We met in 1969 and married in 1971, and took our first pictures two years later. We used a cheap camera that took 120 roll film and that I developed in the bathroom. A few years later we bought a very good 35 mm camera and I developed the film at work, on one occasion leaving the negatives hanging overnight for the darkroom technician to find next morning. He never said anything.
A few years later we brought our first Polaroid camera and had our first child. That was 1976. We had our second and third children in 1980 and 1984, and in 1993 we went back to using 35 mm film that we had professionally developed. We brought our first digital camera in 2003. Such is our married life in terms of cameras.
The camera was part of our friendship, and it was part of our loving. It was a form of self-expression, it was a form or art, be it very simple art.
We once had these pictures critiqued by a well known artist, who had trained under Ansel Adams and now runs a major photographic museum. As art, the pictures are nothing extraordinary, he said, but as a testimony to the relationship that can exist between two people, they are very special. He was very kind, and he was very truthful.