Rediscovering My Old Double Exposure Photos of Georgia O'Keeffe Produces Memories of My Creativity I Hadn't Even Known Had Faded

... "it’s really tough to describe what happened but if I were a Russian nesting doll, the big head was popped off to reveal that there was a same-but-different little me inside ..."

all images belong to Kathryn Vercillo; note on sources below

One of the beautiful things that happens when moving from one house to another is that things that were buried on shelves and long forgotten find their way up to the surface and back into my awareness. Over the weekend, I came across an album of photography explorations I did when I was about 19 years old, starting with a whole series of double exposure photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and her work, and it brought back so many creative memories, weaving together some loose threads in my personal artistic world that I hadn’t even realized were still dangling. I’ll share the story of that work with you here today, a few images along with some additional images from that time, and the memories I’m working through about what photography meant to me then and could mean to me now.

Double Exposure Photographs on Film

I remember a few key cameras from my childhood. There was a rectangular black Kodak point-and-shoot that we kept in the hall closet and used most regularly and a clunky Polaroid that I adored and then there was this old film camera (a Minolta maybe?) that was fancier and more expensive and had to be adjusted manually and I don’t actually remember anyone ever using it until I was about 16 and pulled it out of that same hall closet and began to fiddle around with it.

We had the Internet back then, I think; we got it sometime while I was in high school, but it was expensive to use it and there wasn’t all that much information on it and it would never have occurred to me to go online and Google how to use a film camera in order to rapidly learn what F-stops meant.

You’re about to hit a paywall. Below the paywall you’ll find the story of how I came to love double exposure photography, my job working as a Walmart Portrait Studio photographer, the Georgia O’Keeffe photo series, and how it all relates to the work that I’m doing today.

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