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Georgette with a Sputnik stereo camera

Georgette wasn’t born with a camera in her hands. Until the summer of ’67 (she was twenty), she’d never clicked a shutter. But then she clicked some 720 times on a car trip from Sacramento to New York City, to EXPO 67 in Montreal, and back home, by way of Saskatchewan.

Of course, what got her into photography wasn’t the shutter sound, but all that ruined film. Having followed the exposure instructions included in each box of Kodachrome, she spent the next year in and out of a darkroom learning the relationships between film speed, light and f/stops.

Five years and a couple of exposure meters later, Georgette had under her belt three years as a photographer on a semi-daily newspaper, two years as a still photographer in the Army, and a BA degree in Journalism and History. Then she got a job. A real job, as a federal clerk.

In 1997, Georgette found herself a writer of serious non-fiction for the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. And, in the interim, not only did she pick up academic training in accounting, but she also studied two-dimensional materials and design at an art school for five years, as well as the Zone System and West Coast Photography at photographic workshops given over the years by Morley Baer, Ted Orland, Oliver Gagliani and John Sexton. “I allowed myself to become a minor government official,” she says, “because I couldn’t afford to support my photographic interests otherwise.”

At the time a dabbler in black & white formats, Georgette discovered stereo photography in 1995 and began producing Holmes-Bates format stereo cards. “I don’t know where stereo will lead,” she says, “but it definitely is a medium where photography, writing, design, and desktop publishing can be legitimately united.”

Since 2002, Georgette has taught stereo card making annually at the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Photograph by KC: Georgette with a Sputnik stereo camera

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