Ever look back at how you started to do something? I've kept photography and my imagery in drawing and painting very separate over the years. I don't think I was ever grown up enough to combine them and be able to understand how one--photography as a documentary tool working for a newspaper has some very strict ethics regarding manipulation and or editorializing, And 2 how creating something with paint or charcoal is usually so internal that the documentation is really more personal. A year or so ago I began to combine all these things together in personal work, but it was very formulaic. Very little of the imagery was deeply personal or deeply meaningful to me. They were statements about this or that, but really, not cutting into the heart of what I am all about. I've been thinking a lot about how I got into drawing when I was in my early 20's. It was an obsession--mostly because I wasn't very good at it, but really felt I had something to say in the medium. So I drew and I drew and I drew. I began drawing things from my life, my food that I would carry and eat. One day I decided that I wanted to nail some fruit to a wall and draw it day after day. These were about many many things in my mind and as each days drawings progressed I found personal symbols and forms that seemed right to me. After all these years I found it funny that I never photographed this, just drew. So today I decided to photograph a still life of a banana peal and an apple nailed on to a board to revisit some old ideas in a new way. There is much going on in these--some of which was going on over 20 years ago and some stuff that has gone on since then. Its funny how much goes into something that seems so simple to look at. My students are in for it tomorrow as I'm going to really clobber them with this notion and see what they do with it. Photograph by Richard Sayer