An Entrepreneurial Creative - Photography, Productions, Promotion

Photography represented my first entrepreneurial self-employment activity. I had a roommate at Harvard who'd been a free-lance photographer in Baltimore, and he suggested we get cameras and start shooting photos for enjoyment and some extra money. We got grants from Harvard's student aid office and we used the grants to buy single lens reflex cameras - he bought a Nikon F, I bought a slightly less expensive Minolta SRT-101 (still one of the best cameras I ever used).

We started photographing students, nature scenes, anything we could see. I didn't make much money but I really enjoyed the art of photography. My roommate JP was able to commandeer space on one of the upper floors of the freshman Union Hall and he set up a darkroom with enlargers, film tanks and development chemicals for black and white film (I think JP got a color enlarger later in the year). It was in that lab that I basically taught myself with help from JP how to process black and white film and print enlargements.

I really enjoyed photography, enjoyed it in fact more than the subjects I was studying. At that time Harvard didn't have a major in creative skills or photography or anything like that - Harvard was the classic Ivy League liberal arts college and we studied the core liberal arts subjects. I'd chosen chemical engineering(?) as my major and that's why I was enrolled in the classes that eventually proved to be my academic undoing - physical chemistry, organic chemistry, 2nd year calculus and differential equations. This was an academic schedule, as I reflect back on it, that would have done in any first year student much less one as ill-prepared for a rigorous study schedule as I was.

The only good thing - besides the fact that I actually survived the first semester with some good grades - that emerged from that first semester was the realization that photography brought me - I was a creative person, and a good one. After I left Harvard, came back to Chicago and enrolled in the University of Chicago, I was determined to pursue photography as an income source and a creative outlet.