Pete Lowry's early candid photos

IN EARLY MLC YEARS, 1969 to 1971 or so, alumnus Pete Lowry, then a teenager, carried around a Zenit B single-lens reflex camera charged with Tri-X or Plus-X 35mm film. He shot roll after roll, capturing candid black-and-white photos of friends and classmates, teachers and aides, around MLC and on field trips. Some of these he printed and passed around at the time but most have never seen the light of day, until now.

Pete, a botanist and lifelong field photographer, had this to say of his early practice: "A black-and-white darkroom had been set up at some point, which stimulated my interest in taking photos and then developing the film and printing them. My dad had given me a Russian-made SLR camera, which was pretty basic but good enough to have fun taking pictures of people and places. Looking at them now, they offer an unedited glimpse into what our daily lives at MLC looked like in the first few years."

Teacher Dorothy Zarelli, who was at MLC 1970 to 1972.

Amy Friedman

Anna Berry

Barbara Wallace

Barry Pelzner ??

Betty Mayther

Deon Reynolds

Dick Dragoon, Marga Taylor, Barbara Wallace

Emil Abramovic

Emil Abramovic

Eric Mick

Eric Mick

Gillian Floren, Lisa (Liz Kaye) Michaelson, et al!

Leslie Willhite

John Lynch

Jonathan or Gregory Dubay

Leslie Asbjornson ???

Jill Kaeser; Unidentified

Lisa Abramovic

Marlys Mick

Paty Baum

Playground view; Temple Beth Israel

Sam Giese

Sara Izquierdo, Dick Dragoon

Unidentified. Know them but can't place them!

Pete thought he remembered the darkroom being behind the stage in the auditorium but realized there was maybe no water there. Paty Baum cleared that one up: "The darkroom was a room off the library, probably an old storage room or broom closet, but it did have a sink. If you walked in the library door and went toward the back wall, there was a door, and that was it. It was very small and cramped; two people could barely fit." And Pete couldn't remember who taught photography and darkroom techniques but Paty and Chena (Taylor) Weitzer solved that one: it was Zeke McDonald, an Antioch aide.

Pete says he didn't work at or toward any artistic or documentary photographic practice; he just followed his eye. After returning from a family trip to Europe, from May to December 1971, he switched to shooting color so he no longer used the darkroom, and moved away from photographing people in this way.

Here are the first 25 of several hundred images, from negatives Pete kept in his collection. Some were slightly damaged in storage but did not lose their integrity. They provide a moving visual record of MLC's earliest community. Over time the remaining images will be cleaned, scanned, and posted here. Click each to view full size.

Did you work in the darkroom, or can you help us identify any unidentified, maybe-identified, or misidentified people in the photos? Thank you!

Zeke McDonald, Antioch aide and photography teacher (LinkedIn).