Hawkeye

Description

Where the Time Goes, released shortly before David’s death, examines Diane and David’s relationship since the early 1970s. Hawkeye looks further back, to photographs David took with the Brownie Hawkeye camera he received for his eighth birthday in 1959. It documents, from a child’s perspective, family, church, work, and school in the region that would become Silicon Valley.

The Hawkeye was designed to be easy to use and required no particular expertise, but David took an active role in composing each photograph. He arranged classmates under Easter or St. Patrick’s Day banners; he posed his friends against the walls, windows, and doors of school and church; he positioned nuns in front of the Virgin Mary and his family in front of the church; and he composed a powerful image of his teacher. Sister Mary St John, Bible in hand and wearing the traditional nun’s habit, sits in front of a blackboard and below an American flag, conveying the authority of both religion and education. All the early photos were slightly crooked, creating a signature style in the young photographer’s work.

“Load right, aim sharp, and shoot well. The satisfaction of good pictures will be your reward,” – Brownie Hawkeye, Instruction Manual, 1959

Without consciously intending to document cultural change, the young photographer recorded the decline of an agricultural economy and the expansion of a new post-war economy of consumerism and exchange, with subdivisions replacing cherry orchards, and warehouses and car dealerships replacing walnut trees. With the Hawkeye, he documented new buildings, salesmen’s meetings, hardware shows, and open houses where his father proudly displayed new products like Marvalon, and young women roller-skated on Varathane-covered wood to demonstrate the durability of new plastic floor treatments. He photographed his grandparents standing proudly in front of his father’s new truck, and his sister, mother, and grandfather in front of the Christmas tree and television set.

The neighborhood where David photographed family and friends, primarily working-class Italian, Irish, and Portuguese Catholics, is now the site of technology giants Apple, LinkedIn, Google, and Nokia. The young photographer, with his ability to speak through images, left us a set of powerful Hawkeye photographs that not only give us a remarkable view of America during a period of growing prosperity and increasing modernization, but also narrate the pre-history, both personal and cultural, of the iconic landscape of Silicon Valley.

Ann Jastrab, Executive Director of Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel, California, provided Foreword.

Design: Victor Levie, Levievandermeer
ISBN 9789053309476
Format: 18 x 20 cm. portrait
Hardback with embossed photo on back cover
112 Pages with approx. 60 photos in tritone

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