Athens, GA, 1974

This photograph caused a little bit of a fuss. For the record, Mitchell has long pants on, and any bare skin of Michelle’s was accomplished by minimal disrobing under the covers. (I am also completely dressed.) You’d see more skin poolside.

The picture was set up to use for the cover of “The Impression,” the UGA student literary magazine issue themed “Sex at Georgia,” which, granted, was probably intended at least partly to tweak some sensibilities. Isn’t that what college is for?

In the early years of my career there were conversations that people needed to be educated in “visual literacy,” to understand when/how they were being massaged by images to sell a product or point of view. In today’s world of deep fakes, easily accomplished, and even easier and more realistic as AI develops, a healthy dose of skepticism is important in “reading” any image or video.

For me there are three kinds of images: 1) documentary/journalistic–just the facts; 2) illustration–to help visualize text content with no requirement to be truthful; and 3) advocacy–advertising and propaganda. A fourth might be fine art/personal expression.

For me this was an assignment to create an illustration. For the editors of a magazine, the cover is considered advertising. There is no case made for this to be documentation, but the implication of illicit sex set some folks off, including one faculty member who sat on the board that supervised student publications, and chastised me saying he would bet I would not use that photo in a portfolio.

At that point, I was in my late 20’s, an Army veteran who’d had enough BS, married, divorced, back in school on the GI Bill, feeling reckless and even more anti-authoritarian than normal. It disturbed his world view that I was not intimidated.

Looking back, I think the thing he and others should have been more concerned about in the photo was the amount of student drinking rather than the possibility that 18 year olds (legal adults) were getting lucky.

As it happens, the old guy was right; the photo never made it into a portfolio, but not for moral reasons. It just never rose to the point of being useful in a showing of work examples, like 100’s of thousands of other photographs I’ve made.