I begin a proof sheet diary made with the Leica. Family snaps and sublime nature come together in Plenty. The proof sheet is a record of prosaic moments, presented in the context of a larger frame.

The Havana Biennale with my friend Leigh Kane. I begin renting out the house as a vacation destination. Ann and I reconcile. Bill is back in the picture on holidays and family get-togethers.

Work

One Year One 4x5 image every Saturday for a year, out my back window into the woods.

View One Year

8-Acre Field A walk along the path I mow around the field, and a series of interventions in the landscape.

View 8-Acre Field

Oregon Hill Photos—an overdue attempt to get to know my neighbors, residents of the country road where I have lived for almost thirty years.

Ann gets a job an hour away and moves to be close to her work. A trip to France to visit Ken and Eunice, and Arles. Then I turn my attention to my immediate neighborhood.

Ann and I hit a serious bump in the road. I move to the studio and start living alone. Ann returns to school to become a physical therapy assistant.

My youngest sister dies of lung cancer.

Obama elected.

Tres Riches Heures—a first attempt at expressing some of the pleasures and pains of family life.

2005 A sabbatical year.

2007 I buy a used Leica M6 and a Linhof 4x5. Fall semester in London with a great bunch of Colgate students. Elgin Marbles, Stonehenge, side trip to Athens.

Vertical and Horizontal—Standing and Lying Down

Work

Vertical, an image of the road to Stinson Beach, is 5’ 8¼” tall, my full adult height. Horizontal, taken in the woods outside my house in upstate New York, is 5’ 7¼” long, my current length.

Barry Kim and crew build our studio.

Someone asks, “What are you going to do next? Female drag?” If I really want to be perverse, maybe the only way to do it is to masquerade as a woman

A quick trip to Paris where I give a talk about my work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

9/11.

I discover the work of George Platt Lynes and embark on work that will become NoMans Land.

Based on 1940s portraits taken by the gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes invests these portraits of the heroes of my youth with a sensual softness that is clearly homoerotic. I think it would be interestingly perverse if I insinuate myself into their clothes and pose, embracing their glamour, appropriating their success.

Matthew Sheppard.

Friends who attend a conference about "Sissies and Tomboys” comment on the dearth of material about tomboys as compared to the wealth of material about sissies. I offer this as a museum for tomboys—a place, in which the lost histories of hidden desires are made visible and legitimate.

I turn sixty and friends and family give me a beautiful canoe.

I aim to subvert the ways in which women are photographed in advertising and other public media, photographing my friends and family assuming a pose—in this case the unfamiliar and unaccommodating pose of female toughness.

Ann and I spend the summer in Florence where I teach in the Syracuse University Summer Program. I receive my second NEA Fellowship.

I hook up with Nancy Gonchar and move to thirty acres in Lisle, New York. Residency at Light Work, Syracuse, NY, and NEA Artist Fellowship.

Geraldine Ferraro is the first woman vice-presidential candidate representing a major American party.

Linn

Tina writes a tofu cookbook and tests her recipes on us. She finally leaves me for another woman. I earn my MFA and publish an artist’s book about my sister’s death called Thirty Five Years/One Week.

World

Israel invades Lebanon, Marine barracks bombing.

1976 My husband has a mini-nervous breakdown. I decide to take control of my life.

1977 I spend the summer in Rochester in an internship at the George Eastman House and a workshop with Nathan Lyons. I have an affair with a woman and come out as a lesbian. Bill and I separate.

1978 I earn my BFA from Alfred University, studying with John Wood and Jesse Shefrin.

1978–1982 I buy a house in Rochester and move in with my youngest, Kate, and Tina. I start the graduate program at Visual Studies Workshop. There I study with Joan and Nathan Lyons and Keith Smith and meet Catherine Lord, Martha Gever, Adam Weinberg , Sally Stein, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula among a host of interesting and stimulating students and visitors.

Soweto, Elvis dies, ERA, Sandra Day O'Connor, 3-Mile Island.

Our oldest daughter, Sarah, graduates from high school, goes to Outward Bound in Maine, and runs away from home.

Final pullout from Vietnam.

My younger sister dies of melanoma, pregnant with her second child, leaving a two-year-old daughter and a grief stricken husband.

Nixon resigns.

Bill gets a teaching job at Alfred University and we move to upstate New York where the kids go through public school.

Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, moon landing.

Birth of our three children, Sarah, Joe and Kate. Bill re-enters UC to earn an MFA in sculpture and studies with Pete Voulkos. We move from Berkeley to New Mexico to Connecticut to Brooklyn in search of fame and fortune, which elude us.

Castro, Kennedy assassination, Berlin Wall, Cuban missile crisis, “I have a Dream”, civil rights.

I marry Bill Underhill who has been drafted and we move to Heidelberg, Germany. We travel in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.

Sputnik.

Linn

I drop out of college and take classes at California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute, including a seminar with Dorothea Lange. She praises one of my photographs, which becomes a talisman for the years when I am postponing my career and raising kids.

World

Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus.

I am sent away to a small, private high school in Massachusetts and am initiated into the world of leftist politics.

In 1953 I enter UC Berkeley to study architecture and live at home. I meet fellow student Bill Underhill.

McCarthyism rampant, Rosenbergs sentenced to death for spying, Watson and Crick discover chemical nature of DNA.

Mother starts a photographic portrait business in her home. I learn darkroom technique from her.

Born in Oakland, CA, the second of four daughters to Carol and Dwight Baldwin.

Jesse Owens represents United States in the Berlin Olympics, Spanish Civil War.