Collage

Penny Collage, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I scanned the negatives for this today. I took the photographs used in this collage in either the summer of 1991 or 1992... leaning towards the latter. They were taken one weekend that Penny and I took the kids to Grand Haven State Park, which runs along the shore of Lake Michigan, about twenty minutes south of Muskegon, Michigan. It's probably the earliest example of my creating not-so-typical "panoramas" with my picture taking. Aside from possibly laying the original prints on top of each other way back then, I'd not thought about creating an actual collage out of them until today.

Penny Collage II, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

This second version includes our son, Zachary, but he got up while I was taking the series of photographs, so that's why he appears somewhat to be floating mid-air. Penny also moved a bit during the sequence, as she lowered her left arm and rested it across her right arm before raising it back to her chin. I like them both for different reasons.

At that time in my life, I mostly took pictures of the kids or Penny, or documented family gatherings, which, of course, is why I appear in so few of our family's photographs. I wasn't much of a photographer, really, despite that I had a 35mm camera and had photographed a few weddings. At best, I was a picture taker. Which is not to say that I didn't have ideas about being a photographer. (Many a set of negatives has a frame or two in which I attempted something "artsy"... something that caught my eye for one reason or another.)

In fact, it was about this time that I purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67, and shortly after that, an auto-focus Nikon N90, along with a couple of lenses. While the N90 was sort of classified as a serious hobbyist or just-short-of-professional camera, the lenses were adequate only in their combined ability to cover a range from 28mm to 300mm: a Nikkor AF 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 and a Nikkor AF 75mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Neither lens was very fast so therefore not ideal for doing professional work, but I wasn't as informed as I should have been about camera gear when I bought it all.

While writing this, it occured to me that chances are high that I had the N90 by this time as one of the photographs on the same set of negatives was taken by my daughter, and I suspect that since it's in focus, it was the N90. The Nikkormat FTN I'd had been using since 1979 or so (and which I still have) likely would have been a struggle for her to use with her four- or five-year-old hands, especially since it was manual focus.

From the Back Seat

There's a chance, too, that the photographs were taken with Penny's point-and-shoot camera, but judging from the shallow-ish depth-of-field on several other frames (including those which make up the collage), it's not likely.

These negatives have been tucked away in boxes for nearly thirty years—so long that while I recognized the images in the collage, the photograph of me and Penny took me completely by surprise. Mainly because I just have no memory of it, but also because there are so few photographs with both of us in them.

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Dad Show and Tell

In March of 1991, I visited my son's First Grade class at Gier Park Elementary in Lansing, Michigan, to do a show and tell of sorts. As I recall, it was supposed to be job related, but as I was supervising a photographic services unit at the time, that job would have been a bit difficult to explain, much less demonstrate, especially since so much of what we did wasn't quite in keeping with what five- and six-year-olds understood about photography, if they understood much about it at all. So I went as a photographer. Cameras and pictures, they probably could understand.

I brought in my Mamiya RB67 medium-format camera, with both my Polaroid back and a film back, along with one of my studio flash units with its umbrella. I also brought in an air shutter release bulb with twenty-foot-long tube so that the kids, along with their teacher, Mrs. Madeleine Shanahan, could each take a self-portrait using Polaroid 669 instant film.

The kids seemed to really enjoy the magic of it all. When everyone was done taking turns, I did a group photograph of the class and Mrs. Shanahan.

It might have dissapointed them slightly, but I took all the Polaroids home with me so that I could create the above assemblage, but I gave them all to Zachary (in the red striped shirt at the back) the next day so that he could distribute them to everyone. (All these years later, I wish I'd taken the picture from directly above the assemblage.) I recently got in touch with the mother of one of Zachary's classmates and she told me that her daughter still has her Polaroid. You can't believe how happy that made me.

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The Artist Project, Part II

So, I did a thing.

This is something I should have done a long time ago, back when digital online publishing became a thing, but I'd never forced myself to design it much less go through with the preparation of the files necessary to produce it. Another factor has been that I didn't care for Blurb's templates, and instead of figuring out a workaround at the time, I put it on the back burner. The back back burner!

As I was scanning old negatives last month, however, I came across the thirty-year-old negatives from this series of portraits, and went back to the scans I'd made of them probably three years ago, not long after having acquired a scanner that could handle medium format negatives. It was yet another of my false-starts to get this thing moving. This time, though, I'd made up my mind to bring this to completion, so I retouched all the images, which was a painstaking process in and of itself (see below), looked at Blurb's BookWright Online interface, and decided how I could avoid using the available templates.

Feeling a bit of a breeze at my back, and with a determination to finally get it done, I trusted somewhat in my ability to work around the template limitations. I stuck to working on it for a solid week. I dropped pretty much everything else I've been working on, primarily my research/writing projects, and concentrated on creating something I believe has a place in this world.

As I alluded to last month, I've done this primarily with one person in mind, Karen Stock. At the time my exhibition went up at the Lansing Art Gallery (which I only recently discovered no longer exists), I was totally out of my league. I didn't know the first thing about having a show of this nature, much less the duties that came with it, so this book is more than just a thank you to Karen, it's an apology for my inexperienced mindlessness at the time.

But now, it's done, and the book should be in Karen's hands by now. While she and I are connected on Facebook, we don't interact very much, but I've been hesitant to let on that I've been doing this other than with a close friend who also knows Karen. I've planned on and hoped for the book to be total surprise to her. I also had a copy printed for Bill Harrison, who so graciously allowed me to use his darkroom at Custom Photographic all those years ago so that I could get a big chunk of the prints done in time for matting, framing, and mounting at the gallery. He should have his copy by now as well.

While I have zero expectations that anyone else would be interested in having a copy, especially since they're not exactly cheap, it's currently available both in hardcover and softcover at Blurb's base prices. It's also available as a PDF.

So, once I got that ball rolling, it turned out to not be very difficult to complete, and I'm quite pleased with the quality of the book. So, with that little bit of tailwind, I dove right into another book project, yet another one I've imagined for almost twenty years. In fact, I had actually gotten quite a ways into that project at one time, but I've since trashed that design for a new one, and have processed and re-processed gobs of photographs for it. Again, while it's not something I expect anyone to buy, I feel compelled to assemble the photographs in a non-online form as a kind of permanent record.

Side note: I selected the cover photograph—which is not amongst the photos that were included in the gallery show—because I felt that since hands were essential to all of the artists' work, I wanted something that highlighted that aspect.

A limited preview of the book here.

Part I

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