another picture, this one post-bath

I almost forgot about nablopomo. I just remembered that I have to post now, and I feel like I’ve been going nonstop all day. I haven’t given any thought to what to post.

Tomorrow I’m going to photograph two people I met at the Drop In Centre. I’ve been meaning to blog about how this came about, but I haven’t yet. To be honest, I’m pretty preoccupied with planning the NYC trip. I’m hoping once we settle on accommodations, my blog posts will get better.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from my daily walk to work.

Oh wait! I’ve been kind of wanting to ask who’s reading here? I know some of you – the ones who comment occasionally. But if you haven’t commented yet, why not drop a note here? Sometimes this space feels kinda lonely…

Here are some pictures from our 2008 trip to Cuba that I never uploaded. Not sure why I didn’t upload them, because I’ve always like them, but I don’t think they offered enough of the spectacle at the time. I was also really into heavy post-processing, and these pictures just didn’t work for that. I’m hoping that sometime during nablopomo I will write about how my eye has changed over time, but not tonight. I’m tired, and besides, poor, cancelled Dollhouse is on tonight (I hope). So here you go:

Those are all from Varadero.

This one, which I did upload to flickr, but didn’t put in any galleries here, is from Havana. It remains a favourite of mine, even though the cafe ripped us off for breakfast.

On Remembrance Day, I forgot to take the car keys out of my pocket before walking to work. For the third time in a week. These are the keys my husband uses to start the car that takes him to work 45 minutes away. For the third time in a week. I have never before done such an absentminded thing, let alone three times in a week. That is usually the domain of my husband.

In related news, my kid has woken me up every night for a few hours each night for the last four nights. Three of them were due to peeing accidents, his first since he stopped wearing pull-ups to bed a few weeks ago. Tonight he is back in a pull-up, and I told him if he wakes up tonight he mustn’t wake me up. Somehow I doubt he will listen. Regardless, I am exhausted.

And speaking of my kid, here are some of scenes he’s created that I’ve recently come upon.

I was so struck by his sense of geometry that I took an aerial view too:

Here are some pictures of Ron and Leona.

Considering that I make my living from words, I find it a little surprising just how antagonistic I feel towards them in the realm of photography. Antagonistic is perhaps too strong a word, but you get the gist. When placed next to pictures, words often carry more cognitive weight, per unit of visual space, than the images. For example, when I go to a gallery or read a book of photography, if captions are presented next to the images, I find myself glancing at the picture, reading the caption and moving on. I only stop if the caption reveals something I didn’t see in the first look. Sometimes I don’t even look at the picture to begin with, I just go straight to the caption, then glance at the picture to check whether the caption makes sense.

If a book or gallery doesn’t provide any verbal information at all near the picture, I spend a lot more time looking at the picture, formulating my own sort of caption. I may never actually form the words, but I figure out what’s happening in the picture all on my own. I much prefer these enforced brakes on my experience. Good examples of this kind of book are Doug DuBois’s …all the days and nights and Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi. They both open with essays written by other people, a sort of open-ended musing on the collection of images, and both books end with more personal accounts from the photographers about making the images. They also both have a list of the images with caption information at the end, so you gather the book’s meaning in layers of questions. In both cases, I went relatively quickly through the images once, then back to read the text, then through the images again, and finally the plate lists with captions. For all my impatient nature, I loved the way I experienced these books as a slow unfolding.

* * *

In all the photography I’ve been looking at over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that artists’ statements fall into one of two camps. The first is the academic camp. These statements are characterized by elevated language and jargon. Now, jargon has a bad reputation, but there’s really nothing inherently wrong with jargon. It acts as a kind of short-hand for very complex abstractions. It also serves to identify people who are within the circle of specialized knowledge the jargon is describing — and people who are not. The problem only comes if jargon is used to communicate with people outside that circle. These statements often go along with highly conceptual work, although not always. For me, these kinds of statements often feel like a long, narrow hallway with only a small door at the end. A one-way hallway. They restrict my experience of the images to such a degree that I don’t even really need to see them. All I need to do to understand what the artist has to say is to understand the statement. If you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of these kinds of statements. By using jargon, they become inaccessible to people without that highly specialized knowledge of art history, theory, and contemporary practice. And I really don’t think access to art should be restricted.

The second kind of statement uses simpler, everyday (or should I say quotidian?) language. They feel more like a beginning to me, like an open door, inviting you into a warm, well-lit room that you can’t see the corners of until you get inside it. These statements are accessible to anyone with a reasonable level of literacy, and chances are the photographs are also accessible to people with low literacy (which, you may be shocked to hear, is just under 50% of the Canadian population). I really admire Phil Toledano’s statements for their elegance and brevity. They give you just enough information to begin your own encounter with the images, and this, to me, is what an artist’s statement should do.

Just before I started writing down this post – I’d been mentally composing snippets of it all day – I saw on conscientious a quote on this very subject that seems pretty apt now: “Artists doesn’t own the meaning of their artworks.”

I guess I still subscribe to the belief that a good photograph should be able to stand on its own without verbal description. The experience may be enhanced by a caption or statement, but it shouldn’t depend on one. (This is why I sequenced the images and text of Two-Powered independently — to avoid subjugating the images to illustrations of the text or subjugating the words to captions of the images. I wanted to create a tension between the words and images. I’m not sure I was successful: I think the words carry more power than the pictures, but what can I say? I did my best.)

I’m thinking about this now, because I’m trying to figure out a statement for my many scars series. Part of me wants to say almost nothing, to let the pictures stand on their own, and the other part wants to tell everything he’s ever told me because he’s such an interesting person and because all the things he told me informed the images that resulted. Perhaps I just have to figure out a way to enforce a sort of afterword online?

Anyways, enough going on about this. So You Think You Can Dance is on!

Wow, this interface looks different! (Not the one you’re looking at as you read this, but the one I’m looking at while I type.) My husband upgraded wordpress for my blog last night for the first time since I launched it nearly two years ago now. And it’s totally different. This on the same day that my employer switched to Microsoft Outlook for its email platform. Oh well.

So I finished the Chelsea Hotel book and have tentatively booked a room there for our trip. Photographer Claudio Edinger lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the early 80s and published the book in honour of the hotel’s centennial in 1983. Did you know Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there? Or that William S. Burrows wrote Naked Lunch there? And Henri Cartier-Bresson stayed there too. I just found all that out yesterday, in this book. Anyways, in the introductory text, Edinger describes the problem of photographing one’s neighbours: “Then my problems began. A woman from the fifth floor, who saw me taking pictures, was convinced that I was with the FBI. She called me to let me know she knew. A notorious Lothario, once convicted of rape, menaced me with black magic, because I photographed him in the halls without his permission. For weeks afterward I checked around my door for little dolls bristling with steel pins.”  He goes on to describe the parade of people who lived in the room next to his, saying “I probably could have done a book just on my next-door neighbors, but at what cost to my safety and sanity I’ll never know.”

In a great section on the history of the hotel and its more famous inhabitants, Pete Hamill says death is part of the romantic myth of the Chelsea, and cites the death of Dylan Thomas there, which is memorialized with a plaque, among others. “But there are no plaques for the people who still arrive, full of hope or despair, to make the Chelsea their home. Years ago, the Life magazine writer Marshall Smith described the Chelsea as ‘the world’s most tolerant, non-expendable third-rate hotel.’ That description remains true today, a hundred years after it rose over 23rd Street. There is a myth of the dead, but within Chelsea people live. When I walk by the hotel on a summer afternoon, I often think about the hundreds of people inside, writing and painting and sculpting and dreaming, and I want someone to celebrate the living. To hell with the waste of early death. Life is lived here.”

Edinger’s beautiful black and white portraits, which remind me of Cartier-Bresson’s portraits actually, do that. You can view many of the photographs in a gallery on his site that pairs photographs from Venice Beach and Chelsea Hotel.

Too busy obsessing over the Chelsea Hotel (and reading Chelsea Hotel* with stunning photographs by Claudio Edinger and written contributions by Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, and other residents – it’s wonderful!) to write a proper blog post, so instead I give you another picture from Halloween that I didn’t post the first time around.

Soon, I hope, I will write real content.

*I popped over to the university library today and sure enough they had the book I’d seen mentioned several times in my research yesterday. Funnily enough, though, it was in the hotel and food administration section, not the photography section.

Anyone who knows me knows I tend towards obsessive thinking. For the last few years photography and researching related purchases and education have been the subject of much of it, although trips are right up there too – figuring out where to stay, getting the best deal in accommodation or finding the place that best matches our needs, researching things to see and do, that kind of thing. I’ve been wondering why it hadn’t kicked in for NYC, for quite a while now. I think maybe I just wasn’t ready to commit to either bringing our son with us, or leaving him behind — both options have major drawbacks. Not long ago, my son finally realized that it might be a lot of fun to hang out with Grandma and Grandpa for a few days, and now I’m really ready to leave him.

Sure enough, last night my obsessive thinking kicked in, and I’ve been researching, researching, researching online, mostly about where to stay. This evening, I’m obsessing over whether to stay at the Chelsea Hotel – you know, the title of Leonard Cohen’s song about Janis Joppelin? Yeah, THE Chelsea Hotel. I’m super keen to make pictures there and to see all the art that is all over its walls, but I’m not sure I actually want to sleep there. It’s hard to know from people’s reviews what you’re really in for, because everyone has different standards for comfort and different expectations, but surely it has to be at least a little better than the bedroom we stayed in in Havana? The bedroom itself wasn’t bad at all, but real Cuban plumbing is awful – you can’t flush any amount of toilet paper at all! And the shower head broke off so it made only a little cold, pee-like stream.

As much as I’m not one for roughing it (we never, ever camp), I’m awfully enamoured with the idea of staying there. Just do a little search on flickr for pictures of it and you’ll see why.

I was planning to write about something else today, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Another day perhaps.

Here is a story my son just told me.

One time, a long, long time ago, I was lonely in my carseat. And I saw a light come down to the ground and the car got hooked up to the light, and I called, “MOMMY! DADDY!” because I was SOOOO lonely. I never want that to happen again.

(Do I need to clarify that this has never happened to him? Once when he refused to let me undo his carseat straps and refused to get out of the car, I left him in it while I unloaded groceries, but that was it.)

Now here is a picture that has nothing to do with that.

I’ve been walking by that trailer every day for probably two months. The other day I noticed a pregnancy test laying on the ground next to it. I tried to see whether it was positive or negative, but that part had fallen out I guess. Whatever the result, I couldn’t help but wonder if they made the woman who peed on that stick happy or sad. And where it came; I couldn’t see any other spilled garbage nearby, and it seems too big to be blown from away. Oh well… just another of life’s great mysteries I guess.