Month: October 2024

While recently going through my old photographs I came across this picture of me at 18. I’d always loved taking pictures, but during my first year of college I took a required photography course and started using a better camera.

It was one of the most fun and exciting turns in my life. Even though I wanted to be a writer since I was nine, making a living writing didn’t seem like the most practical idea so I decided I would make a living as a photographer instead, while still pursing my dream of writing books. That plan didn’t go so well, alas, but I stumbled into something that ultimately led to Echo, a social network I started in 1989. My first book was published in 1998, when I was 42.

I remember telling my therapist, when I was around 30-years old, that if I didn’t publish by the time I was 40 there was no point to keep trying. After 40 I’d be too old to enjoy it. Hahaha. I remember seriously thinking that!! Hang in there dreamers!

This is me at 18, in my college dorm room, with my beloved Pentax SP-1000.

I was watching a YouTube video about Montauk, on Long Island, (I love this guy’s videos, Peter Santenello) and they mentioned haul seiners, which is a kind of fisherman who practices a certain method of fishing. They said haul seining had slowly been outlawed. And it made me feel nostalgic, the whole video made me feel nostalgic because Montauk, when I knew it, was pretty much the last refuge for middle and low income people out east on Long Island, and eventually they will be pushed out of there too one day. (I grew up on Long Island, in the 1960s and 1970s.)

There’s this slight hill between Montauk and the Hamptons and my friends used to joke how people in Montauk would rarely go over that hill into the Hamptons, and they preferred it on their side of the hill. I was not a poor fisherman, but I identified with them more than the glitterati (a group I very definitely did not belong in either).

Anyway, I spent one summer in Amagansett in the 1970s, and I was coming home from work as a cocktail waitress when I decided to drive to the beach and watch the sun come up before going home to bed. A bunch of haul seiners were there setting up their nets and I took pictures of them. (My camera went with me everywhere in those days.) Amazingly, I went digging for the negatives and found them! Here are two shots from that batch.

I have a new book coming out in January called The Killing Fields of East New York (much more to come about that)! Which means I had to get a new author photo. Always an agonizing ordeal. Gone are the days when I could take a few shots and love every one of them. After hundreds and hundreds of takes, with different cameras and my new iphone, I picked one that made me look much younger and prettier than I look in reality. Here is the one I chose and the runner up.

Winner, taken with my new iphone 14.

The runner up, taken with my Cannon G9. Note the position of my arm, strategically placed to hide my neck.