Flashbulbs had a short life expectancy in those days. With a certain amount of stress they were known to explode-- to shatter and sometimes burst all over the subject of the picture. Eventually, smart people fixed this with a bit of properly applied enamel to strengthen the cracks in the bulb, and from there all manner of impressive technology was born. Of course, none of this concerned me when I was taking pictures. I was very good at snapping, but remained purposefully, dedicatedly ignorant of the mechanics of photography. At the time I didn't feel as though artists should know or care about those things, that we were more about expressing feelings and ideas all bottled in a single moment. Later, I was reminded that we all have our tools, and at the very least we should know how to manipulate them.

That was the year I had run away to join the circus. They called themselves a Carnival, actually, and traveled mainly Germany. It was my dream to capture the freakish, free-wheeling life from the beaten trail that I suppose everyone longed to live at the time but which the circus proved possible. Not only did the traveling band seem so beautifully free, they were far from the vagabonds that my family was always so quick to compare me to and warn me against-- their palette did not consist of browns and greys and the shabby, dreariness that I was running away from.