I was Editor of the Mischianza Yearbook at The Hotchkiss School during my Upper-Mid (Junior) year of prep school in Lakeville, Connecticut. Upon entering the dining room for breakfast, I discovered the sailing team had erected its entire fleet of sailboats where the tables and chairs usually sat. A light-hearted prank to convince the Headmaster, Skip Mattoon, to give us Saturday classes off - it worked!

Rushing back to my dorm to grab my camera before the everything was taken down, I saw this scene above unfold before me. Without even consciously knowing it, the viewfinder rose to my eye and I heard the familiar <click> of the shutter release. The student rounded the corner and the “moment” was over in a single frame. F8 @ 125/sec ISO400 on Kodak’s time-honored B/W classic, Tri-X film.

To our modern eye, the silver-halide crystals look “grainy” and maybe even a little blurry. But the coolest part about this picture is that I almost threw it away…

By the time I actually got down to the darkroom to develop the roll of film, it was almost three weeks old. I was in a rush because I knew these tiny, hyper light-sensitive crystalline forms were fussy - they don’t like stay very stable once they’ve been exposed. So the longer you wait to process and preserve them, the more unstable they become and the “muddier” the photographs can appear.

But fortunately, to save time, I made a quick contact sheet to determine which three or four images should actually get printed for The Record newspaper article being written. On a sheet full of stark white sails was a dark, moody, high-contrast shot - the very first of 36. Taking a quick peek through my magnifier loop reveled the truth about the photograph I’d managed to capture… It was a metaphor for all the youth lost and maturity gained in a single frame. It was indeed Evanescent Hotchkiss.