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Introduction to An Eames Primer |
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From An Eames Primer (2002) by Eames Demetrios:
When I was 14, I volunteered at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, and, through an elaborate set of circumstances, I was lucky enough to go on a trip to the South Pacific to swim on the back of a 30-foot whale shark. The night before I left, my grandfather, Charles Eames, showed up at our door completely unexpectedly. He came with a camera, one of those very basic 35mm models that came to market in the mid-1970s, for me to take on the trip. Charles told me that it was the least expensive one he could find and he wanted me to know that if it was lost or drenched it was no big deal. He said he and my grandmother Ray had gotten it for me because they knew that if I borrowed my parents' Nikon, I would be too afraid of dropping it in the ocean to do anything with it. In fact, he feared I might never take it out of the room. What was amazing to me even then was that this exact fear had been tugging at me--what if I destroyed my parents' valuable camera? Charles had brought precisely the right gift. I even took some pictures of that whale shark that were part of my own first publication.
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