Due to a deflated ego and over indulged conscience mixed with a triumphant id the blog is in a state of total confusion. Please bear with me as I work hard to sort this all out. I will be back tomorrow with another post.

The house is in a whirlwind of anticipation. My wife and my soon to be 16-year-old daughter are running to and fro buying fabric, candies, decorations, etc., all in preparation for the most ghoulish of holidays – Halloween. You would think the Messiah is close at hand with all the excitement! I can smell wonderful things being cooked in the kitchen. Cakes, cookies and other assorted sweets are being made for a party for friends and company next week. Soon the sewing machine will be humming, whirring out yards of cloth to make my daughter into a beautiful and elaborate Snow White. The metamorphosis is beginning and by next week, it will be complete. My little, rotten 16-year-old daughter will become an angelic Snow White for a day. She will probably still want very little to do with her father afterwards. So here is the problem as I see it. Not to be a naysayer or a Mr. Scrooge, but I hate Halloween. I have never liked it. Even as a little kid all dressed up as some robot or motorcycle, I was so uncomfortable asking for treats. Why couldn't they just give them to me without all the hassle? I don't understand all the fuss. The last thing I want to be is someone other than myself. It is exactly my problem in reverse. I want to be more of me, not less. Escaping into becoming some bucolic angel or hobgoblin doesn't make me any happier; it just feels all wrong. I need to stand sure footed in my own shoes, grounded to the earth below, seeking with a little help of Sigmund and Co. to come to grips more with the me that is wiser, bigger and stronger. Maybe this year I should simply beg for treats not as some angelic Mr. Hyde, but just as plain old boring me on stilts. Well the festivities have begun, the autumn leaves are falling, the smell of wood burning in fireplaces is in the air, and I can feel all the happy little kids around me dreaming of all the treats to come next week. This un-bemused photographer will fight to the death to keep any pumpkins off his head at least until next year.

"Enough! Enough!" yowls my imaginary woof, Oklahoma. I can finally see by imagining his eyes and visioning his head on the ground with his paws over his ears, that I must cease. It is time to stop my ramblings for a while about my ontological, existential, physiological disorder of an upbringing, and bring us back to reality with some real meat (preferably filet) and potatoes of photography. No more psycho-babble, let's get right to the heart of the matter of my pictures and of photography in general. So to start my down to earth foray for a while, i thought it only fitting that I interview myself with some pertinent life affecting, photo directed questions that have been posed to me over the years by you, dear readers. This will be my way to get me back to focusing clearly and directly on photography, through my pictures and see if I can leave all this sissy introspection behind and close this spigot on my emotions, well here goes. Mr. S: In over 40 years of photography do you have one day in particular that you feel was your best? Mr. Smith: Ironically, I do. In the spring of 1976, I was in Jerusalem on a fellowship and was having lunch with the beautiful photographer, Dominique Nabokov. She asked me to accompany her to the Armenian compound for Armenian Orthodox Easter Service. That afternoon was the most photographically productive and exciting day of my life. The church was filled with despair, yet illuminated with light. The light was transcendent and for one of the few times in my life I felt spiritually whole. The light, the people, the experience was the day to remember. Mr. S: This answer brings up another question. What is the source of illumination in your pictures? Or (to be more colloquial) what is your light source? Mr. Smith: Where or how I learned to use light as I do, to this day remains an enigma to me. It is not complicated. In fact, it is so simple, that  it continually surprises me that I find so few people doing it. Everyone feels more is more and I guess I have always felt that less is more. Basically, there are two answers to your question. Firstly, Interiors. This is where the real photographer is exposed. No hiding behind a rock in the great outdoors, but rather exposing yourself in some small space. I have always loved intense directional light. It is not only because it visually appeals to me, but as discussed in earlier blogs, it emotionally seems to reveal or illuminate the person and place in a way that I find satisfying. I almost exclusively use natural light and I like to see the subject as our eyes view it but with more focus and more intent. Even in graduate school I never liked how people lit things or used light. It felt quite banal and unemotional. I always went off on my own tangent and must have…

Columbus hasn't landed yet. He is really close to the shore and we have decided to take the day off to go and meet him. We will be back tomorrow with another installment of the life of Mister S. Until then...

Although the world outside of our enclave in the mid-sixties was filled with America at it's best and most horrific, I, like all good completely egocentric adolescence, was preoccupied with the oncoming, unavoidable, and eventual reality of senior lectures with Mr. Clark. From your first weeks at school, you learned in awe, fear, and sometimes loathing of the power and the glory of Mr. Clark. He was our Senior English teacher, the architect of all truth, grades, and the college application letters. Throughout my years leading up to the fall of 1966, I was mystified at the power of Mr. Clark. Rumors abounded everywhere. Don't mess with the man! He can destroy your college dreams. If he liked you he could make you but no one in my immediate world, except my father, did I hold with such trepidation. One semester my dorm-mate was the bon vivant, world traveler, know it all, speaker of Italian, Thom Steinbeck, the son of the famous John Steinbeck. I can remember one afternoon when the father came to visit the son. The father came slightly early and I sitting alone in my room where he poked his head into the room graciously introduced himself and asked immediately where he could find the famous Mr. Clark. That did it! If John Steinbeck knew who this man was then all my fears must be true. Mr. Clark must have had a direct link to Isaiah, Moses, Jesus, and even Shakespeare. He was the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost all wrapped into one human Trinity. So in the fall of 1965 as my senior year began, classes began in a total blur. All of course, except Mr. Clark's senior English class. I must digress for a moment. On these pages in the past I have made it abundantly clear what a wreck of a child I was. Wealth, style and status, were not the problem. Intelligence, graciousness and wisdom were. Up to this time, keeping with good family tradition I was not a reader of much except a good playboy smuggled into my dorm room. Intellectual curiosity was not a high point in my social upbringing (up to this point)...so besides being an emotional cripple, I was an intellectual nitwit as well. Cars, girls and clothes were the makings of a man what lied beneath either were unknown, uninteresting, or too frightening to look. I can remember my first senior lecture with Mr. Clark as clearly as I remember where I was on that sophomore year day when I heard that President Kennedy was shot. On both occasions a gun went off. The tradition was that after lunch, while all the rest of the school was in study hall, Mr. Clark would take stance in the refectory. From above like Dumbledore with his magic wand, would commence his hour and a half lecture. This little, unattractive, mean spirit of a man, would speak the most glorious words I had ever beheld. There would be a stanza of…

I am drenched. My galoshes are filled to the brim with rain water. I have set out all the pots and pans to catch the drizzling streams. As soon as I dry out I will be back with a new blog post. Until then wish me luck in finding the kitchen to make a soggy sandwich.

It was truly a wonder that I learned anything academic at Boarding School, let alone have any time to peruse any interests that I might have had, because the conspiracy of the elders was to keep these 200 mischievous, innately troublesome youths, so busy changing clothes, that at the end of the day who could have any time for anything but sleep. The theory must have been, keep them so busy, so active, who could have time to fall out of Grace. This whole theory melded perfectly with the fashion of the times. We were the young masters of the universe, and we had to dress the part. There was a uniform, or perhaps better expressed, there were at least three uniforms to be worn each day. It started like this. We were required to wear a grey suit with brown shoes and tie to classes. So each morning if I was not a waiter (which I will discuss at a later date), I would dress in a beautiful grey suit with a Paul Stuart tie and brown highly polished Brooks Brothers shoes. My parent’s fashion preoccupation must have worn off on me, because I began to love clothes. The worsteds, glen plaids, charcoal flannel stripes all of a well made suit, made me feel as worthy and proud as the clothes would allow. I would vary my tie to fit the occasion. I was a true preppy. The odd thing, and perhaps the most embarrassing thing to admit today, being totally isolated in this 10,000 acre prison, I imagined that the whole world would want to be like this. It was not until I graduated and out in the real world that I realized how lost in translation I was. So off to classes I went in my attire, carefully examining the twill and the tweeds of my contemporaries, noticing the ties, socks, learning my craft to perfection. Who cares about world history when right there before my eyes was the American dream, the American elite. I could tell if the suit was hand made by it's buttonholes and stitching and how adventurous and audacious one might be by the lining color of his suit. I grew to love color, not on the outside where it was forbidden but on the inside linings of suits. Anyway, enough about my sartorial perception, this story is really about change. So as I said before I interrupted myself that off to classes we went dressed in our grey suits which we wore until after lunch. After lunch there was an hour and a half study hall in your rooms, where we would all take off our suits and ties and dress in jeans, khakis ect. for study hall. After study hall, there was always sports football, soccer, cross-country, hockey, and lacrosse, etc. each having it's own uniform, which we would have to dress appropriately for. In the spring I would play tennis and the white of my shirt had to match the white…

Just as I was approaching my full adolescence, and girls began to occupy at least 90% of my thoughts, and cars the other 10%, my parents thought it the perfect time to send me to an all boys’ boarding school. That way, they could leave the driving to them, and they would be free to travel the world with no guilt about who is left behind. I couldn't decide at the time if this was the best thing that ever happened to me as I would be free of the confines of my home, or was it the worst thing that could happen to a boy to be sent to a confined school without girls and without family. So for a week in my 8th grade year my mother and I trekked off in search of the perfect school for her son. We looked at this and that school all over New England, and as far as I could tell, never was there and utterance about the academic provenance of the school, but rather constant chatter about uniforms, proper attire, the maintenance and care of buildings, and particularly the overall aesthetic of the place. Oh, one other thing. As I was raised nominally Jewish, it was very important that I attend a strongly Protestant, preferably Episcopalian school where a moral code was preached, quickly forgotten, but the attainment of wealth and status was never forgotten. Finally, near the end of our quest, she found it. As soon as she walked onto the campus, met the head master, purveyed the glorious drama of the buildings and grounds, viewed all the blonde attractive boys, she exclaimed with a great deal of glee, "This is the place for my son!" Never-mind its lack of academic excellence, it had all you needed. It was beautiful, everyone looked great, it was perfect. In deference to my mother it truly was a masterful place. Unfortunately the tree that produced this apple had this critical eye that proved correct to often for her own good. It was built in the early twenty's by a woman equally as fanatic and eccentric as my mother. Set in over 10,000 acres of the Connecticut countryside, she had built a small English school modeled after Eton. She brought craftsmen from England and had gone broke painstakingly building stone by stone a masterpiece, which originally had a mote, designed to surround the school. I guess was to either keep the rabble out (although it was miles and miles to the nearest town) or probably to keep these 200 spoiled rotten kids in. She ran out of money using her entire fortune to build a preparatory school to build character in boys. This was a hard thing to do in the 1960's. Whether it worked or not is yet to be determined. Never the less, the school was truly a masterpiece of architectural distinction. It was like going to school in 19th Century England. Harry Potter could not have had dinner in a…