Hugo Street Productions
Images by Larry White
I became fascinated with photography when I was about nine or ten. My father had been interested in photography and, for my birthday, gave me a Kodak StarMite camera–it had a built-in flash! When I was 18 or so, he introduced me to a friend of his who had a darkroom in his garage. He was retired from the Air Force, and had been in charge of spy photography from SR71s during the Vietnam War. I learned a lot of technical stuff, which I’ve pretty much forgotten. He also gave me my first real camera, an Argus C 3 Rangefinder, using 35 mm film, which I used for years. When I started attending San Jose State University, I took some photography classes, where I learned how to compose, had access to a developing room, and had a great teacher who encouraged creativity as well as technical confidence.
I played around with film, using my Argus C3, and a 2×2 format Yashica MAT 124, which my uncle had given me. (He had also served in Vietnam–Army–and had brought the Yashica back from Japan.) A clone of a Rolleiflex TLR, it opened my eyes to format cameras. (And there was nothing like holding the camera upside down over my head so that I could see over a crowd through the viewfinder to get the shot.) Sometime later, I acquired a Minolta XD 11, my first SLR. Then,about 2006, I bought my first digital, a Canon 5D (now the “classic”) and my photography world went wide open. No longer constrained by the cost of film, I shoot as much as I want to. I shoot primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also in my portfolio are images from England, Scotland and Mexico.
There are also Landscape and Nature images taken from the Berkeley Hills, the Central Valley, Mexico and other locations.
Much of the photography in “New Photography” and in “Gallery” are of musicians I’ve had the pleasure to photograph over that past several years; my heartfelt thanks goes out to all of them for the great pleasure I derived not only from the access I was provided, but also for the great music of the great many (great) local Bay Area musicians. I started documenting the many local working musicians for my project, “Musicians Talk,” in 2020; video footage can be found in the “Video” section and on YouTube at: Larry White/Hugo Street Productions.)