A smiling Sylver Short back yard Casa Grande Arizona 2005 Acrylic Print

Sylver got her nickname when she headed a commune in Washington in the 1970's. Her hair had turned prematurely gray and she was dubbed "The Silver Fox." Silver morphed into Sylver.

She passed away 18 months later from a recurrence of mantle cell non Hodgkins lymphoma cancer in the early morning hours of the summer solstice.

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...