I’ve added a new gallery to my site. Long-time readers might remember my post about photography and homelessness and postpartum depression, which included a quote from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City:

“Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play – can these still be called the glory days of the Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner – are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone – no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.”

That quote has been rattling around my head ever since, and I’ve decided to use it as a statement for this latest collection of images. Together, they make a sort of meditation on the idea of home and the boundary between inside and outside.

* * *

I’ve been reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and he says something that I think is also relevant here:

“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”

* * *

Inside out

Ten years ago today, I got his phone number off the store computer. Completely illegal, but it was getting late in my last shift ever there, and he was too cute to let disappear. Turned out it was moot, he came anyways, and he pulled a tiny scrap of paper from his pocket with his phone number on it. He hates it when I get to this part of the story, because he blushed and stammered when he handed me the number, and later that night my friends validated that with that kind of blushing and stammering, the mandatory waiting period before the phone call is null and void.

Five years ago today, I shoved a ring on the ring finger of his right hand, and I couldn’t understand why it didn’t fit. Hours later, he finally managed to put the ring on his left hand, and we drank wine and ate dinner and watched belly dancers.

Tonight, we will ride the bus downtown. I think it’s been almost ten years since we rode the bus together. We will have dinner and a few drinks and maybe end up on some dark and sticky dance floor – if I get him drunk enough – which we also haven’t done in ten years. He thinks we’ll just feel old, and he might be right. But I figure it’s worth a try.

I am awe. Joerg Colberg just published new work by Sally Mann, accompanied by an essay by Mann that just had me spellbound. Between the words and the images, I felt like I was reading a love poem.

Go look and read.

I got a phone call tonight from the Stephen Lewis Foundation, to which I donate 50 percent of the proceeds from online print sales here. They’re launching a new campaign, “A Dare to Remember,” and they wondered if I would be willing to participate from Oct. 17 to 25.

I am.

The thing is, I can’t think of a good dare. But I have a feeling maybe someone here can.

If you check out the website, you’ll see they have different categories of dares and suggested fundraising goals. I would love to do a bold dare and aim for $1000. So what do you think I should do?

Leave a comment here or email me at kate (at) peripheralvision (dot) ca with your most outrageous ideas — tamer ideas are welcome too.

“I have no real argument against so-called set-up photography, at least as a process. [...] photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don’t speak to me of the document; I don’t really believe in it, particularly now. A picture’s not the world, but a new thing.

“That said—too briefly—my argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the IMAGINATION of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis.”

~ Tod Papageorge on Alec Soth’s old blog
“Literature especially has an interesting relationship [to] photography – to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging. That weird practice between staging and finding is very much like a Ray Carver (story). You think, “he’s seen this,” but he’s taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You’re riffing off of reality.”

~ Larry Sultan on AMERICAN SUBURB X

So last week we went to my parents’ cottage. My brother and his family weren’t able to come after all, so for several days it was just me, my husband, my son, and my parents. Which means I got to read a lot more than I expected. I read Image Makers, Image Takers cover to cover first. It was fascinating to read about the methods, approaches, and philosophies of so many different photographers. Before we went to the cottage I went on an Alec Soth binge, reading his old blog and any interviews I could clap my eyes on. It was on his recommendation that I bought Image Makers, Image Takers, and it was also his recommendation that brought me to Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography. I just happened to find his later book, Why People Photograph, which I also read at the cottage, and I think I actually like it better than Beauty in Photography. His essay on Paul Strand I found especially illuminating, not just about Strand’s work, but about how to read photographs and what makes great photographs great.

Back when I first watched The True Meaning of Pictures, I thought that the critics who said that Shelby Lee Adams’s subjects weren’t sophisticated enough to really understand what was happening in the photographs of them were just snobs or assholes. But I’m coming to realize that there are degrees of visual literacy, and mine is deepening.

I even read some poetry. My mom bought Jeramy Dodds’s Crabwise to the Hounds, which just won a Trillium Book Award and made the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. I actually have a lame claim to fame with this book, because I went to high school with Jeramy. He even dated one of my very good friends for a couple of years. Another friend from that time read his book a while back and said she’d always known he had the soul of an artist. But I knew no such thing. To me he was kind of intimidating; I had no idea he was interested in reading let alone writing – I thought just liked to get drunk and play mailbox baseball. Anyways, turns out he’s a really good poet. The language is so good and dense that I had to stop and think about each line, and I could only read a poem or two at a time. I meant to bring it home with me, but by the time we left my son had developed a tummy bug, so my packing was rather distracted and I forgot it.

I have to say the vacation had some big ups and downs. My husband lost his wallet in the torrential rains we drove through for two hours before we finally stopped at a Tim Hortons. We realized the next day his wallet must have fell out of his pocket when we ran back to the car. So he had to make all sorts of phone calls and trips into town to deal with that.

On the up side, we got to meet my new nephew, who my sister and her husband adopted in May. He’s 22 months old and utterly charming.

Also, the lake happened to have its annual corn roast and fishing derby, and my son caught his first fish — in fact it tied for first place in the under 6 fun fish category.

He also ran in the egg and spoon race. And you know how there’s ALWAYS one kid who runs away? That was my kid this year. I was laughing too hard to get a decent picture, but I did manage to squeeze this one off showing one of the organizers in hot pursuit. I’m kinda proud to see him breaking the rules at such a tender age.

We stayed at my parents’ farm for a night too, which is where I made these next few pictures.

And now for a few more pics from the cottage:

This morning I went to my local university to find out what would be required to upgrade from my three-year BA in English to an Honours BA in Studio Art. Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s a whole wide world that I’m missing, a sort of lineage and vocabulary that I’ve learned enough to know of its existence, but not enough to know it. You might think that vocabulary doesn’t matter, especially in a visual medium, but I’ve always found that words influence our experience and perception. Sometimes you don’t feel something until you have a word for it. Or you can feel it, but you can’t distinguish it precisely. Or something. Naming is power.

I remember one time last summer at the drop-in, it was hot, and I felt like I was moving through molasses. Everyone else seemed to be moving slowly too. “I’m so lethargic,” I complained. And the other volunteer asked me what that word meant. I said it meant tired, even though I knew it wasn’t really doing the word justice. But I felt so awkward, like my language kept me an outsider. And it kind of does. I still think of that little encounter, mostly with guilty feelings for not letting him in on the nuance of lethargy.

Anyways, I want to learn more about the history of photography and critical ways of talking about it. Especially since I’m thinking about a project on suburbia, I figure it might be a good thing for me to know what work has come before me on the subject. So that is why I found myself at the university.

This need for knowledge also had me looking for ways to get books from the university library, and I discovered that alumni can get a free alumni card and borrow up to 20 books for two weeks at a time. So I got my card today and visited the library and even though it’s been almost a decade, I remembered exactly where the photography section was. It was kind of surreal walking among the stacks after so long. And like many places I return to have a long absence, it has its own smell, which although I didn’t notice it before today, I know hasn’t changed. I used to write poems when I was younger, and lately I’ve been feeling like that was good training for photography. Both art forms require you to really see. Anyways, walking through the library I remembered a poem I wrote that was actually published, a poem called “The Library” that when I read it last summer I decided was nonsense because I couldn’t make sense of it, but today, it made sense. So many rows upon rows of books, they really muffle the sound.

Anyways, the photography section is delightful. Barely a Digital Photography for Dummies or Catalogue of Dogs to be seen. I picked up Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography, and devoured it this afternoon. Incidentally, one of the first essays talked about the importance of freshness in art and the resulting necessity of knowing who’s come before to create that freshness.

After dinner tonight, I devoured Charles Traub’s In the Still Life while my son dug nearby in the sand. I both loved and hated that he didn’t display captions with each image. It made me look longer and harder at each one though, and that’s always a good thing.

I also got Why People Photograph, also by Robert Adams, which I’ll take to the cottage next week. (Mind you, it’s a two-bedroom cottage that will be housing 8 adults and 6 kids, so it’s possible I may not be able to read it.) And finally, I’m excited to have discovered Thomas Daniel, with the catalogue to his exhibition Into My Eyes. I haven’t read it yet, but glancing through it at the library I was really taken with his portraits, and the obvious respect he has for the people he photographs.

All in all, it was a good day. And now it’s time for So You Think You Can Dance. Perfect.

The blog has been pretty quiet for the last several months because I’ve been working on lots of stuff in the background. One of those things is a book, which I’m excited to officially launch today. Two-Powered: A Diary of Motherhood and Apple Pie combines words and images I created during the first two years of my son’s life. I was also granted permission to include a beautiful poem by Adrienne Rich, a poem I discovered during the same time period.

I thought about searching for a publisher for the book, but I decided to self-publish for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that I have no patience. I’m guessing it would take at least a year to get to print, and possibly much, much longer. And I’m more into making stuff than selling or pitching stuff.

This book doesn’t fit easily into a specific genre – is it a momoir or a photography book? I don’t know. I’ve read that genre-bending books are considerably less attractive to publishers, who need to figure out how to market their books. If there isn’t a tidy demographic to market to, it’s a much riskier venture. I thought about trying for photography publishers, who could foot the bill for producing it in fantastic quality, but these really aren’t fine art images. They’re not about beautiful colour or good tonal ranges; the digital files themselves aren’t particularly high quality either – some of them I even made on my husband’s crappy little point-and-shoot.

The bottom line is that I really feel the collection contains a message that needs to get out sooner than later. So I decided to publish it on demand through lulu.com.

I think it’s very difficult to mother in a culture that has no space to admit real ambivalence into the discourse. When my mom read my book, she said, “Wow, you were in a real depression.” But I don’t believe I was. I don’t think it was pathological at all – I think it’s normal to be ambivalent as a mother, and healthy to acknowledge that it’s really f-ing hard, especially in the first two years. Can you think of anything in which you have a bigger stake than in the growth and well-being of the most important and helpless person you’ve ever had the fortune to know?

My husband developed a website to showcase the content of the book. We still have to put a link to it on my home page, but in the meantime, you can get there from here. I thought about only including the first 15 images to encourage people to buy the book, but I felt that if my goal was to speak through this cultural silence, I should my money where my mouth is and put it all out there. If you do buy the book, you do get treated to Adrienne Rich’s wonderful poem, which isn’t on the site.

So there. It’s done, it’s out there. Wow does this ever feel anti-climactic.

Check it out here.

• - Don Weber’s advice in May to make the photographs I want to make not the photographs I think I should make. How do I tell the difference??? How do I tell the difference between inspiration and a case of the shoulds?

• - Wade Robson – I didn’t realize how young he is. It’s shameful really, how much talent a single person can have. These are oldish videos, but I only discovered them last week. If you like dance or Wade Robson, you really must watch them.
• - This is him actually dancing with Cirque du Soleil.
• - And here he is when he was 8! I’m not sure what’s scarier: that he was only 8 in 1992 or that he was that good then.
• - But this is the one I just can’t stop watching. Or listening to the song over and over again (which, if you also want to listen to it on repeat and drive your partner crazy, is John Mayer’s “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room”).
• - And did you see his choreography with Brandon and Jeanette this week? Awesome.

• - Broken Social Scene’s Anthems For a 17-Year-Old Girl. Especially since I heard it in connection with an interview with the author of this book. (Which I plan to read but haven’ t yet.)

• - I love my iPod. I get to wander around town playing mopey songs (see above) in my ears and pretending I’m a miserable, brooding teenager again. I don’t know why I like pretending to brood so much, but I do.

• - The idea that if people in a photo were directed the photos is fake or fictional or even less meaningful or valuable. For me, it just feels right to interact with the people in my photographs. I feel creepy if I’m sneaking around trying to capture them in a so-called ‘real’ moment – even when the person has agreed to let me photograph them. Of course, this could just be narcissism, that I want every photo I make to be about me, or at least as much about me as whatever’s actually in front of the camera. This will take me a while to figure out.

• - Wanting to open a twitter account for this blog, but being stuck on a name – peripheralvision is one letter too long, apparently. But if I’d just done it a few months ago, it would have been fine. I dunno. I guess I’ll make it peripheral_vsn.

Here are some of the images I’ve been shooting while mooning about like a broody teenager:

(that’s my old dorm room in the bottom right corner)

Apparently, I am a Website Updating Machine. (Well, my husband, aka My Own Personal Web Designer and Tech Support Guy, has something to do with that – he very cleverly made it so I can update my galleries without depending on him for anything.) I just posted my new, still ongoing, series “Not like the others,” formerly known as my belly dance project.

My statement:

Belly dance is thought to have originated as a way to prepare for and articulate the experience of womanhood. This series places belly dancers in urban and suburban settings to foreground the sterility of modern North American culture and highlight the absences that may draw women to this ancient dance form. If the dancers are not on stage, then what are they performing?