked out of the business storefront room which was ceded to me as a study place at the end of the day. So I could speed read the academic text material or type up my log—paper books, no devices then, execept a tiny portable typewriter I'd just bought in Tokyo when I realized I couldn't possibly keep notes in longhand, having typed since the age of 11. Smoke Camels and type up my notes, when, after business hours, the desk was mine.
More tomorrow.
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