Robert Comings Self-Portrait, age 22

This is how I spent most of my weekends during my military service in the 298th U.S. Army Band… walking around the city with a camera, taking lots of photos. I have often thought that the two years I spent doing that was a self-imposed course in composition, to the degree that I would many times take my camera for a walk even when I had no film. Whenever I composed an image and clicked the shutter I was depositing that unique arrangement of shape, value, texture, line, and color in my mental art vault.

I came across this image while putting the finishing touches on the self-published book I am building and thought it would be fun to post it here. Of the 1,000’s of photos I shot during my 3 years in the Army, this is the lone surviving print. No negatives survived.

I found this photo by accident when I was dismantling a framed collage by my late and wonderful friend John Keith Kessel. He had taken it from the “gift room” I maintained for several years to get rid of stuff I no longer wanted. He had used it to stiffen and fill the frame of his collage.