This was my first project after a hiatus from art and music making that lasted almost two years.  I had moved to La Jolla from New York to play tennis full time; it had become my work and project.  The SX70 project came about quite by accident:  I was hired by the hotel where I lived to do a photo inventory of its furniture prior to a remodel of the entire hotel (In the spring of 1979.) While taking a photo of a chair that was positioned in front of a window that had gauzy curtains, the flash bulb didn't go off with the result being a blurred image or double exposure, catching the curtain's movement caused by the breeze coming in through the window.  It was quite beautiful to me plus there was something about the Polaroid film that made the image seem more "realistically unreal," and vice-versa as if the film had captured a dimension of phenomena that other film missed.  Part of that I'm sure had to do with the color qualities of the film plus the lack of sharpness of the lens.

In any case, I was immediately hooked by the magic of the image and continued doing some photos of my own aside from the inventory project. These early images only corroborated and reinforced my dazzled reaction to the nature, the richness, and the intensity of light that existed in La Jolla. I gained a better understanding and appreciation of the impressionist painters' fascination with light in the south of France.   I appropriated some the hotel film and began to experiment with my own shots in my room at the hotel. I began to see immediately that doing photography was giving me something back that my music wasn't capable of achieving. I sent some of these early shots, many of which were intentionally blurred by slightly moving the camera as I took the picture, to Polaroid, which back then had an in-house program for enlarging the SX70 images. The blowups were, to use a dangerous term in this context, even more magical for me. In the end, I didn't have blowups made of my work. They were, however, instrumental in cementing my interest in pursuing photography: Thus began the project.  I used the hotel SX70 camera through 1979 and then, on a trip to the East Coast at Christmas, I bought Polaroid's most expensive rig that came in a large metal case with lenses that differed in magnification strength. I think the primary users of this camera with the special lenses would have been, for example, people employed in law enforcement, or others who needed on the spot simulated macro lens-like images.

Another component of the project was my experimenting with drugs and writing about what came to me through those drug experiences. That was all done, so to speak, systematically, which is to say that I knew what I was doing and I knew that I was doing it. The SX70 project began without the use of drugs and would, no doubt, have continued without them. The drugs, of course, became part of the experience, but were never its focus.  It is safe to say that the majority of the images were not shot while under the influence.  I eventually arranged all the photos in two large books grouped in smaller and larger configurations. With the completion of the project came an unfortunate outcome: a confirmed sale to a collector of the entire project fell through for reasons having nothing to do with the photos themselves. He, in fact was thrilled with them — In all, there were over 2,000 images that became the official version of the work — but not thrilled with me over some personal matter. But that is another story.  The selections seen here are either single images or small groupings. The first six images (including the blowups are from 1979, the rest from 1980-81.