It was 1978, Boston, standing in a darkroom in Kendall Square, watching a print processing tube go around and around, waiting for the next step to dump and refill. That was forty years ago, and I am still making photographs/prints. Who ever thought that would be my destiny?

I went to school to be a professional photographer and ended up on the other end of the gun, getting paid to print. Brown finger tips, who-knows-what inhaled, lack of sunshine. But the bright part is it let me meet my best friend and wife, sharing pressurized air over a light box. And how many images have I seen printing, processing, mounting slides (my estimate, well over two million frames), trimming, and packing? It's like I lived every other photographer's life. But I enjoy it, and that is what life is supposed to be, to do what you like.

I never knew that in 1964, glued to my father’s side in his hobby basement darkroom, truly amazed at the magic of an image popping up in a tray of smelly chemicals, that I would continue doing it. Thanks dad for forty years of printing…so far.

Mark