Faulkner said you have to kill all your little darlings. He was talking about writing but I can see how the exact same principle applies to editing your photographs. And I’ve heard or read several photographers say that their favourite photographs almost never make it into the final edit.

I’ve finally updated the galleries on my site with an edit of my Drop-In Centre work. In selecting and sequencing the images, it really felt like killing my darlings. Except that in the end there were some darlings I just couldn’t kill. I discovered that I have no emotional distance from which to properly judge these images. In some ways I’m closer to this work than I am to my family work. Mostly because I know I can always shoot more with my family. But with the people from the Drop-In Centre, it doesn’t work that way. Some people I haven’t seen since I photographed them. I think others might think it’s weird for me to photograph them again.

Anyways, the bottom line is that the edit is loose and I have no idea at all whether these photographs are any good or of value to anyone else. When I started making these portraits, I wanted to make photographs of people, not people in distress or people dealing with a particular set of circumstances. I wanted to move away from photographs of poverty or homelessness or mental illness or addiction. At the same time, I didn’t want to romanticize or gloss over or turn away from those very real issues that real people are living with. I don’t know if I’ve been successful at any of that, especially since I have no control over what viewers will see in these photographs. I know what I see in them, but I also know these people outside of the context of the photographs.

So… why don’t you go have a look? I’d be very interested in any critiques you feel like sharing — although please keep it constructive.

What’s the Jackanory has a fantastic studio tour-slash-interview with Phillip Toledano up. I think I’ve developed a bit of a crush on Mr. Toledano, truth be told. First, I had no idea he was British, and I’ve always had a soft spot for a nice accent. Somehow from his pictures I expected him to be brasher, like a stereotypical New Yorker or something, with darker hair and a wider middle. But apparently he’s actually cute and charmingly self-deprecating, and I was especially pleased to hear him say that he thinks most of his pictures are total shit for at least a 36-hour period. Anyways, go watch it. 

To people who use Adobe Lightroom to process and manage their photos:

You know how the program prompts you to back up the catalogue? You should really do that. And if you’ve had a particularly productive week, sorting, selecting, and processing from thousands of photos? You might want to back up the catalogue every day or so. Because if you have a power outage while you’re working in Lightroom, the catalogue could be corrupted and unrecoverable. Which means you still have your raw images, but all the sorting, tagging, rating, and processing you’ve just done? Will be gone.

I’m just sayin’.

My friend Beck wrote a post a while back about community and how they can’t really be built. They’re organic. Jennifer responded with some of her own thoughts. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of community and its absence lately on a number of fronts. I blame the rise of the nuclear family. I remember reading about research (I can’t remember where for sure but I think it was in Sheila Kitzinger’s Ourselves as Mothers) that found in cultures where people lived close to their extended families, new mothers wanted mostly to parent just like their mothers. But in cultures like North America, where adult children move far away from their parents because, as Beck says, “moving away is what we do now,” new mothers generally want to do the opposite of what their mothers did.

The benefit of the extended family model, I’m guessing, would be more support for parents and in particular mothers. But that system also perpetuates the status quo and supports (depends on?) rigid gender roles. The benefit of the North American nuclear family is that it affords significant social change – probably an essential ingredient for the women’s movement. But it also makes for instability and uncertainty on an individual level.

It struck me reading Beck’s and Jennifer’s posts that it also makes it very difficult to forge real-life communities. Because there are as many different ways to raise children as there are parents, I feel like I can never step in and parent other people’s kids. And while I would welcome someone else stepping in from to time to parent my kid (like if he misbehaves at the playground), I wouldn’t care for it at all if it doesn’t align with my values and approach to parenting.

For the last several months I’ve been working on a book of some of the images I made and words I wrote during my son’s first two years of life. I’ve been remembering how angry I was, especially at parenting books with their prescriptive tone, contradictory advice, and dire consequences if I didn’t follow their instructions to the letter. But the only reason there’s so darn many of them, and so much need (I remember clearly my desperation to find some kind of solution to my son’s sleeping issue – little did I know the solution would be accepting that I can’t control it), is because of our lack of community. As much as I love my mother, I couldn’t always trust her advice because she got duped herself as a young mother by the parenting book industry. And I didn’t have any close friends with kids who were enough older than my son to offer comfort but not so much older that they couldn’t remember the reality of life with an infant. And so my husband and I struggled, and I made bleak photographs, and the three of us survived.

* * *
Ever since the workshop with Donald Weber, when he said that you need to know what you have to say and that takes time (and how he’s figured out that his work is all about power and the wounds it inflicts on those who don’t have it), I’ve been wondering what my own work is all about. And my initial thinking is that it’s all about community, or the lack thereof. More specifically, I think I could drill it down to being all about the rise of the nuclear family and its impact on society.

For my first volunteer shift at the Drop-In Centre, I was also in need of its services: one of my family members had been evicted the night before and was homeless. The thing about mental illness is that family cannot come together in the same way you can with physical illnesses – if you try, the mental illness will suck you all in. Sometimes I am ashamed at my distance from my family member, and I wonder if people around her wonder where her family is and what’s wrong with us that we aren’t doing more to help. The fact is there is a limit to how much hardship and distress a single nuclear family can withstand and overcome. I believe this may very well be the case for everyone who comes to the drop-in centre: the woman with a chronic disease who didn’t want me to photograph her because her family disapproves of her coming there but she keeps coming nonetheless; and the man whose mother is in a nursing home a few hours away and the man whose daughter will soon be moving in with him, and the man who walked here from the east coast, and the man whose daughters thought he was dead for the last decade, and the boy whose parents dropped him off to stay at the shelter, but stayed to eat a meal with him before they left. There is a limit to what one family can do, and places like the Drop-In Centre fill in the gaps.

I think this is also very much the subject of my Two-Powered series, which I have yet to unveil here – the photographs I made during the first two years of my son’s life that are darker than I remember. My parents were wonderful, but if the nuclear family hadn’t taken over our culture, I would have had no need for parenting manuals, and struggle to reject them and find my own path. Don’t get me wrong: my family is wonderful and they were very supportive during my orientation into motherhood, especially my mother. But I live two hours away from them, and there is a limit to what one family can support. Moving away is what we do now.

My belly dancer series gets a little more difficult to link in, but I believe it’s there. That I can’t articulate the link is probably the reason I’m making those photographs instead of writing about it. I started belly dancing when I most needed community, and it played a significant role in me overcoming severe anxiety and panic. Visually, the photographs are probably more about isolation than community, but the act of photographing these women has revived that part of my community. Yet I photograph them mostly alone and a bit overwhelmed, visually, by their harsh surroundings.

I’m shocked at how my camera, or perhaps more accurately, my compulsion to photograph people, is widening my community. I’ve said it before in relation to the Drop-In Centre, but I’ll say it again because it’s important. Photographing people deepens my encounters with strangers or near strangers. The other day, I found Nadia Sablin’s website, which has some beautiful photography. In book five, she shows “Portraits of friends and strangers. And strangers that have become friends,” which I thought was bang-on.

My newest project, still very much in its infancy, involves photographing original owners of houses in the neighbourhood we moved into last fall. The suburb was built mostly in the 50s and 60s, at the same time as the nuclear family rose to power in North America. So I’ve been going door to door to find original owners. Now, when I walk to work in the mornings or to the playground in the evenings, I know some of the people I’m passing, and we wave in a neighbourly way. I wouldn’t have otherwise met them were it not for my compulsion to photograph. Nothing else could make me knock on strangers’ doors – certainly not needing a cup of sugar or a sympathetic ear. But already I feel like this project could lead to the possibility of living near friends.

I had the pleasure of working with my friend, Kathryn, last night. As usual, I’m having trouble choosing among them. What do you think?

Ugh. I’ve had two separate illnesses within 7 days of each other, and sadly on my days off. Which means I’ve badly neglected this space. Sorry.

Self-doubt is a funny thing. Every two weeks I go to a discussion/critique group that Trina Koster facilitates, and I leave feeling pretty good about my photography. But during the intervening two weeks of web surfing and shooting, I realize my work sucks and I have a long, long way to go. Then I go to the discussion group and feel good again. Rinse, repeat. Too much self-doubt paralyzes but I suspect there’s a basic amount required to get better at your craft.

Anyways, I clicked over to Deep Sleep Magazine and discovered that they published some pictures from my Lunenburg Parking Meters series for their Alien issue! Which I find VERY exciting. When I submitted them, and even when I was notified they made the shortlist, I didn’t think they’d actually make it through.

The editor’s note mentions “disagreement and controversy about the final selection, with a couple of stories in particular (you will have to guess which) producing violently opposed reactions of the “I love these” / “they suck” variety.” So of course I immediately decide they’re talking MY story. Unfortunately, I’ll never know for sure. Anyways, I’m pleased as punch to have my work included. Thanks, Deep Sleep!

Go check it out.

This just in:
If you’ve been reading my reports of the TVO photography documentaries with envy, guess what?!? You can watch some of them online. So what should you watch first? The Mother Project fer sher. And I’m also happy about this because I missed Girl in the Mirror… woot! Now go forth and watch movies that are VERY hard to find from rental stores.
But first, here are some recent pictures of mine…

Thanks to TVO, I’ve now seen Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project and What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann.

In my explorations of motherhood and photography, I’ve mentioned Tierney Gearon here and there, but not in much detail. I was troubled by her work, but also felt that I hadn’t seen enough of it to comment on it. Today I discovered that you can actually see her pictures on her website. I don’t find it intuitive, but if you go to Exhibitions, you can select which exhibition you want to look at, then scroll through the pictures through arrow buttons on the images.

I watched The Mother Project halfway through, then stopped because I wanted to discuss it with my husband. So I got him to watch it all the way through with me. (Although, funnily enough we haven’t actually discussed it yet. Whatever. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.) Going into it, my vague feeling was that it’s kind of wrong to use your kids for your own expression, especially if you’re using them as a metaphor or archetype (as I touched on here). I’ve also always bristled at language around one’s children being one’s great work of art or one’s great project. Children are individuals too, not just products of their parents. Not only that, but I suspect that publishing pictures of your children naked makes them vulnerable, although to what I don’t really know.

Before watching the two documentaries, I probably would have put both Tierney Gearon’s and Sally Mann’s work into the category of using their kids as metaphors. Indeed, just before I stopped The Mother Project halfway through, Gearon was speaking to the camera about how her photography is her way or processing things and that sometimes she feels bad about it but that she doesn’t think it’s really hurting her children. The first time around, I thought “Yeah, right.” But once I finished watching the whole documentary, I’ve changed my mind.

I mean, mothers are people too.

I guess what I realized is that Gearon wasn’t really using her kids as metaphors. She was using photography as a way to express and process her own experiences, and given that her own mother is mentally ill, chances are her experiences and expressions are going to be strange. And there’s no doubt that her pictures are weird and disturbing. But they’re also fascinating and original, and I don’t really think she is damaging her kids by making them. (And from a practical standpoint, clothing can really interfere with universality, since it situates them in a specific time and place. And I suspect that great photographs need an element of universality to be great.)

Well, maybe she is, but that’s kind of what parents do, isn’t it? Parents wound and embarrass their kids, and often in ways they have no awareness of. And kids are pretty resilient.

I think the reason that Gearon’s and Mann’s work has been controversial is not because the children are naked or semi-naked. I think it’s because the work challenges our idealizations of childhood and family.

* * *

Around the same time, I checked out some videos on youtube of Jeff Mermelstein, a New York City street photographer that Donald Weber mentioned. (The video is in three parts.) In the first part, he says:

“I’m a voyeur. I’m not asking people if I can take their picture. Even if they’re on a public stage, I’m in a sense stealing something from them without asking them. [...] You couldn’t do the kind of photography I do if you spoke to the people before taking their picture. I myself feel no guilt about that. [...] I’m totally comfortable and cosy because I know I’m not trying to hurt anyone with the camera. It’s what I do, it’s how I respond to… people.”

Which got me to thinking.

All this time I’ve felt guilty for making pictures of other people, pictures that people might not like of themselves. Pictures that they might not want published. It’s kind of been my standard: would the subject be ok with this picture being published? My response to that guilt has been to be totally transparent with my subjects and turn it into a collaboration. But maybe that guilt is just a product of our culture’s obsession with image. Why should people have control over their image? What harm can really come out of having a less than flattering image of you published? I’ve already said that I’m not interested in making pretty pictures of people. And many, many photographers have talked about the tension between the photographer’s agenda and the subject’s, the challenge of getting behind the subject’s facade to capture something real.

So what do you think of all this?

* * *

PS TVO is showing The True Meaning of Pictures, which I blogged about last October I think, tonight at 10 p.m. Be sure to check it out if you can.

Also, So You Think You Can Dance (US) starts tonight. And finally, Fox renewed Dollhouse AND Castle, two of my new favourite shows. Yay!

Day 2 of the Donald Weber documentary photography workshop was just as great as day 1. Here are a few quotes from him that really have me thinking.

“It’s not about making one picture to say 25 things. It’s about making 25 pictures to say one thing.”

“You lost out because you wanted to make a pretty picture.”

“Take the bloody picture and think about it later.”

“You need to both react and anticipate.”

“My favourite pictures almost never make it into the edit.”

“Put everything you have into making an excellent photo. Then top it.”

“You’re not their PR agent.”

“You have to do your subjects justice but you also have to do the story justice.”

“If you see something interesting, follow it. You never know what’s gonna happen.”

“Sometimes it’s ok to be out of focus. Maybe it’s not a bad picture that’s out of focus. Maybe it’s a good picture that’s out of focus.”

“Tape your zoom lens off at 28 mm. If you want it, walk for it.”

And finally, the one that’s really got me thinking:

“Stop being the photographer you think you should be and just be the photographer you want to be.”

It was an amazing two days, and the week of shooting was great too. It didn’t result in great pictures, but I pushed my boundaries and I learned a lot as a result. I think I got the most from having Don critique my actual work. It’s the first time I’ve gotten feedback from such an accomplished photographer. But all of his critiques were gold no matter whose work he was talking about. If he gives another workshop, even if it’s very same one, I’d totally go again. He’s got a charming combination of brusqueness, compassion, and zeal for the medium.

If you’re in the Toronto area next weekend, be sure to check out his free artist talk at the Pikto Gallery in the Distillery District. It’s on Saturday, May 23, from 2 to 4 p.m. Also, buy his book, because Don’s awesome and so are his pictures.

Last night I went to bed with visions of the images I could make today, of people I’d begun talking to yesterday that I would approach for photographs. The visions were the first thoughts I woke to this morning. I went to the centre with more spring in my step than I’ve had all week.

Shortly after I arrived, however, Sister Christine told me not to make anymore pictures. She said I had enough already, and besides this isn’t a place for taking pictures. She told me to go to a church or Tim Horton’s. I tried to explain what I was doing, but she didn’t remember the conversation we’d had about a year ago, when I thought I’d gotten her permission to photograph there, provided I always got consent.

Well, shit.

(I get why she said this, I do. And I’ll totally respect her wishes. But I’m sad. Partly about project, but also about what she may think of me.)