Emmet interviewed me for my first visual arts class. I don't really remember what we discussed, since I knew little about photography, but I remember toward the end of the interview he gently placed his hand on my knee, only for a moment, and I immediately felt secure and welcome in that environment, like when a seasoned waitress smiles and calls you "doll," nourishing you with words as well as food. His kindness and sincerity affected me profoundly through that simple, familiar gesture, and I have never forgotten it. As luck would have it, however, I didn't have Emmet for an instructor until maybe two years later, yet I always felt like I was his student.

Emmet always went out of his way to be positive and/or constructive when he talked about a student's work. I do not ever recall him making a negative comment about anything. If he didn't particularly like or support some direction of your work, you didn't immediately know it because he would adapt his discussion to highlight some positive aspect of the work, whether it was the content or the technique or simply something interesting-and occasionally seemingly unrelated-that it conjured up. I can remember two texts that he assigned as reading, and at the time I didn't understand their connections to making photographs; I barely understood how to use a 35mm camera. One was a guide for actors by Boleslavsky, the other was a small book titled Science and Human Values by Jacob Bronowski, which I never read because the relevance wasn't literal enough for me then. Yet it was a particularly valuable lesson—in a school where the majority of students were exceedingly grade-conscious, he consistently made you think beyond the narrow limitations of course expectations and the grading system. What you earned at the end of each semester, it seemed, was the value of what you had honestly learned and how you were able to demonstrate that learning, not only in the class but also in the rest of your life; somehow Emmet knew what that was for each student. He made students think; he taught you how to draw connections between gelatin silver particles balancing fragilely on a sheet of paper and man's understanding of the cosmos, between the alchemy of developers and humankind's tumultuous relationship with nature—he taught me how to make photography an integral part of my life rather than just a thing that I do. I became a photographer and photographic historian, without a doubt because I had Emmet as one of my earliest influences; I learned more from his gentle and generous being than from any other single source. To this day, I never make an image without imagining what he might see in it.