The season is changing.
I was in Walmart, when suddenly I saw this B-24 jacket in front of me. The 451'st! The bomb group that took the war to Hitler and helped to make life hell for those members of his war machine who fell beneath their bombsites. The 451'st... my dad's bomb group.
From this vantage point, with that cap, it almost looked it was my dad, walking through Walmart in front of me.
Coincidentally enough, I am supposed to make a brief slide show of about 20 images to take to New York that says something about where I am as a photographer.
I had decided to begin that image with a picture of my dad on his deathbed, looking at a picture of a B-24 in flames, its wings peeling back, that was taken from the B-24 he was flying in. Then I was going to sum up my history as a photographer, with the majority of the images coming from my work in Alaska.
When I found that picture, it put me right in the midst of a bunch of other pictures involving my dad and family and so I just wound up making the slide show centered on him, but incorporating us all.
That doesn't say anything about my career, what I have done, and there is not single image of Alaska in that show.
But it does show where I come from, and gives a hint of something that I must do that seems impossible, yet must be done before I die.
Lou Hoffman, who flew in the same bomb group as my dad.
It is a good day today. The future looks bright.