Biography • How I Got into Stereo • My Work
Currently, Georgette Freeman is leading a second life as a book artist and book arts instructor in San Francisco. Since first attending college in 1967, she has garnered BAs in Journalism and History and pursued other extensive academic undergraduate course work in 2-D materials and design, drawing, sculpture, and accounting. She has shown work in various non-profit fine art photographic and book art venues since 1971.
In addition, Georgette has participated in numerous photographic and book arts workshops over the years, and taught workshops in stereo card making since 2000. Since 2003, she has continuously taught book art workshops at the San Francisco Center for the Book. In 2005, Georgette retired from the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a field examiner.
Georgette wasn’t born with a camera in her hands. Until the summer of ’67 (she was twenty), she’d never clicked a shutter. But then she clicked some 720 times on a car trip from Sacramento to New York City, to EXPO 67 in Montreal, and back home by way of Saskatchewan.
Of course, what got her into photography wasn’t the shutter sound, but all that ruined film. Having followed the exposure instructions included in each box of Kodachrome, she spent the next year in and out of a darkroom learning the relationships between film speed, light and f/stops.
Five years and a couple of exposure meters later, Georgette had under her belt three years as a photographer on a semi-daily newspaper, two years as a still photographer in the Army, and a BA degree in Journalism and History. Then she got a job. A real job, as a federal clerk.
In 1997, Georgette found herself a writer of serious non-fiction for the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. And, in the interim, not only did she pick up academic training in accounting, but she also studied two-dimensional materials and design at an art school for five years, as well as the Zone System and West Coast Photography at photographic workshops given over the years by Morley Baer, Ted Orland, Oliver Gagliani, and John Sexton. “I allowed myself to become a minor government official,” she says, “because I couldn’t afford to support my photographic interests otherwise.”
At the time a dabbler in black & white formats, Georgette discovered stereo photography in 1995 and began producing Holmes-Bates format stereo cards. “I don’t know where stereo will lead,” she says, “but it definitely is a medium where photography, writing, design, and desktop publishing can be legitimately united.”
Since 2002, Georgette has taught stereo card making classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book. In addition, looking to dignify her hand, Georgette Freeman is a student of calligraphy, as well as a journalist and photographer, book artist, and a retired SEC examiner.
This work is what I was doing from 1995 to 2001, when not examining investment advisers’ books and records for the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. As I flew, from Bakersfield CA in the south, to Fairbanks AK in the north, and from Great Falls MT in the east, to Port Angeles WA in the west, this is what I was thinking about on the plane.
Back then, my first name was George. I was male, straight, deep into my SEC career, well along in a relationship with a woman, and had no children, but plenty of hobbies including photography. My partner’s passion was dogs and dog training.
But something was missing in my life. I wasn’t personally engaged. I was 48 years old in early 1995 and about to have a mid-life crisis that no amount of red cars or illicit lovers could satisfy. I had last tried to transition in gender back in 1982, but with my “male” background and without money, gender change was not then attainable. Going back into the closet, I also quit art school, which I had been attending nights and weekends on the GI Bill, and instead focused on accounting and my SEC career.
That all began to change in May 1995 while attending the opening for a show of stereo cards at Sacramento’s Viewpoint Gallery. There I met and was befriended by the show’s curator, the great stereographer David Lee.
That night I saw my own opportunity. The stereo cards on display were by photographers who did not combine writing with their imagery. If there was text, it was only in the card’s title or back label. The folks weren’t into providing context.
The idea to combine the two, to provide context for the imagery, was “triggered” by childhood memories of my Aunt Pearl’s set of stereo cards. When my family visited her in the mid-1950s I would pore over her set of Keystone’s “Tour of the World.” On the back of each card was an explanation of the scene.
Fueling the idea were articles I wrote for View Camera magazine in 1994 and the pursuit of my own version of Mike Mandel’s Baseball Photographer Cards. Quickly, I took to making “store bought–looking” stereo cards and to letting my fancies fly, as I hope you see they did.
By 1999, my audience had grown to include fellow Stereoscopic Society of America circuit members, annual National Stereoscopic Association convention goers, collectors, Amateur Photographic Exchange Club III members, co-workers, and friends. Also I began outing myself through stereo cards as someone who questioned his own gender.
By late 2000, after attending a crossdressers’ convention, I started my transition in Sacramento, continued in San Francisco, and eventually came out to my employer and supervisors. My change of name to Georgette and gender transition at work culminated in late 2001.
In 2002, my darkroom was dismantled and this chapter of my life ended. But little did I know that stereo cards would be my entrée into the world of book arts, where I now live and work. I retired from the SEC in 2005.