On Labor Day a lady I don’t follow on Twitter posted a photo of several books. She said she found them at an estate sale. Each book was all of the Oklahoma Today magazines for the year on that book’s spine. I saw her post because she tagged the current editor of Oklahoma Today, who I know and do follow on Twitter.
Another lady commented that her dog was in one of those books. Nate, the editor, responded (among other statements) that that lady could see her dog online as all the past issues are archived.
So I started looking at past issues. I knew I was in one issue. I thought it was in 1983, so I looked at all those first. I wasn’t in any from that year. So I looked at the 1984 issues. There I was in the September/October issue.
In October 1983 I was privileged to get to attend the very first Oklahoma Arts Institute training session for adults. I was still a senior in high school. But the late Gene Williams, a pharmacist in my hometown of Hollis, paid for me to go in photography and for my friend and classmate Dennis Myers to go in acting.
In the photo on the first page of the article, I’m the third from the right in the back. I’m sitting up on a big stone and it looks like I’m wearing a white coat (I think it was actually gray).
The instructors were awesome. David Fitzgerald was well known for his photos of Oklahoma and he taught at OU. But I’ve probably used more of what I learned from Bernard Plossu. His specialty was taking pics of people, but he liked spontaneously taking pics, not posed ones. I prefer those too. Plossu was from Paris, France but was living in New Mexico at the time we were at Quartz Mountain.
I took some really amazing photos that weekend at the workshop. Sadly I have no idea where they are today. It would be cool if I could find some of the people who also attended this and see if they had any pics they’d taken that weekend.
OkieBrent 