Holographer Mark Diamond

This is an introduction to one of my oldest friends: world renowned photographer and holographer Mark Diamond. Like me, Mark is a high school drop-out; we first met in 1976 at the house of a then mutual friend, and kept bumping into each other at gallery openings in odd places like the Miami Planetarium, but it wasn’t until the early 80’s that I began working with Mark in his Holografix gallery in a South Miami warehouse district (where wild parrots flew overhead every afternoon at 4 p.m. on their way back to their nesting places).
Mark started shooting photographs when he was given a camera at 5 years of age; by the time he hit his teen years he was shooting rock stars for Rolling Stone. Somewhere in the 1970s he discovered holography, became mesmerized by the grainy quality of light helium neon lasers produce, and built a holographic studio in his garage which comprised a bed of sand perched on several inner tubes , with an assortment of interferometers and beam splitters stuck in the sand at angles conducive to hologram creation. I took lessons from him and was smitten; I still have my old reflection holograms and a couple of dichromate gelatin ones to boot. He also hooked me on stereographic photography ; from him I learned the art of free fusing – the ability to focus your left eye on one image while focusing the right eye on another and fusing the images together in your mind to create a 3D view (now I don’t need to use those stereographic viewers so popular in late Victorian times).

Mark’s had a most amazing assortment of clients over the years, from Buckminster Fuller to Dizzie Gillespie to wealth-laden Sheiks looking for holographic artwork for their banquet halls. I remember being in on a 360 degree anaglyphic holographic display for an udder cream company that involved getting a cow to stand still on a revolving stage while we shot 35mm motion picture film…
In 1982 we fully expected that lots and lots of money would be put into R & D for hologram development and by the year 2000 we’d have holographic lenses replacing telescopes in the space program. But the kind of R & D money we had hoped for never materialized, at least in any public sector I know of. It’s true most of us own holograms nowadays, but we never figured they would be tiny images on our credit cards.