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"So many times I read about art directors/photo editors talking about the photographer's vision, talking about how it's not the style of the photograph but about the moment... forget post processing, forget about lighting... forget about technique... when does the photographer push the button.
As Cartier-Bresson called it "the decisive moment."
.....from an excellent blogspot called the Strobist.
My photographs have been like my kids and one goes astray or as has happened multiple times in my past, stolen in a random robbery or burned up in a fire, I feel the loss more than what should be the norm for a picture.
This past week thanks to Facebook a photograph of mine resurfaced, not just any photograph, but one I grieved and held in my mind for years. I had lost the box of my photos and negatives years ago in a fire that burned my apartment building down on Halloween night 1982, pictures from a rock concert we traveled to from Brooklyn at Watkins Glen, New York ten years earlier. An estimated 600,000 rock fans came to the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, 1973, to see The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, and the Grateful Dead perform, we were four of them. I still have my original ticket. ...and very few memories of what turned out to be a insane weekend. Rain, mud, cold and I can remember people setting the porta potties on fire for heat. I remember a huge thunderstorm and being unable to leave, because everyone had simply stopped their cars on the jammed roads and walked the rest of the way. I remember having only a flimsy blanket and no rain gear, standing on a rain drenched hill looking down on a concert stage barely able to see the band playing. We rigged up a tent from a chenille blanket I had thoughtfully brought to sit on, hardly rain proof -but good background prop for the picture burned in my mind. I remembered that decisive moment, snapping that picture of Klaus and until last week I longed to reconnect with it to see if it was as memorable as I recalled.
Reconnecting with my old college friends via Facebook that are living on the East Coast has been sweet, one of them, Claude Pidgeon who was one of the four along on that concert trip wrote me what he remembered that I didn't.
"We were in my 1967 Lincoln Mercury Park Lane Braughm. It wouldn't start for the trip back. A hippie mechanic stole a distributor cap from a farm vehicle in the field behind a barn, and the car started right up. We made a shelter with bent saplings, your blanket and lots of hay from the field we were in. There were four of us. I know that you, Klaus and I were there, but I don't remember who #4 was. Very cold, wet, lots of acid...Who was with us?
Here and now, 36 years later, none of the three of us can recall the fourth person. I have thought about this picture for years, and when it popped up on Facebook on Klaus's profile last week, I did the happy dance and felt like throwing a welcome home party... if nothing else to embrace that decisive moment in back in 1973.
More pictures click here