Unringing the Bell

   This image is one of the very first photographs I ever took.

   I was five or six at the time when I shot it using an old Agfa 120 box camera that had to belong to my maternal grandfather.

   The scene is of the beach at Monterey Bay Academy in California, a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school that my father attended as a child. The picture was incomprehensible to me as a child. There were not two suns in the sky that day. That would be impossible. But there it was.

   I kept photographing regularly throughout my childhood, but it wasn’t until sixteen years later, studying photographic processing at Humboldt State University, that I would learn of the concept of double exposure. This process involves either exposing the same piece of film or photographic paper two separate times to get a single image with two overlapping layers.

    Learning of this process eventually brought up the memory of my anomalistic childhood beach photograph. I did not believe that this process explained my photograph. It took me several years and several reexaminations of this photograph for me to accept that it was indeed a double exposure.

Unringing the Bell, 2007
Laminated pigment print on rag paper, mounted to rag board on Dibond.
(edition of 3).