When Mather House was just getting started, Skiddy van Stade said to me, 'One of the people you can count on to help you is a sophomore, Charlie Olchowski.' He was right. Charlie was the person who did most of the physical work of building the darkroom, making sinks, painting woodwork, walls, floors. By the time he was a senior (1973) Mather House had the best darkroom and photography display program of the thirteen Harvard houses.

When Charlie graduated, he took a year (before going to law school) to devote to his own photography -- studies of rock musicians and of birds nesting, feeding, staring out at you. One of the times he dropped in from Greenfield, where he lives on the other side of Massachusetts, I took the picture of him here.

I called him, in early July, hysterical about making perfect prints for this book and doing indexes to earn money at the same time. Miraculously, he had the time to print for me and has made many of the photographs that this book was printed from.

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