My First Photograph

Since I don’t know where to begin…

When I was 19, I left New Orleans for San Francisco. I’d never been to California, but driven by youthful abandon and a fear of being stuck in one place my whole life with no stories to tell, I packed a van and hit the road.

I remember my first time seeing the headlands north of the city, the way they dropped into the Pacific, the fog like gossamer on the hillsides. I remember hiking a narrow path, braced against the cold, coming onto a view of waves crashing against the rocks below. I remember thinking I’d never been so far from home.

And I remember taking this picture—this blurry landscape of hills rolling into the ocean, dusty and scratched and printed with the indelible ink of memory.

It was with a pinhole camera that I didn’t know how to use. On the hillside, I handheld my way through the roll of film and then went to the lab and confidently asked them to cross-process it. Thus, this piss-hued piece of poetry. One of the only surviving photographs from that day.

I forgot about the picture and didn’t pick up another camera for over five years. Life went on and then one day, almost by accident, I became a photographer. But that’s a story for another time.

Back then, those headlands marked the edge of my known world. I used to keep this image in my portfolio to remind myself of how large the world felt at the time, of those hills rolling and dropping and leading back to that first great leap into a life I said I’d never take for granted. I’ve come a long way since then, but that fear of being stuck still pushes me forward, to whatever comes next. And so.