Photo Fix

August 27, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Photo Fix

By Leo Racicot

I’ve always liked taking photos. The idea that you can click a button and capture a person, a place forever (or at least for as long as the photo lasts, appealed to me from childhood. When, as a nine-year-old, I acquired a Brownie camera for a birthday gift, I took instant delight in its small, simple “point-and-shoot” capability. Of course, the pictures I took with it were seldom any good. The only shot I like was taken not by me but of me, by my friend, Anthony Kalil. as we were walking up Cross Street towards his home. When, a couple of years later, one of our scoutmasters, Bill Riley, demonstrated how a camera can be fashioned by sticking a pinhole in a shoebox, I was hooked. Could there be a more amazing invention than a camera?

What became a lifelong passion for taking pictures might well have been inherited; while poking through old family scrapbooks and albums, I came across many photos our father had taken when he was serving overseas in India and Burma with the horse cavalry. Throughout his brief life, Papa loved horses (and not only horses but other four-legged equines like donkeys, burros, even zebras). I’ve written before how he kept horses in horse stables located just behind the houses here at the family homestead. Not that all his photos were of equines; he also liked taking photos of the family and of countryside vistas in his adopted Dracut. Since I didn’t know this before I began clicking shutters, my love for photographs can’t be a case if imprinting, more genetics-based, wouldn’t you say?

In about 1988, ’89, an intense friendship fell into irreparable ruin. My emotions became a tiny boat out in the middle of a dark ocean. I was devastated, depressed. Sylvia Contover, a library co-worker, seeing my distress, reminded me that, as full-time ULowell employees, we were entitled to take courses free of charge. She, in her 80s, was working toward her Masters and suggested I might do the same. My state of mind was in no shape to take on Masters’ level courses (that would come a couple of years later) but at that time, with the help of another co-worker, Marie Ann Drouin, I signed up for a Photography 101 class. Marie Ann decided it would be “fun and easy!”. Oh….brother…was she ever wrong.

The section I ended up in was being taught by renowned photographer, Arno Minkkinen. Minkkinen ran a tight ship. Suspecting that a lot of his students had chosen his course as an elective, perhaps an easy A, or like me, as a means of moonlighting through a bad spell, he set forth one of the most rigorous curriculums I had ever encountered. Every week, he chose, as our assignment, a theme. Students were to fill an entire roll of film with examples of this theme. He also gave lessons in the not-so-simple process of developing what we shot. There was a darkroom and we were responsible, on our own time, to develop our work, to be turned in for inspection at the next class meeting. Now remember, I was struggling with depression. Our first assignment was an interesting one; we were to approach total strangers on the street and ask if we could take their picture. I took to this task instantly. I’ve always been a timid guy, more so back then than now. But something happens to me when I set out to take photos. Something about being able to hide behind the camera banishes all shyness and I turn into Ron Galella (the bold photographer who haunted and harassed poor Jackie Kennedy for years). I had no problem walking up to people on the street, asking them if they’d mind posing for me. Of course, a lot of people didn’t want to but a lot did. I do remember one sightless fellow. I went up to him politely and said, “Would you mind if I take a quick picture of you?” He said, “no” which I took to mean no, he didn’t mind. So, I aimed and took the picture. The second he heard the shutter click, he became enraged. What he’d meant when he said ‘no’ was, “No, you can’t take a picture.” Though he was blind, he started charging after me. Naturally, I ran and saw, looking back, that he’d stumbled and fallen. The incident has stayed with me all these years as a lesson that no photo is worth the cost of a subject getting hurt, whether physically or emotionally. Every time I look at the photo of this man, I think, “Shame on you, Leo.” A simple enough misunderstanding but I regret it to this day.

But getting back to Minkkinen and his class. I’m afraid his demanding weekly assignments got the better of me; I couldn’t keep up. Adding to the chaos was the fact that I had a hard time learning darkroom techniques. The overpowering smell of both the stop bath and fixer chemicals used in developing had my eyes watering, my nose stinging. Making the situation worse — one day, I saw the friend who’d stopped speaking to me in the darkroom; even in the impenetrable blackness, I could see and feel him glaring menacingly at me. Some digging on my part revealed he’d signed up for a different section of the course. I decided never to go back to that darkroom. As a result, I fell way behind on my assignments, which led to Minkkinen calling me in for a Teacher/Student conference. I explained what was going on with me, though nothing about the estranged friend. Minkkinen said he understood but emphasized that unless I could catch up on the work, he’d have to give me an Incomplete for the class. When grade time rolled around, what did I find on my report card but a great, big, fat, red F. Throughout my academic years, I’d maintained near-perfect grades. Seeing that F was horrifying to me, as was the lying Minkkinen. It was at that point, I swore to myself that I’d become the best photographer I could be.

I began taking pictures of everyone and everything like a madman. It was rare to run into me when I didn’t have a camera in my hand or around my neck. The circumstances of my life have left me prone to depression. Whenever I find myself low or in despair, my habit is to grab not a Prozac but a camera and head out to see what I can see. In the ‘80s, I bought a used Yashica at Hunt’s Photo in Harvard Square (which I came to call “my trusty old Yashica”). I loved that camera and it held my efforts in good stead up until the time it got left behind on one of my many moves in Las Vegas. With it, I managed to shoot photos of Judy Collins and Julia Child, also many of flowers and gardens, one of my favorite subjects (I don’t know what attracts me to flowers or gardens; I don’t have a green thumb. I like plants and flowers but all I have to do when I bring a new one home is look at it and it falls over dead) I also love taking photos of murals; I like them because they are so transitory, and I want to preserve them before the wrecking ball obliterates them. I think it was Richard Avedon, possibly Susan Sontag who said, “Photographs reveal more about the photographer than they do the subject of the photo.”

I don’t claim to be an expert but I’ve learned to train my eye to the exact spot in the frame I feel is most pleasing. I figure if the image pleases me, it will please the viewer. Only a half-dozen of the photos I’ve taken do I think of as being halfway decent; I like a picture I took of a lady on The Red Line looking at her phone. I looked up and suddenly, the colors of her hair, her outfit matched the colors of the speeding red outside the window. Got it! Another favorite is one of Whistler’s Park on Worthen Street on a rainy autumn evening. Another, of the interior of a hibiscus. These shots strike me as being pure dumb luck. At a point, as I’m aiming, Buddha enters the lens and something akin to cosmic intervention causes my finger to press the button leaving me amazed by the image it captures. I’ve even a couple of times sold my prints to private buyers and magazines. So, take that, Arno Minkkinen!

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