Frame #1

The first photo I ever took, as far as I can recall, is of my mother.

She was raising me by herself, a single mom, in a little apartment on the ground floor of the rambling Oro Fino Terrace in Helena, and I think she’d recently used the camera, because I recall being drawn to it. I picked the camera up from a low table I could reach the top of at age 3 and aimed it at her while she was on the phone, helpless to stop me. I’ll leave judgment of the composition I chose to the viewer; I can only say that it’s daring. But the subject matter was hard to beat.

Kodak Instamatic X35
1/90 at ƒ8, available light, circa 1973