In late summer or thereabouts, I was sent to Boston (Cambridge, actually) by my employer (GAO; I will probably have to explain GAO one of these times because most people either don’t know or don’t understand the outfit).
For a few weeks, I was part of a special crash course on systems analysis at Harvard aimed at government managers. Along with around twenty other students from all over the country, I got a lot of computer theory, a big dose of statistics (one of my favorite courses in college!), a little programming (but remember in those days, it was mainframe stuff; we didn’t have personal computers) and a lot of working through real-world case studies and problems.
By mid-afternoon each day I was out of the classroom so my camera and I hit the streets and public transit, mostly walking miles every day. Of course, I explored the Harvard campus as well. I didn’t socialize very much with my classmates outside, except to run across some of them in bars or restaurants or on self-guided history trails, as I seemed to have more in common with the people I met in the wild. I also tried to photograph my hotel room, which, except for TV and bathroom and the like, was done in replica or faux 18th and early 19th-century furnishings. It appears that my b&w negative archives contain at least 25 rolls’ worth of exposures, of which I have taken a look now at perhaps 10 percent of the lot. Here are some — previously rejected or ignored — of the snapshots from this first new dive into the material.
