as I knew her, sitting in the cubicle across from mine, X-Files screensaver ablaze. If the camera panned back and to the left you would see the outside of her cube decorated with snaphots of dozens of cats belonging to her and her coworkers. Astrid was absolutely cat crazy, and doted on her kitties Thoo and Kimby. Astrid was also a shutterbug, always ready with a camera to document functions at work or dinners at home. In later years she developed her rolls of film at Walgreens and organized her three by five double prints into successions of spiral bound photo albums.
, Astrid told me that as a teenager during the Sixties she had lied about her experience and landed a job as a staff photographer at an Oakland radio station. In storage in her apartment building basement were original pictures of the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds and other bands she met and photographed. She became friends with Dave Clark, striking up a correspondence with him and hanging out together whenever he visited the Bay Area. When the Rolling Stones came to town, Astrid went to their hotel and visited Mick Jagger in his room, taking his picture and getting propositioned as she left. She said she thought about that occasionally, and sometimes regretted not taking him up on it. I guess back then sleeping with Mick Jagger wasn't quite the lucrative career move it was to become in later years.
if she found those negatives I'd make prints and put together a webpage of her photography. She made a couple of attempts to locate them, but was so continually exhausted from her ongoing chemotherapy that she never had the energy to dig them out. After she died I came into possession of hundreds of her earliest negatives and prints, and they were a revelation, in a couple of ways. The routine nature of the color snapshots I'd seen taken with her inexpensive point and shoot cameras didn't prepare me for the level of artistry of the black and white photos she took with a professional SLR 35mm camera when she was younger. She had a keen eye for composition, and a smart, ironic approach to her subjects.
was the other eye opener. I've never been acquainted with anyone whose life was so well documented in pictures. Obviously her mother or someone close to her enjoyed photography, because I found many large format negatives of Astrid growing up, long before she was old enough to have taken them herself. She looks to have been a happy, well cared for, outgoing young girl, but as she approaches her late teens and early twenties—around the time her relationship with her mother fell apart—her expression grows serious, and from then on she seldom smiles. That period of her life that was very traumatic and stayed with her as an adult, tempering her usual wit and optimism with an underlying sense of bitterness and disappointment. The Who was her favorite band in large part because she related to Pete Townshend's exploration of his own troubled childhood through his songwriting.
for a young girl aspiring to be a photographer. Growing up in San Francisco in the Sixties, just shooting her surroundings led to imagery that later resonates with cultural significance, a reminder of a time and place that has since taken an almost mythic aura. I've been told it's nice of me to put together this retrospective of her work, but if I didn't find her pictures interesting and well done I wouldn't have spent so much time on it. The photos included here are just the tip of the iceberg. Using a loup, I eyeballed all the negatives I have, which number in the hundreds, if not thousands, and her friends and family have many more pictures as well. I didn't use, for example, several rolls of film of the Dave Clark Five. I need to figure out who all the guys in the band are, but after months of going through Astrid's photography and designing the site, I'm a little worn out. I plan to add more photos in the future, but for now this will do. By the way, I never found the pictures of Mick Jagger in the hotel room.
Thanks to Astrid's son David MacCreadie and her friend Glenn Davis for their help in putting this site together.
as I knew her, sitting in the cubicle across from mine, X-Files screensaver ablaze. If the camera panned back and to the left you would see the outside of her cube decorated with snaphots of dozens of cats belonging to her and her coworkers. Astrid was absolutely cat crazy, and doted on her kitties Thoo and Kimby. Astrid was also a shutterbug, always ready with a camera to document functions at work or dinners at home. In later years she developed her rolls of film at Walgreens and organized her three by five double prints into successions of spiral bound photo albums.
, Astrid told me that as a teenager during the Sixties she had lied about her experience and landed a job as a staff photographer at an Oakland radio station. In storage in her apartment building basement were original pictures of the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds and other bands she met and photographed. She became friends with Dave Clark, striking up a correspondence with him and hanging out together whenever he visited the Bay Area. When the Rolling Stones came to town, Astrid went to their hotel and visited Mick Jagger in his room, taking his picture and getting propositioned as she left. She said she thought about that occasionally, and sometimes regretted not taking him up on it. I guess back then sleeping with Mick Jagger wasn't quite the lucrative career move it was to become in later years.
if she found those negatives I'd make prints and put together a webpage of her photography. She made a couple of attempts to locate them, but was so continually exhausted from her ongoing chemotherapy that she never had the energy to dig them out. After she died I came into possession of hundreds of her earliest negatives and prints, and they were a revelation, in a couple of ways. The routine nature of the color snapshots I'd seen taken with her inexpensive point and shoot cameras didn't prepare me for the level of artistry of the black and white photos she took with a professional SLR 35mm camera when she was younger. She had a keen eye for composition, and a smart, ironic approach to her subjects.
was the other eye opener. I've never been acquainted with anyone whose life was so well documented in pictures. Obviously her mother or someone close to her enjoyed photography, because I found many large format negatives of Astrid growing up, long before she was old enough to have taken them herself. She looks to have been a happy, well cared for, outgoing young girl, but as she approaches her late teens and early twenties—around the time her relationship with her mother fell apart—her expression grows serious, and from then on she seldom smiles. That period of her life that was very traumatic and stayed with her as an adult, tempering her usual wit and optimism with an underlying sense of bitterness and disappointment. The Who was her favorite band in large part because she related to Pete Townshend's exploration of his own troubled childhood through his songwriting.
for a young girl aspiring to be a photographer. Growing up in San Francisco in the Sixties, just shooting her surroundings led to imagery that later resonates with cultural significance, a reminder of a time and place that has since taken an almost mythic aura. I've been told it's nice of me to put together this retrospective of her work, but if I didn't find her pictures interesting and well done I wouldn't have spent so much time on it. The photos included here are just the tip of the iceberg. Using a loup, I eyeballed all the negatives I have, which number in the hundreds, if not thousands, and her friends and family have many more pictures as well. I didn't use, for example, several rolls of film of the Dave Clark Five. I need to figure out who all the guys in the band are, but after months of going through Astrid's photography and designing the site, I'm a little worn out. I plan to add more photos in the future, but for now this will do. By the way, I never found the pictures of Mick Jagger in the hotel room.