‘Dessert First!’ is a book of photographs taken with a few different cameras during the nine years I spent traveling North America. This book compiles photos of my best friends, artists who inspire me, people who touched my heart, my house in San Francisco, and so many places I will never forget. I have so many indelible memories.
I lost my mother to Covid-19 on January 29th, 2021, just two days after her seventy-third birthday. Apart from the obvious complications of holding a funeral in the middle of a raging global pandemic, there was also the matter of traveling nearly 400 miles from our home in North Carolina to my hometown in Pennsylvania for the service.
I’ll be the first to admit I am not much of a 35mm connoisseur. In the past decade my focus has been shooting landscapes and archaeology with medium format systems and the occasional 4×5. Last year, pre-Covid times, I was sitting poolside with a friend who had recently discovered her father’s old Pentax ME Super and knowing I was a film devotee, offered it to me, unsure if it even worked.
This small camera has gotten some highlights on 35mmc over the years. Hamish already has published a really good take, hence, I won’t bother you much with the details. I’ll just encourage you to look through the viewfinder, it will really put you in the mindset of shooting panorama pictures. You get the classic center focus point indicator of myriads of P&S cameras, but the frame lines, coupled with the general width of the viewfinder will really make it kick in:
This year I made a trip to visit a friend for the first time since he’d moved from the UK to Norway. I took my Hasselblad 501CM, Canon Sureshot A1 and a sack of Kodak colour negative film. My debut zine ‘Arctic Norway’ is the result.
