This was once a stand of trees. A few years ago they were all razed to the ground. I have a hard time believing they destroyed the trees to create a small agricultural field in a suburban complex of houses and big box stores. More and more I am noticing the plague of plastic bags on the landscape…

Well, I think I’ve finally settled on what could well by the final edit of Where will I spend my happy days?

So here it is:

Please excuse the little demo label that popped up on the first image… I decided to try out a free demo of Soundslides to make it, and I must say I’m impressed. The interface is simple and intuitive, and it did exactly what I wanted. Embedding it here turned out to be more complex than I’d expected, but everything else was so simple, I’m not sure I can complain.

In other news, Deep Sleep magazine has just published Issue 4 Memory, and my work (Many Scars) is in it.

Just before we left for South Africa, Die Antwoord started going around the Interwebs. I got a kick out of it but not in a really serious way. But yesterday I found this video (through the Photography Post – which is a great new resource, although I can’t seem to make the RSS feed work in my bloglines account).

You must watch this collaboration between Die Antwoord and Roger Ballen. I love it. (Incidentally, the video I linked to is better quality than the one embedded at TPP. I just can’t figure out how to embed it. Oh well – click over).

The CONTACT festival has launched its website for the 2010 festival. I think I’m most excited about getting to see Tony Fouhse’s USER in print (besides my workshop with Alec Soth of course). His show is at Pikto Gallery if you’re in the area, and I plan to go to the opening on May 7 (unless I collapse from information overload during my workshop).

I noticed the other day that Pikto is also offering two workshops with Donald Weber in May, both of which I’ve taken and highly recommend for anyone interested in deepening their photographic practice. Documentary Photography is a two-day workshop with a week for shooting an assignment in between, and Grant Writing is one day. I didn’t take it to learn how to apply for grants; I took it because I’ve been struggling to write about my photography. He broke down an approach to writing about your work, a structure. But more importantly, he gave me confidence to trust myself – to BE myself when writing about my work. For so long, I’ve been wishing someone smart would come and tell me what’s going on in my pictures on a deeper level. (Don didn’t do that.) I thought that to be successful in the art photography world you have use academic language and concepts, but Don emphasized straight honesty to the point of rawness. And he’s won a number of lucrative grants so the proof is in the pudding.

Anyways, back to CONTACT. I have to say, I’m more than a little disappointed with TVO’s programming. Most of the films were also played last year, with only a few exceptions. But the talks for the festival look great. The Magnum workshop instructors will all be speaking in the evenings during the first week of May. I’m also pretty keen to check out the panel discussion about contemporary African photography.

I think I’m getting close to a final edit of my Woodstock work. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this image, which didn’t make it into my first edit, but which is becoming a favourite.

Sometimes I love my neighbourhood.

You think it’s all boring all the time, then you come across these treasures of whimsy. Again and again, I ask myself: Who lives here??? Who DOES this??? People are weird and wonderful.

You know that scene in the movie Annie when they get her back from the orphanage and everyone starts dancing around Daddy Warbuck’s huge mansion, singing, “We got Annie! We got Annie!” Well, I’m doing that inside my head. Only my words are, “I got in! I got in!”

I got into the Magnum Workshop in Toronto with Alec Soth!

How much do I admire Alec Soth? A lot, a lot.

When I was 20 or so, I loved Al Purdy’s poems. In fact, I loved his poems from the first time I read them when I was around 16. When I was 20, he was still my favourite living (then) poet. He had a reading here at The Albion Hotel, my local watering hole, and I just couldn’t believe my luck in getting to hear him read. Then I got an opportunity to go to the Harbourfront Tribute to him (I think it was 1996? 1997?), and I didn’t think it would get better than that. And then I got to go interview him at his home in Sidney, BC.

This is just like that.

Only this time, I won’t fuck it up.

Eek! Not only am I going to hear Alec Soth talk (presumably about his approach and experiences), but I’m going to meet him. I’ll probably even get to carry on an actual conversation with him. I wonder if he’ll sign my book?

So yesterday I photographed the Tri-City Roller Girls. I was nervous as hell, because I’ve never had to pose and direct such large groups in such short time before, but it was a lot of fun. Of all the ways I envisioned the day, the one scenario I never envisioned was standing behind three strange men in front of urinals. But I did.

Unfortunately, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hold the camera steady and it’s a bit unsharp. What can you do?

There are three teams in the league, and I photographed all three.

Tri-City Thunder is the travel team, made up of players from the other two teams.

Vicious Dishes

Venus Fly Tramps

All in all, a great day.

I’ve whittled my work from Woodstock down to a number that I can at least show you in a slideshow — albeit a long one. I still need to edit it further down, but I think I’ll leave that for a few months to gain some distance. In the meantime, here it is, with a working title of Where will I spend my happy days?

Woodstock has a reputation for being dangerous. One person I spoke to said his wife was held up at gunpoint there, and another one told me he’d been mugged there. Someone else told me it was seriously dangerous, like murder dangerous due to all the gang activity there. Another (coloured) person told me that he feels much safer in historically Black areas than in historically Coloured areas like Woodstock. The Manager of the Woodstock Improvement District, who provided me with a security guard to help me in my project, told me he’s sick of this idea that Woodstock is dangerous. But when I asked if that meant that I could wander the streets by myself with my camera, he said no way. When he saw my camera he guffawed, “Shue! You’re crazy if you think can you walk around by yourself with THAT!”

It strikes me that the South African idea of safety is… well, skewed to say the least.

Being a mother, I had no interest in putting my life or mental health at risk, certainly not for photography, but I didn’t really feel like I was doing that in Woodstock. The problem was that I didn’t feel like I could trust my own judgment because there were probably all kinds of cultural cues I was missing. My safety meter wasn’t calibrated to Cape Town. So I began with a question, but my explorations quickly turned into an obsession with personal security and how people carry out their daily lives under the constant threat of being mugged or carjacked or killed.

My original goal with this project was to make enough good work to apply for grants to return and finish it over a longer term. But I think my love affair with South Africa has moved from the honeymoon phase to the morning after, and I’m not so interested in returning right now. As I’ve been attempting to edit this work, I keep feeling like it’s just unfinished. There are gaps and missing threads that if I’d had more time I could have figured out how to fill but I just didn’t have time to work through all that. Sadly, it might just remain unfinished forever, which feels like a terrible disservice to the people who helped me and invited me into their homes: Sam and her family at the Woodstock Torchbearer, the Woodstock Improvement District, the manager and residents of the Haven Old Age Home for the Destitute, Dennis, Jeffrey, Carol and Nathanial, Elizabeth and Lindsay, and Vanessa, among others.

Where will I spend my happy days?

I didn’t end up making it out to many galleries in Cape Town, but we did go to the SA National Gallery, where I fell in love with Araminta de Clermont’s Matric Queens (the complete body of work was exhibited at another Joao Ferreira Gallery in October 2009 with the name Before Life).

I’m sad that she doesn’t appear to have her own website, but I did find a couple of great audio slideshows of her work. This one features Before Life, the pictures of Matric Queens, and this one features her earlier work about former prisoners and their tattoes, Life After. Go check both of them out. You won’t be sorry.

So we’re home now, waking up at 4 in the morning and falling asleep before a half-assed dinner. I’m working on my edit of work from Woodstock, and I think what I’ve learned is that I can’t do the kind of work I want to do in a week or two. This is a good thing to learn. Unfortunately, it means that my work form Woodstock feels unfinished and disparate. If I was able to work on it over months, I think I would have figured out the right thread. I may still figure it out from home. In the meantime, here are a few random shots.

And a few family/bricolage shots…