These are my first photographs. I was eighteen, a helicopter door-gunner in Viet Nam, and using a loaned Rolliflex twin-lens reflex camera to document what I was seeing. I didn’t know how to use a light meter at the time, and didn’t have one, anyway. But every roll of Kodak film came with a little paper that suggested exposure settings for typical light conditions and that’s what I used to make camera settings for all these images.

Although I had no formal training in photography, as a child I had become acquainted through my parents with Dorthea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, Ansel Adams, and other documentary photographers and had seen the work of all of them in their own homes and heard them discuss photography among themselves, while an innocent bystander myself.