Although Hungarian by birth (1941) , I grew up in a small town on the Atlantic coast of Argentina during the period after WWII. It was there that just upon entering high school I was introduced to photography by a biology teacher who emphasized its application as a recording device for use along with a microscope.
Soon enough I acquired a simple 127-size reflex camera and made a darkroom in a walk-in wardrobe at home, developed orthochromatic film with a red safelight and started to combine negatives to create, to the consternation of friends and relatives, unlikely scenes of flying saucers over the town square by combining a negative of a flashlight beam reflected off a wall with a real scene of the square and contact printing the combination.
Early on I realized the opportunities that photography opened up both as an entertainment and a commercial medium. These early lessons have stayed with me over the years and today I still approach photography from many angles and I enjoy each and every one of them.
In 1957 my family moved to the States and we ended up in Boston. |
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By this time I had “graduated” to an Agfa Silette 35mm camera and I was given an old folding camera by a family friend. By this time I had made improvised enlargers out of shoeboxes and similar nesting boxes but they all suffered from light leaks and were very unwiledy to use. The one I made from the folding camera worked quite well and, besides it being serviceable, during its construction I learned additional invaluable lessons about HOW photography works.
Later on, in 1961, when having to make a decision about college, it was a toss-up between Princeton and RIT. The former offered a sports scholarship (I played soccer of course). The latter offered a Photographic Science program. I had by that time heard of Dr. Harold Edgerton of MIT and electronic flash fame. I visited his “Strobe Alley” and was impressed by the photographs and the man, although I only spoke with him briefly about some concern I had with making pictures of fast moving subjects. At his lab I saw the connection between science and photography and it interested me. Ultimately my brief encounter with “Doc” was probably responsible for me choosing photography. I have been with the Rochester Institute of Technology in one capacity or another ever since.
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