I guess the moment when I decided I wanted to become a photographer was when I found out that there were indeed such a thing as black photographers. Though I knew of Gordon Parks and James Van Der Zee before then, my first serious realization that there was a community of African Americans for whom photography was central to their lives was when I saw a copy of The Black Photographers Annual, which was first published in 1973. I had earlier become attuned to photography through going to the Harlem on My Mind, exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969 when I was sixteen years old. But the Annual gave me an even deeper sense of the range of work being done by black photographers. So that was an important and affirmative turning point for me.

Several of the photographers in New York who appeared in the Annual>/i>, and had in fact created it, became my earliest mentors and friends, including Beuford Smith, Lou Draper, Jimmie Mannas, Shawn Walker, and others. It was through them I began to understand what it was to live one’s life committed to the making of photographs that contributed something to both the larger culture of picture making, but that also represented something of what it specifically meant to black and working within that medium. Later on that community expanded when I met Jules Allen and Frank Stewart, who also published in The Black Photographers Annual.

The first photograph I made, in 1976, that met the level of expectation that I had set for myself, in terms of the kinds of photographs I hoped to make, was “A Man In A Bowler Hat.” It was a classic and almost timeless photograph of a man that looked like it could have been made forty years before. It was the first time I had to interrupt a social situation in order to make a photograph, where I realized that making the kinds of photographs I wanted to make required a set of social skills in addition to picture making skills.

I started making photographs seriously in 1975, and didn’t begin working with a 4X5 camera on a tripod until 1988. When I started, I was working with a 35mm camera…specifically a black Nikkormat, a fairly compact single lens reflex camera. I never liked the Leica rangefinder cameras that a lot of my photographer friends were working with. There was something about the ground glass that seemed intrinsic to me as the place where the experience of the world began to become translated into a photograph. The rangefinder, with its plain piece of glass, didn’t do that for me. So I’ve always responded to putting the camera up to my eye and looking at the world directly through the lens, which one doesn’t do with a rangefinder. And when I started, I was also was working with the small camera in a far more deliberate way than it was traditionally used. I made only one or two exposures, taking considerable time, which of course is more like the way one uses a view camera. In 1988, to change both the nature of the relationship that I was having with the people I was photographing, and to make a different kind of photograph materially, I started using a 4X5 camera for the first time. I wanted to make a photograph that contained even more material information than the small 35mm negative provided, and I also wanted to create a more clearly participatory and conspicuous process for making the work, a process that brought me and my subjects into a more heightened relationship for the time it took to make the photograph, I was using Polaroid Type 55 Positive/Negative film, which allowed me to give them a print as soon as the informal street portrait session was completed. This process of reciprocating be giving them their image was also intrinsic to the way I wanted to work at that time. The photographs that I then exhibited created a large scale presence within the space of the gallery or museum for these African American subjects. This of course was also informed by that initial experience of seeing photographs of African Americans on the wall of the Met in the Harlem On My Mind exhibition.