There’s a story behind every picture.  Sometimes they are funny.  Sometimes they are sad.  Sometimes they are mundane.  Sometimes they are made up. 

So what is the story behind the stickman pictures?

Wayback machine - 1985

I was taking a photography class at a community college in Costa Mesa, CA.  My friend and I had discovered this wonderful film (yes film, pre-digtial days) from Kodak called Techpan.  Techpan was a REALLY slow film, but the range of tones was something that we wanted to experiment with.  So we set up my camera (Canon A1) on a monster tripod from the college, and started experimenting.  I thought it would be cool to create a series of pictures with stickmen in them.  Each picture would be a scene or story of sorts. 

So one night we setup my friend’s beat up 1963 VW Bug in the yard of his Dad’s house.  The house had this really bright halogen light that lit up the yard.  We were both dressed in black and equiped with a  flashlight.  Below was our first experiment:

This picture was actually two separate exposures on the same frame of film.  No tricks or special effects.  Shot a photo for the car lit by the bright light on the house.  Then we reset the camera shutter without advancing the film, turned out ALL of the lights around us, and then dressed in black, tripped the shutter again and I traced my friend with the flashlight. 

If you look close, you can see his face in the face of the stickman.  Needless to say, we were excited about the results and started coming up with new pictures, thus the stickman series was born. 

In the coming posts, I’ll reveal the stories behind these pictures and more.  Hope all y’all (plural for y’all in Texan) enjoy them.

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