Hawkeye

Load right, aim sharp, and shoot well. The satisfaction of good pictures will be your reward. - Brownie Hawkeye Instruction Manual, 1959.

This is the first picture I took in my life. Roll 1. Frame 1. The Hawkeye has a fixed focus lens and no F-stops so I can't take credit for the exposure. But I'm proud of the composition. I realized from that very first experience that I could speak though images. I became a photographer that day. - David Pace, 2020, sixty years after taking his first photograph at age eight.

This rich archive of Brownie Hawkeye photographs tells both a personal and a cultural story. The photographer, David Pace, just eight years old when the first photographs were taken in 1959, captured family life at church, at home, at school, and at work in post-war America. Without consciously intending to construct a narrative of cultural change, the young photographer recorded the decline of an agricultural economy and the expansion of a new economy of consumer products, in which subdivisions replaced cherry orchards, and car dealerships replaced walnut trees. The photographs capture an important moment in the pre-history of one of America's most iconic locations: Sunnyvale, California, the heart of what we now call Silicon Valley. The neighborhood where David photographed family and friends with the Brownie Hawkeye is now the site of technology giants Apple, LinkedIn, Google, and Nokia. The young photographer, with his ability to "speak through images," left us a set of powerful Hawkeye photographs that narrate a story of the origin and history of Silicon Valley. - Diane Jonte-Pace, 2021.