These are the key points from Donald Weber’s workshop last weekend that I’ve been trying to put into practice this week, in no particular order:

1. You have to take risks.
2. Just shoot it. You never know.
3. Know what you want to say. This one is hard. It took him four years to figure it out for himself.
4. Shoot when you don’t feel like shooting.
5. There’s always something going wrong. It’s all about how you deal with it.
6. You need a body of work. Get that first before you chase assignments. They will come from the body of work.
7. Connect with people. Have empathy. Eat and drink and laugh with them. Be willing to put yourself out there.
8. Editing (that is, selecting and sequencing, not post-processing) is key. It’s not just about choosing the best pictures. It’s about stories and concepts, both literal and figurative.

I’ve been going to the drop-in centre every morning. On Monday, I tried to go all day, but I ran out of steam and dropped into an exhausted and stressed-out heap as soon as I got home. I didn’t feel like going back. I worried that people thought I was intruding, exploiting. I worried that I actually was. I felt uncomfortable, and yet compelled to continue.

I went back Tuesday morning, even though I didn’t feel like it. But this time I knew I had to pace myself. So I only planned to go for the morning, and I had to meet someone else at noon anyways. I was exhausted again when I got home around 2. I had scheduled a photoshoot with a belly dancer for the evening, and I was dreading it. I didn’t know how I’d get my energy up for it. And what was the point anyways?

But I remembered Don’s words, about shooting when you don’t feel like it, so I did it. And I got my energy back and we had a lot of fun. Here are a few of my favourites:

This morning, I went to John’s house, who very kindly agreed to let me photograph him there. It was kind of intense. I left feeling a bit weird. Emotional or something. Feeling bad again, that I’d invaded his privacy even though he invited me in. I felt like my photographing him and his home made him sad. He talked about having distanced himself from everyone in the 24 years since his MS diagnosis.

Afterwards, I almost didn’t go to the drop-in centre. I was feeling raw, and like I’d probably just annoyed people anyways. But I also felt like if I didn’t go back today, I might never. And I really didn’t want that to happen.

I saw Tony there shortly after I arrived, who I photographed a few weeks ago and whose prints I’d been carrying around almost ever since. He was delighted with the pictures. “You’re a good photographer,” he said. “Has anyone every told you that?” He was even more delighted when he realized the prints were for him to keep. “Thank you SO much for taking my picture,” he said, and then he gave me a huge bear hug.

The woman on the right is Jenny. I’d talked to her about my project on Monday, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask her if it was ok for me photograph her. Today (before I took this shot), I asked her. “Oh!” she said. “That’s so nice you asked. Some people don’t.”

She said it reminded her of something she learned in rehab. There, they had to make sure to ask people permission before they touched anyone, even just a light touch. Because some people don’t like being touched.  I really like that analogy, of photographing being like touching. Certainly, it feels like that to me.

Throughout all this, I noticed a guy I hadn’t seen there before. I would love to make a picture of him, but I refrained, not sure of whether he’d be ok with it. So instead I just smiled, and he smiled back. After a while, I realized in fact I’d photographed him a few years ago, outside the youth drop-in centre (he’s in the first picture in the post I linked to). He came up to me and introduced himself. His name is Door, like front door. We talked about the photo I’d made, and I offered to give him a print and we talked about how I could get it to him. Our conversation seemed to be coming to a close, when he said, “I just have to tell you, I get a really good feeling from you. I just have this good feeling about what you’re doing, that you’re doing a good thing. So keep doing it.”

I went home and cried, but it was kind of a good cry.

I still don’t know if I’ll be able to make the kind of photos I want to make on this project, but I feel a lot better about trying.

I booked this week off work in anticipation of the shooting assignment for Saturday’s workshop with Don Weber. So my goal for this week is to get out in the world and shoot. I’m easily distracted by the machine that I’m typing this on, but not this week.

I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking of projects. I know what I’d like to do, but it’s scary for me, so I kept coming up with other ideas to replace the scary one. But Don’s whole theme on Saturday was about taking risks – not physical risks, per se, although it certainly sounds like he’s taken his fair share – but pksychological risks. He urged us to use this assignment to face the things that we avoid. And so I will just do it.

Stay tuned later this week or early next for updates…

In the meantime, you better not see me on twitter or facebook too much.

Ok, last night’s episode of Dollhouse was AMAZING! Surely Fox can’t cancel it now?!? (Dear Fox: DO NOT CANCEL DOLLHOUSE.)

This morning I’m off to my very exciting workshop with Donald Weber. Not only am I looking forward to hear about his ways of working and what advice he can offer us, but he has an exhibition up at the studio where he’s teaching, all as part of the Contact Festival.

And finally, there is a stunning slideshow up at burn magazine by Lori Vrba. I find it spellbinding. So I went to her website and looked through all her work. I love it. It’s magical without being sentimental. If she lived nearby, I would gladly hire her to photograph my family – which is not something I’ve ever thought of any other photographer since I photograph him so much myself. She shoots film exclusively, and processes and prints it all herself. She tones the prints with tea and selenium, and I love the warmth of that effect. I also see she’s created a short film, which I really like, but I was frustrated by the lack of streaming – it seems to take a long time to download and it kept stopping. I expect it wasn’t really optimized for the web, but it’s worth being patient to watch it.

Yesterday morning I walked to work by myself, and it was stunning. Everything was dark and shiny with sun and recent rain. I watched raindrops all lit up by the sunlight like diamonds or something fall from trees. I saw sunrays streaking through a slight mistiness in the air. I wanted to take pictures at every step, but I was late, and my camera was packed under a bunch of other gear.

I cried a good part of the way, from the beauty, and exhaustion, and this week’s reminders that life is just way too short to take anything for granted. I feel weird that things that really have nothing to do with me – or at least that affect other people far more profoundly than I could presume to imagine – would affect me so deeply (and I’m not talking about swine flu). I found out on Wednesday that a local flickrite – one of my first contacts on flickr I’m sure – died on Monday. I only found out on Saturday that he was sick, and it really upset me.

The thing is, I never actually met him. I kept thinking that our paths would just cross naturally. I thought it was just a matter of time. We both have young families, we live within several blocks of one another, we have overlapping interests. Indeed, my husband met him once or twice in job interviews. Surely one Saturday we’d see one another with our families and cameras in the park or something. But it never happened.

I keep thinking about the word hospice, how the report I saw said a crew of loved ones were making his living room into a hospice. I keep thinking about how it must feel to know you are dying when your kids are still so young, or how it must feel to know your partner and the father of your kids is dying. But it’s truly unimaginable. I wondered how to reach out to them now, or if that would even be appropriate. Could I leave a lasagne on their stoop? Or send a flickr message to him? Would he even be online? Probably not… A message to his wife? To say what? I thought I had at least a week to figure something out, but on Wednesday I was forwarded a message from one of my work friends. He had already passed on.

Sometimes procrastination doesn’t pay.

I wasn’t sure whether to blog about this. It seems presumptuous to feel so sad about someone I didn’t really know, like an insult to his friends and family. But he did touch my life in a small virtual way, and I am thinking about him and his family a lot, and maybe that’s not an insult at all.

Our house is being invaded by spiders. It peaked last week with the heavy rain, but they keep coming – between 5 and 10 a day. And the squished carcass that we left in the shower as a warning has done nothing. The only thing that comforts me is a vague memory of once reading that spiders bring creativity. Now if only the heebeejeebies didn’t prevent me from sleeping…

[updated below] I read a thought-provoking article this morning about child pornography laws and photography involving children. It’s a long one, but entirely worth reading.

I do think there is another, larger and probably more difficult question around artists using their children in their art, whether paintings, literature, or photography. Is it exploitation? I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. But I also think that if you want to express something about motherhood, parenthood, or childhood in our culture, at some point or other, your kid will come into the picture, literally or figuratively.

Photography seems particularly prone to exploitation. Last weekend, I watched Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, and he says a few times that he is in control. The photographer is always in control. The people he photographed sometimes felt his portraits were cruel and unforgivable, and he himself wondered – retrospectively – if perhaps photographing his dying father was an act of hostility.

Heather Morton Art Buyer linked to Barbara Crane the other day, who apparently paid her children 35 cents an hour to sit for her, with the agreement that they would not be identifiable in the photographs of human forms. I find this fascinating. The other day, I also read this blog post on a similar topic.

I don’t know what to think of Tierney Gearon’s work. I haven’t seen enough of it, and I haven’t yet watched The Mother Project (which, incidentally, TVO is showing on Thursday, May 7, at 10 pm as part of the Contact Festival). But my initial response to what I have seen is troubled.

I don’t think it’s right to assume or take it for granted that my child belongs all to me, as raw material for my artistic expression. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to feature your children in your art either. As I said in my comment at Elizabeth Fleming’s, I’m starting to think that as long as you’re aware of the potential for exploitation, as long as you’re a little bit troubled by that potential, it’s probably ok?

This seems like an appropriate time to give you a sneak peak at the work I’m putting together from the first two years of my son’s life (which I first mentioned here a while ago). I’m alternating between two working titles, “Two-powered” and “Motherhood and Apple Pie.” If you have a smart way to put those ideas together, please share.

Edited to add: Suzanne Revy blogged on the very same topic, only far more eloquently than I did. Which is interesting, because when I wrote my post yesterday, I had meant to include a link to the recent interview on nymphoto with Revy, but I forgot before I hit publish.

Last night was the opening reception of Still Standing at the Alma Gallery. I ended up leaving kind of early (last-minute change to childcare plans), so if you came after 9 and missed me, I’m sorry.

This is what I saw as we approached the gallery:

Shit, I thought. Those black and white shots look amazing. My stuff just can’t compare.

Then I got closer, and realized those WERE my images!

What a top-notch event. The gallery looked tremendous, and the exhibition is wonderful. I especially loved Dean Palmer’s stacked, wide-angle, panoramic images from inside the Gummer Building, which burned down two years ago (the bottom image in the picture above is of the outside of the Gummer, a few days after the fire).

There were lots of people, hors d’oeuvres served by real servers, and a bar and everything. The space was amazing, and they’d opened the exhibition beyond the gallery itself into the adjacent hot yoga studio space, which is beautiful.

This is the view from the yoga studio. The stairs go up to a rooftop patio.

Two chairs I couldn’t take my eyes off. Also in the yoga space.

All in all, a great night. The calibre of work was wonderful, and I feel like my pictures held their own.  I also feel like I have to go back again, just to look at the work with fewer people around (and also to photograph the rest of my pictures, for record purposes).

Please, please, please don’t cancel Dollhouse. I watch it religiously on my PVR, which I’ve just discovered doesn’t actually count in ratings. But I’m watching, I’m committed, and I want to keep watching. Please?

This is probably not something I should admit here, but I didn’t really know who Annie Leibovitz is until that video of her shooting the Queen made the rounds on the web a while back (just google it if you’re interested). I’d heard her name of course, but when I heard it, my brain exchanged her name with Anne Geddes and made me cringe involuntarily. But I know very well who she is now, and I’ve seen enough of her pictures to know that it bears not even the slightest resemblance to the babies in pea suits pictures.

Last weekend I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s At Work, and I’m quite enjoying it. Halfway in, here are a few things that I’d like to share:

“I was in awe of Robert Frank. Here was the great master. I couldn’t believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, ‘You can’t get every picture.’ That was comforting advice. You do miss things. [...] Robert Frank didn’t seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.”

“I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, of course. I was just throwing up a light haphazardly and hoping the picture would come out.”

“It was a popular picture, and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. [...] There are different criteria for magazine covers. They’re simple. The addition of type doesn’t destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.”

“I’m always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone. A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.”

Today I was all grumbly when I headed out for my weekly stint at the Drop-In Centre. I thought about quitting, because it blocks my time in the middle of my Saturdays and cuts into my family time. Today is gorgeous and sunny, and I’d really rather hang with my boys. But I went, and I’m back into my usual enthusiasm for the place and for the time I spend serving coffee and lunch.

One of the men I’ve photographed was there, and I had prints in my bag to give him. But he was erratic and didn’t seem to really recognize me. He just talked about having to deal with the police and their threats of putting him in the local psychiatric facility. I’ve never seen him like that before. Obviously, he’s gone off his meds, and although I definitely don’t think psychiatric drugs are a cure-all, seeing him like this made me sad. Anyways, I didn’t give him the prints. I thought if he’d forgotten, seeing them in his current state of mind might upset him. I hope he’s able to get things sorted out soon.

More and more, I’m feeling like my drop-in pictures just aren’t doing it. I think they’re just not going deep enough. But because of the nature of the centre, the services it provides, and the transient nature of the population it serves, I can’t go any deeper while I’m actually there. I can’t capture the moments of community I see because people need to be assured that they can go there somewhat anonymously, without worrying about their pictures being posted on the Web. That’s why I make sure to not only get consent but to make sure the people I photograph understand that I will at least publish them on my website.

Anyways, I want to go deeper. I think I need to follow some of my friends home. So today I asked one of the first people I photographed if he would be willing to let me into his home. He understands the possibilities of photography as an art form, so he gets what I’m trying to do. He said he most definitely is willing, so expect to see some more photos of him here in the coming months. I expect it will take a while to get something up and going with him, but I’m kind of hoping it might become longer term.

I will still continue with occasional photographs of people who are willing there. But hopefully this other project will take some of the pressure and urgency away, so I can go back to pursuing the portraits a little more organically.

I was about to go off on a long and involved tangent, but instead I’m going to get outside and enjoy some of the 22-degree (Celsius) sunshine.