Around the time I was shooting these photos, I was also working as a layout artist. (This was still back during the era of wax and X-acto knives, with just a wee bit of PageMaker 2.0 or so.) I was studying photographic history and playing in the darkroom. I covered the walls of my study and bedroom with photos and scribblings and cut class way too often in order to wander around with my camera. Everything was intensely visual for me. Everything was about finding a way to see.

Somewhere along the way, I became far more interested in words themselves as opposed to the look and feel of them. I quit taking photographs and designing pages. And I stopped seeing, in a way. But I'll never regret being able to immerse myself in eight years of pure language.

Lately, I've been trying to regain that visual self. I've not been wildly successful, but I enjoyed fiddling around with the handouts and presentations I made this semester. They were very simple, but they were still a way to venture back in. Then I found my prints while I was cleaning, and I'm surprised to find that I'm still fond of a good portion of them - maybe about half or so. I'm thinking that I'm going to make a point of dinking around with the cameras this summer, just to see what I can cook up. Maybe I'll even find my old manual Nikon if I keep cleaning. And I'm signed up for Document Design this fall, which doesn't apply to my emphasis and probably counts for nothing in my degree plan. I don't care. I need to learn to see again.