When I graduated from the University of Utah, I needed a job. And so I put a proposal together and sent it to the Vice President of the University and said, For the past three years, I have been photographing all these different departments and all the doing brochures and headshots and all the things for people around campus. And so there is a need to have a photography department here, that services, just the University. He looked over the proposal liked it and said, I'll give you a job if the first year that you start up in business here on campus, that to make your salary. I had a lab and I had several people that work there with me, I was in conjunction with another department. It worked. So the first year I made my salary, and I continued on doing photography on campus that I love doing. In 1975, there came an opportunity to photograph and do a brochure for the University of Utah hospital, which is a place that I loved working out and photographing because it was so busy. 

So fun and even though it was a lot of trauma and and a lot of emotion, it was still was a great place. And so this brochure was for the premature babies that were being born. And they needed to tell the mothers how to take care of them what to do. And they didn't want to just write words. So they wanted photographs to go along with everything that was going on. So they hired a director, they hired models, and they hired me. And we started this long project to do this, it probably took us about six months to complete the whole project. Because in that six months, what I was doing was writing in ambulances, from other hospitals to the university hospital because they had this specialized unit there, I would ride along in the ambulance to take pictures of the baby as it was being transferred to just not so much the physical photograph of the baby, but just the act of what was happening in the ambulance and picking him up at the hospital and bring him to the university. So I got to do that. Plus, then once they were there, it was the care for the baby. 

And so I spent a lot of time intensive care unit for the babies. That was very joyful, because what they had in that unit was all these little premature babies who needed attention all the time. And a lot of them were in these little small units that kept them alive to give them the correct amount of oxygen, and light and warmth and everything that they needed so that they could grow properly. But the one thing that they also needed was a lot of love and attention. So they had a program where grandparents, not the real grandparents, but elderly people would come up and sit in rocking chairs with these little premature babies and hold them and love them and give them the warmth that they needed because mothers and fathers couldn't always be there all the time. It was a great program. And so I actually got to sit many days while we were waiting for things to happen to put on a gown and pull these little tiny babies in your hands, not so much in your arms because they were little but hold them and love them. And so this became actually the focus of the whole brochure was their life at this unit. My model was wonderful, beautiful girl by the name of Lindy. As you can see from the photographs, she had beautiful long hair. And one of the days that we were shooting there, she was holding this little tiny baby that had just come out of its little incubator type thing. She was holding it and loving it. Our director was off somewhere else and scriptwriter was somewhere else. And it was just Lindy and I. And as she started to hold this baby, she got feeling of how wonderful this was. All of a sudden I'm like, scrambling to grab my camera, which I always had with me anyway, but I was scrambling to get it so that I could capture this before she moved on and did something different. I had to just tell her to just stay there keep doing what you're doing and loving that baby. And as she did that, I was snapping away trying to get this beautiful shot that I could see the emotion between Her and that little baby that she was holding, because it was so amazing to see her emotion. It wasn't just a stage photographs it okay, hold up, pick up the baby and make like you're loving the baby. That didn't happen. 

She was really holding this and her heart was really there, loving that little child. So the picture then became the iconic picture. It was the front of the brochure and became the photograph that they used in all kinds of publicity to for the premier unit. There are all kinds of other shots that I did, for example, we photograph someone having a baby, but not in all the intricate parts just from just being in the operating room. We photographed the father and mother, you know, kind of there holding the baby afterwards, of course, they were actors, we photographed the emergency room. And as they came into the hospital, from the ambulance, we've had all of these different pictures, and spent all these days with these babies and with the actors, trying to make everything look as real and as sensitive as possible. So that in this brochure, they could convey to the mothers that their preemie baby is being taken care of and that the hospital had all the right equipment and had everything that they needed. 

This was a brochure that was supposed to convey love, intimacy, and beauty, and tenderness, instead of just the clinical. Here's what happens to your baby. Here's what we do. Here's how things work. Here are the rules. Here's this, here's that we took extra precautions, and did extra time trying to make sure that everything in this brochure, conveyed love and emotion. And the photograph of the baby and Lindy, totally showed that. And the same with the ones throughout the rest of the brochure, with emergency rooms and all that there was care, even in choosing the paper for the brochure, the colors for the brochure, and everything so that it conveyed this warmth. For these new mothers who had just delivered this baby, small enough that would fit in the palm of your hand and wondering if it was going to live, when no one was going to happen to it, wonder how things were going to work. This was the ultimate kind of brochure for this, it was probably one of the best projects that I had worked on to my career at that point and still highlight of my career to this day. Because we spent so much time most of the time when you do a brochure as a photographer, it's quick, quick, quick, might take you a week or two weeks to shoot everything and get it done, turn it in, give it to the art director. And they probably should. And it's done. When we spent as much time as we did in this, like six months getting this thing shot, right...