So I got my first roll from the Yashica processed and scanned to cd (holy crap it’s expensive! I’m going to have to find somewhere else I think) and I’m pretty happy. Mostly I was just trying to put the camera through it’s paces so I could see how accurate the light meter is, how the lens performs wide open, at how slow a shutter speed I can handhold, etc. The negatives look a bit underexposed in some of the lowlight situations, so I think I’ll want to get a handheld light meter eventually, but for now I think it’s ok. Overall, I’m impressed. Here are a few samples from the roll.
I’m an idiot but my friend’s cool!
So it’s dare week for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, and I still haven’t come up with a dare that’s challenging but do-able. I have, however, created a new 2010 calendar, and if you buy it, I will donate all the proceeds to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. This new calendar features images from my 2007 trip to South Africa that aren’t displayed in the gallery here and that I’ve never offered for sale. You can preview all the images in the calendar here. The calendars I sold last year are also still available, updated for 2010, and I will also donate 100% of the proceeds to the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
Happily, my friend, Janna, has come up with a fantastic dare. She and her family are eating a typical Malawian diet for the week. That means no booze, no juice or pop, no prepared foods, and a limited menu of beans, Nsima, the Malawian staple of corn meal, and beans. They’re even inviting us over for dinner tomorrow night.
Funnily enough, when I told my husband that we were going for a Malawian dinner of Nsima (the South African version is called mielie pap), he mentioned that he’s actually kind of already done the challenge. Years ago, when he lived in Toronto, he could only afford a $5 sack of corn meal, and because his job was a long commute, he only had time and energy to cook it once a day. Within a few weeks he started getting paid, and then he shifted to Chinese buffet once a day.
The great thing about this dare is that anyone can donate online. So please go support her. The Stephen Lewis Foundation does wonderful work, and this dare is a genuine challenge for them that requires a lot of thought and planning to actually carry it out.
So what are you waiting for?
more snippets
Yesterday I received a list of the other artists being included in Mother/mother-. There’s only one other Canadian besides me. Her name is Lindsay Page, she’s also a photographer, and her work is amazing. So go check it out.
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In other news, after months of planning to start upgrading my BA in English to an Honours BA in Studio Art in January, I’ve done a total about-face. I had been hoping to do 2 courses a semester for the first few semesters, so I could get through the first year prerequisites and to the stuff I really want in the photography classes in about a year. But I discovered this week that the studio art classes have 6 hours of classes per week each, and another 6 hours of homework. Which means I could only do one class a semester, and then I’d probably have to choose between photography time and family time, since the homework probably wouldn’t involved photography. And that kind of choice just doesn’t seem tenable at this time, especially when what I really want to do is improve my photography. I also realized that the core photography classes are all film-based, and mostly 35 mm I think. Now, I do want to learn more about film and darkroom techniques, especially colour printing, but I’d rather have a course about film practice, a course about digital practice, and a bunch of courses about personal vision in which you could pick your poison – film, whatever format, or digital. Finally, I also discovered that the darkroom has very limited hours, which would make it even more difficult for me to balance my family life, work life, and student life. Add all those realities to concerns I’ve had about art school all along (mostly worries, probably unfounded, that all the theory will make my work suck [more] or give me analysis paralysis), and that’s how you get a total about-face. So now I will probably become obsessed with discovering other avenues. A certificate in Photography from Ryerson may be one, although I really don’t fancy driving into Toronto one night a week all winter.
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Look what arrived on Thursday morning, a day earlier than expected?!?
I’ve shot a roll on it but it’s not processed yet. I’m curious to see whether the meter is accurate at all, and whether any of the frames are in focus… Also to what shutter speed I can hand-hold it. With no mirror slap and no heavy lens out front, I’m hoping for at least 1/60 but 1/30 would be sweet.
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David duChemin posted the other day about being present when you’re shooting. And waiting beyond the boredom. It really spoke to me, as I’m becoming increasingly aware of my impatience when shooting. I can go out on the streets with the intention of finding a place and waiting for something to happen, and I just can’t bring myself to sit down and wait. I just keep walking around until I decide to go home, with virtually nothing shot. (As Anya said in the season 6 episode of Buffy I watched last night, “I tried being patient but it took too long!”) It’s either that, or as I think I’ve mentioned here before, I shoot continuously and compulsively, often shooting the same frame over and over again.
A couple of weeks ago, I went out with my neighbour Joan to visit her husband, Royce, who lives in a long-term care facility. I spent 2 to 2 1/2 hours with her all told, and I only shot 50 frames. I watched and I waited. These are my favourites:
Backing out of the driveway from the home she and her husband built…
Although he’s retained his sense of humour despite his stroke dementia, she told me he’s not the man she married.
I’m a bit worried these pictures make her look impatient, and she’s so good with him.
She said the house was really bright when they first built it, but since the trees they planted have all grown up, it’s really dark now.
She’s making Christmas ornaments to be sold at a craft sale for Royce’s home.
update on my latest obsessions and NYC
Once again it’s been too long since I blogged. My day job is insane right now, and it means I have very little mental space and energy for things photographic. I’ve also been trying to keep up with the books I have out of the university, without much success. The one book I’ve been really enjoying is Photography After Frank by Philip Gefter, former Picture Editor for NY Times. One of the reasons I’m enrolling in school next semester is that I really want to learn more about the history of photography, and the essays in this book are really all about that. I’m only about a quarter or a third into it, but I can confidently recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the last 50 years of the medium.
I’ve also been obsessing over the purchase of a new (to me) camera. I’ve been noticing that the best portraits are often made with large format cameras, which require a very slow process to create a single image. I find working a digital SLR, especially for portraits, has pros and cons. It’s fast so you can capture actions and moments really well. But it’s also a big black machine that I have to have up to my face to get those moments. And I’m generally very impatient, so the speed suits me. But I want to slow down a bit, to become a bit more deliberate. And I want to have the ability to make pictures without a big black machine in front of my face. Also, I’ve been loving the square aesthetic lately, and although I can crop my digital pictures to square, I like to frame very carefully while I’m shooting, and I can’t really see the square that well. So for all those reasons I’ve decided to try medium format, with a twin lens reflex. I’ve been losing auctions left and right on ebay and checking out stuff on craigslist and kijiji. So far no camera, but with any luck I’ll have some kind of Yashica Mat soon. They have a waist level viewfinder which reverses the image left to right so that should slow me right down, along with the manual exposure and the possibility of not even having a meter in camera. No doubt I will experience extreme frustration in the beginning, but hopefully I’ll get through it and my photography will improve.
I promised a while back that I’d give details about the Mother/mother- exhibit and opening reception when I had them, and I’ve had them for a while. The exhibition opens on Dec. 2, and the opening reception is on Dec. 3. I believe it will be up for the month of December. I’m still trying to decide what we’ll do. Originally I’d planned to go up with my whole family but now that I’ve looked into prices, I’m not sure. I find it slightly horrifying that a few nights in NYC will cost at least as much as a week or two in the Dominican Republic, to which my sister and her family just moved last week. So now I’m wondering if perhaps it makes sense for me to find a friend to travel with. I’m even considering not going (I’d feel out of place! What would I wear?! I’d have to pretend I’m smart and gregarious!), but I’d like to meet Jennifer Wroblewski, who’s curating the show and who has been very supportive of my work. I’d love to experience NYC with my husband, but the idea of leaving our son for a few nights kind of terrifies me. Anyways, I’ll figure out something.
Thanks to that exhibition, another opportunity has opened up. It’s looking like the two pictures that are being included in Mother/mother- will also be included in The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art. I find this very strange. I’m all for being in a book about real mothers, but me? IN contemporary art? I don’t know… Anyways, you can pre-order the book, which is being published by Demeter Press, a very cool publisher out of York University focused exclusively on motherhood.
I’ve had so many rejections lately that I find I don’t really believe these good bits. But a wise friend reminded me that all arts generate more rejections than acceptances, and you just have to guard the acceptances fiercely, which is easier said than done. But I’ll try.
So that’s all for now.
It’s been too long since I last posted. As usual, my mind is full of half-formed thoughts and rotating obsessions.
Anyways, here are some pictures of the Roller Derby I went to on Saturday. My friend is hoping to make the team for next year. She has WAY more courage than me! They hit the ground hard! But they do have awesome names. My favourite on Saturday was Lippy Wrongstockings.
There was a fire-eater outside the arena.
They have awesome taste in socks!
Greta Garbage, Anita Martini, and Lippy Wrongstockings got sent to the Sin Bin (aka the penalty box).
You can see a slide show of the whole set here.
about South Africa
The last time we went to South Africa in January 2007, we decided we would fer sher go back in the first half of 2010. Part of me even hoped we might be go back before 2010 too, but it hasn’t happened. And now 2010 is approaching fast, and I’m starting to think we might not go back for a while more. The trip is just so long and gruelling, and the thought of making it with a 4-year-old makes me want to stay home. It’s also expensive, and now that I’ve been entertaining thoughts of going back to school, and now that my sister and her family are moving to the Dominican Republic for three years, I’m starting to wonder when we might actually get back to SA. And that makes me very sad.
Last weekend we watched District 9. It was such a treat to hear all the authentic South African accents, and see the real landscape around Johannesburg. I read a review that talked about how the movie is an allegory for apartheid, or the holocaust or any other major oppression in history. But I think it’s more specific than that. It seems very much set in post-apartheid South Africa, although there are certainly A LOT of echoes from apartheid. (The title itself is a reference to District Six, which was once a thriving multi-cultural neighbourhood in Cape Town, until the Group Areas Act designated it as whites-only, and all the buildings that belonged to non-whites were razed, and all the non-whites were moved elsewhere. The area pretty much remained a wasteland, although the government is building new houses there.) Also, there were just so many South Africanisms and inside jokes – so my husband told me because a lot of them went over my head – that I think although the movie has wide appeal, it’s really directed at South Africans.
A few weeks ago at the uni library, I found some books on David Goldblatt’s photography, which I first saw in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. One of his colour shots was hanging, of a domestic worker sitting in her employer’s house, and I just loved it.
Anyways, one of the books, David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, features an interview with him, critical essays about his work, other essays about South African arts generally, and of course his photos. Lots and lots of his photos. This particular quote no doubt influenced my experience of District 9:
“After about 1968, I realized that the kind of work I was doing was so internal to South Africa, so steeped in our obsessions and perversions, that without involved explanations it meant very little to outsiders. My dialogue, to the extent that it went beyond myself, was with fellow South Africans. My dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgements. This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite.”
Here are some more quotes from the interview that are still rolling around in my head:
On living in apartheid:
“[...] over time it grew evident that the real conflict was [...] how to square one’s conscience with being a white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life. Was one to become an activist, a saboteur, a worker in the underground? I had neither the conviction nor the guts for that. [...] Once I became seriously engaged in it, photography became my way of being politically active. It was a political act. I must be careful to tell you, though, that I would not allow my photographs to be used for political purposes. [...] I came to learn that the messages that editors, propagandists, and political bodies wished to attach to my pictures rarely corresponded with my own concerns. I took these photographs because I was engaged in a dialogue – between the subject and me.”
On his approach to photography
“I came to realize that I was not cut out for news work. Editors wanted photographs of events, and I saw that as a photographer I wasn’t all that interested in events. I was and am far more engaged by the states of being that lead to events, by the conditions of society rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions.”
“My photography became a political inquiry, an interest in real things. My concern was not to make “interesting photographs” but to probe the immediate world I lived in.”
“Long ago I tried to make pictures like those that came from Europe, soft and beautifully modulated. It used to break my heart – I could never get my pictures to look like that. Then, in 1961, I realized that it had to do with light. We have a lot of it in South Africa, and it is often sharp and harsh. So instead of fighting our light, I began to enjoy it and to work with it. I photographed from within rather than as if I were visiting from somewhere else.
“At the same time, my work became more oblique. I sought out irony and tried to impregnate pictures with a sense of it, for it often revealed the nuances and complexities of our life in South Africa.”
More on apartheid and his sense of place
“It was impossible to live in this country and be separate from the system. You couldn’t do it. The system penetrated every aspect of life here. [...] You were complicit simply by being here. By breathing the air. In living ordinary decent lives, paying the rent, sending kids to school, taking jobs, catching trains, blacks were complicit in their own oppression, and whites, even if they opposed the system, by living within it were complicit in the subjection of blacks. Unless, that is, they were activists prepared to go to prison and die for their beliefs.”
And finally, he had some comments about his methods. He says this about working in Soweto during apartheid: “A white mane in those places at the time attracted a great deal of attention, from both the populace and the security police. I developed an approach that usually disarmed both. I unambiguously declared my presence and purpose, which was to photograph ordinary life. I adopted a slow and formal photography, no shooting from the hip, the camera invariably on a tripod, everything upfront and transparent. Ordinary onlookers soon got bored, while the police seemed not to know what to make of the sheer banality of what I was doing.”
Later on in the book are essays by JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, among others. Nadine Gordimer went out with Goldblatt on some of his shoots and she had this to say: “When one looks at some of the astonishing revelatory Goldblatt photographs it is in immediate response difficult to believe the fact that he never takes photographs of people surreptitiously, except in the anonymity of the crowd. Unthinkable for him to do a Walker Evans, hiding a camera between his coat buttons on a New York subway train. Sometimes when working with him, particularly in the Transkei among rural people, I found myself amazed and humbled by the way in which he would not seize his perceived wonderful moment because the subject whose image presented itself did not want to be photographed. Goldblatt always asked permission, and if he was refused, gave thanks – his respect for the decision – and walked on.
“I saw later, in the evidence of the photographs he did take how superficial as well as ethically doubtful my regret for “missed” images was. I think of the old woman in her mud home; her contemplated grace of ignoring the process of photography she had consented to. Susan Sotag quotes Brassai saying he didn’t want to catch subjects off guard in the hope that something special would be revealed of them. For Goldblatt, like Brassai, that something special in the subject doesn’t have to be caught off guard; if it is there, it is Goldblatt’s challenge to himself to find it even when the subject is “on guard”. He does not use the camera as a licence, freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people he photographs.”
2 things I tell myself
when I’m feeling down…
1. Keep shooting. It’s ok if your pictures suck; they’ll get better if you keep shooting. It’s when you stop that you need to worry.
2. Keep the creative act separate from the critical act. In other words, don’t listen to the judger while shooting or thinking about shooting.
Sunday grouch
I don’t think I’ve brought my camera to the drop-in since May. Having posted the first edit to my site here, I felt like the work was sort of complete, at least for the moment. I brought my camera with me on Thursday, but I wasn’t planning to shoot, I just happened to have it with me. I was hoping to find some of the people I photographed in May to give them prints, but none of them were around. Apparently Gerry is in Sudbury.
Anyways, I felt like an ass with my big honking camera there, like everyone I wasn’t sitting with was looking at me and imagining all sorts of exploitative intents in my mind. I don’t usually go on Thursdays, and it’s busier and there’s a lot of people who don’t come on the weekend when I usually volunteer. So I felt like an ass.
That’s neither here nor there, except that it felt a lot better being there yesterday. One man used to have his own darkroom and shot with a Rolleiflex, but he lost a lot of his equipment when he landed on the streets. I asked him yesterday if I could photograph him sometime for my project, and he said sure, although he didn’t know why I’d want to. I said, “Why wouldn’t I want to?” and he didn’t have a response to that. When I told him that I would want to publish them in the context of being made there, he confessed that he was actually delighted to be asked. Delighted. That was his word. It’s funny that I feel like such a vulture sometimes, when a lot of people are just happy to be seen.
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This week I went to my uni library again, and I’m so impressed with its collection of photography books. They just acquired Doug Dubois’s All the Days and Nights, which I actually ordered last weekend (it’s on sale for $30 for the hardcover on Amazon.ca – a deal I couldn’t pass up, especially since I’d been scoping it out ever since it was released in June). I picked up Alec Soth’s Sleeping Along the Mississippi, and I can’t stop looking at its pages. The Internet really doesn’t do justice to his work. It occurred to me as I browsed through different photography books at the library that I want to look at photography that keeps me looking. I saw lots of books that had interesting concepts or stories, but when I looked at the pictures, I didn’t want to linger over them. The photos didn’t make me want to keep looking.
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I suspect my photos do not keep people looking. The other day I had a horrible thought. You know how So You Think You Can Dance always features lots of bad auditions by really bad dancers? And sometimes they’re shocked and disbelieving when the judges tell them they suck? Like they truly can’t see the difference between their own dance and that of better dancers? What if that’s my photography? I say this not to fish for compliments – if you complimented my work right now I wouldn’t believe you anyways – but to be honest about the self-doubt I’m feeling. I kind of hate all my pictures.
I found a ray of hope on Nevada Weir’s blog when she outlined the ten stages of a travel photographer’s development. I suspect it can be reasonably generalized to any photographer? Anyways, the ninth stage is when you hate everything you’ve ever done, so fingers crossed I’m on the threshold of some enlightenment or breakthrough.
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Apparently, my judging part is working overtime these days. Photolife magazine published their list of emerging photographers. I got excited at the thought of discovering some Canadian photographers so I bought it. Some of the images grabbed me so I came home and checked out the photographer’s websites. And I was really disappointed. Most of the sites I visited had slick-looking sites, but they were totally unusable. The navigation was impenetrable, they took too long to load, and in one case the only way to see someone’s photography was to click next on each image with no indication of how many pictures there were to get through, or any kind of categories. So when I hit a bunch of work that did nothing for me and bore no resemblance to the work published in the magazine, I just gave up because I couldn’t see any other way around. It just amazes me how many web designers there are out there with absolutely no concern for the user experience. <Ok, end of rant.>
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Oh wait, just one more thing. The other day I was sorting through my pictures of John. I have date with him later today to go to pretty much the diviest bar in town — also the only bar downtown that I never once visited during my uni years — where he occasionally goes for a beer. Anyways, I discovered this picture, which I rejected on the first pass-through, but now I think it’s pretty good.
I like the little wisp of smoke, the red ember, the outlet coming out of the wall, the box of cereal beside him and the carefully closed bag from the box on the arm of the couch.
I can hear Don Weber’s voice now, “You’re a LOUSY editor.” It wasn’t originally directed at me, but I think it fits. Now how can I learn to be a better editor?
Woohoo!
Hot on the heels of hearing that I didn’t make the list of finalists for Critical Mass, I just received official notification that at least one of my Two-Powered pieces will be included in the Mother/mother- exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City!!! The email had this to say:
“Mother/mother- began as a labor of love, to find work by artists willing to embrace their dual roles of parent and artist, who proudly let parenting inform and expand their work. There were over 300 submissions, many of which were strong.”
Details about dates and which pieces are still to come. I’ll keep you posted!
shooting vs editing
Tony Fouhse in his post today talked about ways of shooting and editing, and how one influences the other. He concluded that he prefers to shoot a lot and give himself permission to make mistakes, bark up the wrong tree, and edit them out, than to restrict his shooting and show every single frame. I definitely have the same approach.
However, I shoot a bit compulsively; I take the same picture over and over again, almost as a kind of insurance. I do try to move around and explore the subject from many angles, but I suspect it’s all a bit excessive. I’d like to blame digital, but I remember shooting an entire roll of 36 frames in South Africa of exactly the same scene, and not one of them was remotely usable.
For example, I’m working on a series of photographs about John. I think I mentioned him here before? Anyways, back in July he invited me to photograph him while he got a tattoo. I was delighted. And I knew that because this was part of a larger series, I’d probably only end up with one shot in the final edit. So I went and I shot. I shot close to 500 frames, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was thinking. The thing is, I knew only one frame would end up making it, but I didn’t know which one that would be. Maybe it will come with more experience, but the Decisive Moment doesn’t present itself to me when I’m shooting with trumpets and stars. I’ve had way too many experiences where six months or a year down the road, I find a photo I’d initially labelled as a reject but now discover it’s actually really good. I’d just been too close to the experience of shooting and the expectations I developed in the moment. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 8 frames.
I’m not sure how I’ll proceed from here, but since I still have more shooting to do with John, I’ll let the project unfold before I get my knickers in too much of a twist.
Image Makers, Image Takers revealed some interesting takes on this issue.
William Eggleston had this to say: “It happens so fast. I compose very quickly and without thinking, but consciously. I take a picture instantly and never more than one. Sometimes I worry about the picture being out of focus, but I take that chance. A long time ago, I would have taken several shots of the same thing, but I realized that I could never decide which one was the best. I thought I was wasting a lot of time looking at these damn near identical pictures. I wanted to discipline myself to take only one picture of something, and if it didn’t work out, that’s just too bad.”
Whereas Tina Barney said, “My theory is, the more pictures you take, the better you get. It’s like a sport. I never wait to get a particular shot because wonderful accidents can happen when you shoot a lot.”
Also, I’ve recently seen some collections with different frames from the same scene or almost the same moment, that I find quite thought-provoking and compelling. The first was in David Goldblatt, Hasselblad Award 2006, which I got from the university library. The book contains several fold-out pages that show three different views of the same scene, and they don’t feel self-indulgent like someone just couldn’t decide at all. Each image adds to the other in a meaningful and important way. Laura Pannack’s series, “grams,”is another example of several shots from the same day and scene.
Nevertheless, I’d like to find a way to be a little more deliberate and sparing in my shooting without closing myself off to the unexpected.