I knew I’d never again do anything as important.

I’d gone to Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988 to study art. Once there I toyed with the idea of majoring in sculpture but the pregnant promise of potential waiting wealth convinced me to declare a CA major (Communication Arts at VCU and graphic design or advertising design to normal people). Back in the late 80s and very early 90s, advertising campaigns like Nike’s “Just Do It” and “Bo Knows” were taking the world by storm. U&lc (Upper & lower case) magazine had faded into complete obscurity and the quiet sophistication of ads reminiscent of the “Man in the Hathaway Shirt” as still offered by Gentlemen’s Quarterly magazine were quickly becoming less Previn and more Geritol.

“Hip” was being redefined. CSNY was OK as just Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Marijuana, once legal because of absence of regulation and later highly illegal due to overeager legislation, was still cool even if it was being smoked on network television shows like thirtysomething. Making money, indeed striving to wallow in money, was good. Greed, for lack of a better word, was good. And the then jarring offerings from ad firms like W + K were cool too. Taste had been radically redefined from the carefully refined to the carefully revolutionary.

Along with it came warehouse-sized advertising firms chomping at the bit for more and more and more graphic designers. Today’s major venture capitalists were getting their first taste of controlling someone else’s company. Salaries that would have made Gordon Gekko sweat were being offered to promising, yet-to-graduate designers.

That’s where I came in. A year or so afterward, that’s where all those L.A. firms large enough to house the Spruce Goose fell as if hit with buckshot. My career jostling typefaces was over before it began.

Teaching for Head Start was not a career opportunity I leapt at. I’d left VCU and needed money. My godmother (in a high station with Head Start locally) waved a position in front of me and I only accepted when my options had dwindled to taking tolls at an underwater commuters’ tunnel. Tending others’ children six hours a day became infinitely preferable to sucking down carbon monoxide eight hours a day.

I thought I’d do the job for a year, two years with bad luck, three years in the extreme. I was beginning my fifth year when I realized just how much time had passed and how far I’d strayed from a career in any visual art whatsoever.

I took up again my old love: photography. The Yashica from college had evaporated into the miasma of things sold and traded to be replaced with an old Canon from a family friend. I took a class and then another. When I was given the leeway to assign myself a project, I photographed my Head Start students.

Children of Grandy Park represented I know not what for the International Photography Awards jury that chose to honor it last year. Visually the greatest commonality in the series is that all the subjects are African-American kids. Structurally, they’re all tight headshots. Thematically, they’re all children that appear not so very remarkable who also happen to have disquieting backgrounds.

I get something else from those photographs entirely. When I see them I remember the moments they were shot surrounded by an impenetrable vagueness. The instant Rico stared at his reflection in my lens is just as rewarding in recollection as it was when it occurred. What happened before I sat down across the table from him? What happened right after? I know that history no better than how or why I uttered my first words.

What I remember most and most keenly are those children stepping one by one onto the bus to depart for home on the last day of the last year I would teach Head Start. When that last yellow raincoat faded into the darkness, I knew I would never again have so much of an affect on a child much less sixteen of them simultaneously. When that last tiny hand waved goodbye, I knew it was not just a goodbye for the two of us but also for my best chance to affect the future. When that last little heel rose and rested on that last school bus doorstep I knew the best I could ever do was done. I knew I’d never again do anything as important.

This is the first installment of a look back on the award-winning series.