That’s 5 photographs from 50 years ago.
I’ve published two collections of my first two decades of digital photography starting in 2004. As chance would have it I bought my first SLR (single lens reflex) camera in 1974 so I’ve started to see if I can put together similar collections for the 30 years since then.
1974 was a significant year. In March I started work for Mobil Oil and left the UK to live first in New York and then, in August or thereabouts, I moved to Jakarta where I Iived for two years. It was a year of much travel and early summer I was in Singapore for a couple of days returning en route from Jakarta back to New York. That’s when I bought my first SLR, a Minolta SRT101. I think it came with an f1.4 lens and it was all manual, focussing and exposure. And of course it was a film camera.
I stopped off in the UK and my first shots are the ones I took in London. As well as this shot of St Paul’s from Fleet Street I’ve got several shots of friends whom I met that day for lunch. In my photo album this is the very first photo.
I was always able to take advantage of my travels to visit Connah’s Quay and this trip was no exception. It gave me the opportunity to register photos of my family. This one’s of my grandmother who would have been in her 70s then. She lived on for another 10 years. I’ve also got one of my mother taken on the same visit.
My photographic record of the rest of the year, despite my new camera, is disapointingly thin. However you’ve got to remember that those were the days of film cameras so you didn’t take photpgraphs with the gay abandon that we do now. I’ve got just a couple including this shot looking down East 42nd Street. The short building on the left seems to be the Central Commercial High School which was demolished in the mid 70s.
At the time Mobil put me up in a serviced apartment, more of a bedsit actually, in the Carriage House on the corner of 38th and 3rd. That enabled me to walk to Mobil’s offices on 42nd street and, more important, put me within easy distance of the bars and restaurants of the upper East side. It was far away from the flat I shared with Ed Libbey in Clapham.
I moved to Jakarta to live some time in August and met Juni on my first night there. She was working for Cathay Pacific at the time and living in Hong Kong. We were both staying at the Hotel Indonesia.
It was sometime later in the year that I had a weekend in Hong Kong when this photo was taken.
Shortly after that I moved into my house on Jalan Nangka in Kemang. That was a three bedroom bungalow and my expat lifestyle required me to survive with a housekeeper and maid, a gardener/guard and a driver!
I was still taking few photographs but at least I have the one on the left which signals the end of the year. I had booked a short break in Bali just before Xmas and that’s me on the left sitting alongside a friend’s wife. I remember that it was very hot.
It looks like it was a tough life and I can’t disagree.
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