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Charles H. Traub was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1945. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois, and joined the Peace Corps after graduation in 1967. An accident in Ethiopia forced him home to Kentucky where he met Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who became an important inspiration and friend. After service in the United States Army in 1969, he decided to pursue photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. There he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel and Garry Winogrand."
Traub met Meatyard: "He was encouraging and immediately invited me to be part of an exhibition which he was holding .."
Traub, Meatyard, and May began holding crit sessions at University Of Kentucky with department head Robert Doherty.
Traub and Mendes were writers: Traub an English major (which helped him) "to discover that you could make metaphors or equivalences of your own experience that were not literal." .... [about his early work} "I don't even know if we really should call them landscapes. Rather, they are abstractions of trees that deal with the edge-to-edge problem."
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conversations define the place; sometime you overhear something interesting, so you stop, listen, and maybe join in. That is how a place and its people grow.
Traub joined some of the best conversations of his generation [RL: the conversation you missed]