Remember Don Fox?


One of my earliest memories growing up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania was
sitting in a first grade classroom reading: "Look, Jane, look. See Spot
run." These concepts-looking and seeing-seemed to "stick," lasting far
longer than chemistry or catechism or calculus.

This conservative little community in the shadow of Appalachia offered much
to look at and see for an inquisitive boy, the second of six children.

Yet the more I saw, the more I wanted to see, and by the time I graduated
from high school the world beyond the village borders beckoned. It beckoned
me to a career in broadcasting, and in 1966-'67 it called me to duty in
Vietnam where I served as Chief Announcer for the Armed Forces Vietnam
Network (AFVN). There I hosted the now-famous (or infamous) "Goooooood
Morning, Vietnam" radio show, The Dawnbuster.

During my off hours I continued the habit ingrained by that Weekly Reader. I
looked. And what I saw was a proud yet anguished people, maintaining their
dignity in the hardscrabble circumstances of war at their doorsteps. I
looked-hard-and what I saw led me to photography.

Returning to "the world" led me to a career in broadcast journalism, then to
college and degrees in History, and Philosophy, then onto a Master's degree
in English. In 2002, I retired from nearly a quarter century of
award-winning teaching in an upscale Upstate New York suburban high school.

Retirement afforded me the time and energy to re-fan the embers of my
earlier passion, looking and seeing through the lens of a camera. Yet what
my camera caught outside myself never quite matched what each scene awakened
within me, and so my interest in digital imaging emerged and shifted my
focus from photographs to images. A photograph, I came to understand, can
capture a body, but an image can reveal a soul.

With all of today's digital imaging tools at my disposal, the challenge is
not to ask what I can do to a photo to improve it, but how can I help the
photo reveal what lies within and beyond itself. The true task is to release
its spirit, and by doing so to confirm to others another elementary truth:
that in order to unlock our humanity we must earnestly foster those
childlike gifts-to look, and to see.