There’s a certain sameness about my walk to work. Sometimes I bring my camera, although I should really take it more often. Last Friday morning, the light was lovely. It was sunny, but a bit cloudy – the sun kept sneaking behind clouds and making the light all soft and glowy. I spent most of the walk wishing I had my camera, but also knowing that I was late, and if I had my camera, I’d be later. Anyways, there was a boy wearing a big leather glove and a shaking peregrine falcon on his hand. But I didn’t have my camera so I can’t show you.

I also walk by that pregnancy test and trailer every morning, wanting to photograph the spectacle with no cars around it. Although I did have my camera on Thursday morning, because my son has speech therapy, by the time I got to the trailer there were a bunch of cars around it. This was all I could do with it.

I have to say, for the last several months I haven’t been a big fan of photographing in full sun. The wet and cool summer may have had something to do with me getting in touch with my inner Englishman.

Anyways, the sameness of my walk. We’ve been in this house for more than a year now, which means I’ve been photographing some of the same scenes in different seasons. Here are a few examples.

(the top one was last week, the bottom in June I think)

(the top was in June I think, bottom in April vs. one I posted a few days ago)

(the top one was in May I think, the bottom last week)

And here are a few more from my local environs that I like (apologies if I’ve posted them before)…

Of course, I have no idea where any of these pictures will lead, but it’s fun to do.

Did you know it’s the 25th anniversary of house music? That makes me feel old. Although, it had been around for a long time before I finally caught on about 10 years ago. Anyways, I’ve been enjoying this nice house mix created in honour of the anniversary.

It seems I’ve moved on from my NYC accommodation obsession to NYC photography galleries! Sadly, Sally Mann’s Proud Flesh is over, but I did discover that Doug DuBois’s All the Days and Nights is showing very near our Midtown hotel. It comes down 3 days after we arrive, so we’re just in time! Although I’m disappointed to miss Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood exhibition, which is happening in February. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all I guess.

I discovered this site, which lists many photography galleries in New York, although it looks a year or two out of date.

I’m nursing a bit of a headache so I’ll sign off now. Once again, a short post. Sorry. Thanks to those of you who said hello a couple posts back. Most of you I knew but there were a couple newcomers, which is always nice.

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.