Original Photo: New Orleans 2002, Printed 2003. Cyanotype on cold press paper
Light filters through an apothecary’s window display of abandoned medical panaceas

There are few sensations as exhilarating as a clean slate. Beginnings are fumbles in the dark, full of possibilities and pitfalls. Whether we’re a middle-aged man falling for an ingenue, a traveler landing in a brand new city, or a woman besotted with babies, we’re all attracted to the same thing: a fresh start.

Artists fall for new materials in the same way.

While sorting through boxes from the past, I rediscovered my first cyanotypes from 2003, made shortly before I moved to Asia. As I sifted through these prints on French, English and Indian cotton papers, memories come flooding back:

* Late nights printing with halogen and other lights, experimenting with angles and distance, melting negatives, reversing others, and overexposing most of the prints that made it that far.

* Entire afternoons spent at Kinko’s making transparent negatives: enlarging, inverting and adjusting contrast on their copy machines.

* Days devoted to printing in Boston’s feeble spring sunlight.

The images are from my travels through the UK, Cuba, Haiti, Morocco and more. Most of my experiments I destroyed, and some sold to casual collectors.

Click here to see the few early cyanotypes that made the final cut.