So here is my Brother and I posing for a picture with my sister Dorothy who arrived December 18th, 1965.   We both have guns because Dorothy exhibited early signs of vampire-ism and we had to be prepared to shoot her if she should hiss or lunge. We may not have been aware that a bullet wouldn’t kill her, but simply knock her back momentarily until she shook her tiny body and let the bullets drop out of her. Then she would giggle and fly at us again. You can see her in this picture because she’s half human still, so she shows up on film. She also cast a reflection in mirrors but would bite at her image and spit poison at dolls.

As she grew up, she would spend the daylight hours attached to the underside of the coffee table you see in the picture, or sleeping up in the corner of the ceiling.

The other thing worth noting is my Dad’s expression – you can tell he’s in the midst of telling me how to take the picture, so he’s not as relaxed as Frank, my brother. This is a theme in my photographs of today. If the picture was shot with my own camera, and I’m in the picture, then I’m most likely stressing about how the person using my camera is using my camera, and I’ll be the only person in the picture who’s not having any fun. This photograph is tilted because at the moment I snapped the shutter, a Shriner hit me with his tiny car. At first it seemed weird that he was all the way out in the desert, but then he explained he had just robbed a bank and was heading back to his hideout.

He was lying, of course. He and the javelina in the passenger seat had clearly been drinking.

PS. I’m pretty sure this was the infamous car that had a rattle somewhere on the port side. In those carefree days before seat belts were standard issue, my brother and I would crawl around the inside of the car trying to locate where it was coming from, while Dad drove around. I seem to remember a sunny afternoon playing on the front lawn while Dad took apart the doors.

Went back home to Colorado for Thanksgiving, and came back with all sorts of scans from the family albums. I looked at them every week when I was little. Our family has always loved cameras – so there’s no end to the pictures I can find. I’ll post just a few here. No explanation needed, except to mention that it was shot in Colorado Springs.