Surreal Images from the Archives

I have finally vowed to scan all my old photos and get rid of my photo albums. What is the point of hauling around books full of wrinkled, discolored prints when images can be kept digitally? The colors won't degrade, and they can be organized and stored online, safe from fire and other household mishaps. I don't see a downside, really -- as long as you also keep an electronic backup, which I intend to do.

While scanning yesterday, I came across these images.

The one above was taken either by me or my father on one of our yard photography expeditions. That's one of those dreadful air potato vines that are the scourge of Florida back yards.

Here's my brother underwater in a swimming pool at a resort on Longboat Key in the early 1980s.

In 1983, as I've mentioned before, my Dad, stepmother, brother and I drove cross-country after visiting my father's family in California. We made a quick trip through Las Vegas. We stopped at the MGM Grand Hotel for lunch, and to this day that's my only experience of Sin City. Well, that and a few hasty snapshots taken from the car window.

In the mid-'70s my mom's parents came to visit, shortly after she and my dad divorced. I remember sneaking up behind them to take this picture as they sat together in the back yard. I was eight or nine years old, and I was into "sneaky photography." As I recall, they did this almost every day of their visit -- pulled two chairs together and just sat. I've always liked this photo.

And here I am playing around with the camera in my first apartment, at Tropical Gardens in north Tampa -- where $250 a month in 1985 got my roommate and me a sweltering one-bedroom with virtually no insulation and some really interesting neighbors. I'm not sure what I was trying to do here -- take a selfie in the mirror, I suppose? That plant on the right is still alive, now in the ground outside my mom's house. Come to think of it, that hanging plant is at her house, too.