exhibition details

Here are the details of the exhibition I’m in, and the opening reception:
alma-stillstanding.jpg

Saturday, April 25th from 7 – 10pm

Celebrate DOORS OPEN GUELPH 2009
With the official opening of

still standing
An exhibition dedicated to Guelph’s rich architectural heritage
April 21, 2009 until the end of May

Photographers:
Dean Palmer, Gordon Laird, Karolina Kuras, Dawn Owen, Colin Carney, Julie Pasila, KC Hornsby, Chris Tiessen, Peter Kelly, Nicholas Rees, Maggie Leighton, Romano Bernabei, Stephen Beatty, Kate Wilhelm, Rob O’Flanagan, Karin Silverstone

The exhibition, which also features the work of Plein Air Painters, Scott Abott, Kathleen Schmalz, and Laura Coutts, will include archival photographs of historical architecture from Guelph’s Civic Museum, a quilt by Joan F. Hug-Valeriote, and Janet Morton’s Knitted House.

The alma gallery
133 Wyndham St. N Guelph, ON

I will also take this opportunity to confess clarify that I have decided to change my donation practices. I’ve decided to donate 50 percent of the proceeds from online sales only to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. As I have recently learned, printing and framing is a huge paint in the ass takes a lot of time and effort, so I’m going to feed any proceeds back into my photography. When I started this website, just over a year ago, the idea of exhibiting framed prints on a gallery wall felt like a total pipe dream. But now that it’s happening, I feel like this is the right move. Back then, I didn’t feel like I really deserved or needed the proceeds of print sales myself, but now I do, for real-life sales anyways. I’ve changed all the wording on the site to reflect this change.

the four compassions

dr. gabor mate2 detail

Last night I went to see Dr. Gabor Mate talk about “The Four Compassions: A humane community response to addictions” at a local church. He is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he works with patients who suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three. He’s written a number of books, including The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I read last fall.

He is a tremendous speaker. Apparently he only prepared his talk as he arrived, but it was very well-structured, so he obviously gives a lot of talks. I could have listened to him for hours. Way back when, I wanted to talk about his book, but it took me a while to finish, and by the time I did, I’d lost touch with the first half of the book. His talk last night was a great refresher.

He believes that the basic, instinctual response of humans is compassion, unless experience shuts that response down. The four compassions are:

1. acknowledging the suffering of other people
2. understanding, and a drive to find out what’s behind the suffering
3. recognizing ourselves in others’ suffering
4. possibility, transformation

He also said that even referring to someone as an addict diminishes our understanding, because that is not what or who they are. They are human beings in deep suffering. He talked about InSite, the safe injection facility in Vancouver where people get clean needles and rubbing alcohol, and if they overdose, health professionals are there to revive them. He mentioned the RCMP head’s official stance on reviving people from overdoses, which is that it shouldn’t be done since it sends a message that it’s ok to use drugs. Dr. Mate said he couldn’t fault the logic of that, but if we’re going to take that stance, the entire medical system should take it, so that the workaholics who have heart attacks don’t receive bypass surgery, and the smokers don’t get antibiotics for their bronchitis. Which is just inhumane, of course.

He talked about how judgment hurts all of us, because it separates us into us and them, and denies the unity of human beings. He also said that if we find ourselves making judgments we shouldn’t feel too bad about it, because the human brain is wired to make judgments all the time. We’re just there. But the trouble comes when we believe the judgments. So the trick is just to observe the judgments without becoming attached to them. He also said we judge most harshly the things we are ashamed of in ourselves. So to serve his patients compassionately he needs to take care to deal with his own addictions (workaholism and compulsive cd shopping) so he doesn’t lash out in shame.

In the Q’s and A’s after his speech, he said that he believes nobody is beyond help. If a person is alive, then their soul is alive, and the soul is infinite possibility. He also talked about recovery, how the word recover means to find again, and you can’t find something again if it wasn’t there in the first place. What people find again when they recover is themselves, their wholeness, their infinite possibility. To do that, they need confidence, some hope of victory. And our judicial and medical systems don’t nurture that hope at all.

He ended the night answering a question about parents who let their kids cry it out to train them to sleep. Essentially, he said it wasn’t good for the child’s emotional wellbeing, even though explicit memory doesn’t begin until after age 2. But the practice teaches kids that the world is an indifferent place. He said it isn’t the child’s problem that our world requires both parents to work full-time. Now, I pretty much agree with him, to a point. And it wasn’t something that we were able to do. However, I also bristle at anything that smacks of prescribing what a mother should or shouldn’t do. Fortunately, I have the benefit of having read his book, and he did advocate that our culture needs to support mothers and families much better than it currently does. Because early experiences have such influence over a person’s brain development and later wellbeing, a mother’s job is quite literally the most important task there is. But if I hadn’t read the book, I might have left the church all set to ream somebody out for doing what they think is best for their family.

That said, I’m so glad I went to hear him speak. And I enjoyed the irony of hearing him critique certain Christian approaches up at the pulpit.

dr. gabor mate

I will leave you with my memory of something he quoted at least a few times through the night:
“Do not pay attention to the things that others do or fail to do. Only pay attention to the things that you do or fail to do.”

CONTACT festival coming soon!

Duuuude! Not only is the CONTACT festival website now live with 2009 details, but apparently TVO is running a concurrent month of photography documentaries! Yeehaw! I am so deleting the first season of So You Think You Can Dance Canada from my PVR for this. (And yes, I really am this pathetic.) They’re showing some great-looking films, including Tierney Gearon’s The Mother Project, which just yesterday (seriously!) I was thinking I might have to break down and buy, since it’s proving hard to rent.

If there are any long-time readers, you may recall that last year I had a decadent Mother’s Day all by myself in the Big Smoke, and went to a lecture with David Hurn AND an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s classical work. This year, I’m going to spend two Saturdays in a documentary photography workshop with Donald Weber, and I’m trying to find a way to spend one of those Sundays wandering around.

Easter at the farm

This weekend we went to my parents’ farm.

After the village easter egg hunt:
after the kill
(That night, we told him the Easter Bunny was going to visit the house. My son replied, “I just hope he doesn’t throw eggs at my head!” — Apparently, the Easter Bunny at the village egg hunt sometimes threw eggs from his basket, and a few came near my son’s head.)

washing hands

evening-1
A slice of life…

I’m fascinated by how my son organizes things. He’s more interested in playing with the eggs than eating them!

easter tractor

easter eggs-2

things that annoyed me today

Well, the day itself wasn’t so bad, but coming home was NOT fun.

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Exhibit A

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Exhibit B

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Exhibit C

Yeah, apparently the city cleaned the sewers today. I did see the letter that said we should keep the toilet lids down and plugs in the sink during the day this week, but I only remembered when I saw the spray of toilet paper bits on the cupboards. They weren’t kidding apparently. On the bright side, the bathroom was overdue for a good mopping.
Here’s hoping tomorrow is a better day.

thinking of other places

When I saw Stuart O’Sullivan’s personal work a few weeks ago, I felt physically winded with wishing I was in the warmth of South Africa. My husband’s maternal grandmother had just died there, and I was really feeling the distance. The second picture in his series could have been taken in her house, in the room where my husband’s uncle smoked while we visited. Only I was too busy being all North American about cigarette smoke around my baby to appreciate it. It’s only been two years since then, but the uncle has died, the house was sold, and now Granny has died too, not quite 92.

my son and his great granny

Uncle Roger by his paintings

My next thought was to wonder if my husband might know O’Sullivan, since they were both born in Johannesburg around the same time. (No, he doesn’t.)

And my third thought was that I have pictures just like that. So I went through all my South African photos to find them, and, um… Well, I don’t really have any. Certainly, I have photos that share the same subject matter: flowers in front of walls with razor wire or other sharp things to keep people out, burglar bars from the inside, men in blue suits working, people swimming in pools by well-manicured gardens, the amazing brightness of indoor rooms… but they kind of suck, to put it bluntly. I guess that’s why he’s published a book and had exhibitions and I haven’t.

On the plus side, looking back at those pictures made me see that I have actually improved since then. And that’s encouraging.

* * *

Last week, my copy of The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings arrived, which I mentioned a while back. I love it. If you have any interest in documentary portraiture at all, get it. It was only $17 Cdn on Amazon, which seems incredible for a photo book (although I will say that the reproduction of the images just wasn’t as good as more expensive photo books). Albert’s handwriting tell as much of a story through the book as his captions and the photos themselves.

* * *

I also discovered yesterday that Phil Toledano’s father died recently, at the age of 99. I found Days with my Father back in January I think, and I think it’s wonderful. My deepest sympathies to the family.

* * *

I’ll leave you with one more picture of Granny Joyce. Granny

more

Since you responded so kindly to my recent pics, here are a few more from this weekend, and an exciting announcement.

rachelle-14

rachelle-12
(When I started this project, I never in a million years thought I photograph a belly dancer on top of a manure pile, but what do you know? The opportunity presented itself and I jumped on it.)

rachelle-2

rachelle-8

rachelle-16

And now for the announcement: Some of my photos (not the belly dance ones) are going to be part of a group show in honour of Doors Open at the Alma Gallery here in Guelph in April. The opening reception is on the evening of April 24, and the show will be up until the end of May.

unveiling

I’ve been ready to blog about this for a while, but I just haven’t quite gotten it together. I’ve started a new project, working with belly dancers. I got the idea last summer, but it’s taken me all this time to think about the concept and get up the nerve to approach dancers to model for me.

I remember when Tony Fouhse posted some recent photos of his crack addicts (I think it was in November), he said the photos weren’t quite what he was going for. I thought he was nuts, because I thought the photos were wonderful. (Ok, so I went hunting through his blog for the link, and it was actually in August, but he seems to have taken the actual pictures away so there isn’t any point in linking you there.) Working on this belly dance project, I’m starting to understand what he was getting at. I did my first shoot with Ishra in February, and I thought many of the shots were beautiful. But they weren’t quite what I was going for. Here are a few examples:

tribal col

window redux

angles
(This one might actually be a contender, because I think it caught a moment of introspection, but I probably won’t know for sure until I finish the project.)

A couple of weeks ago, I had two more shoots, and started making the kind of photos I think I want to make for this series. Unfortunately for these lovely women, it was minus 15 Celsius with the windchill. Of course. Just my luck that after two weeks of mild temperatures, on the one day I want to make pictures of scantily clad women outside, it’s really f-ing cold.

gwen2

fresh2

buckle redux

veiled colour redux

receding snowbanks redux

And that’s all I have to say about that for now.

Gabor Mate is coming to Guelph!

Check it out: Dr. Gabor Mate, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which I highly recommend, is coming to Guelph on April 14.

In somewhat related news, I’ve decided it’s time to decompress a bit on the photographic front. So I’m either going to rewatch all seven seasons of Buffy again, or I’m going to reread Snap Happy by Fiona Walker. If you like British chick lit and haven’t read Fiona Walker, you must.

hibernation

I made a slideshow with pictures I made this winter. Please go check it out, and then tell me what you think. Be warned, when you click on the link, you’ll just see a blue Q while it loads the entire slideshow. Please be patient. (My in-house tech support didn’t have enough coffee or time this morning to make it start playing while it loads.)

You learn something annoying every day.

Actually producing the slideshow to display on the web was REALLY annoying. I’ve been working on that sucker all week. Adobe Lightroom, which I use for most of my workflow, is great for making slideshows to display on your computer, from selection and ordering to playing. You can control the transitions and speed to match the music. The problem is you can’t export the slideshow with music. I’d created a slideshow that fit exactly with the music, almost by accident, but nobody could see it unless they were also seeing my messy living room.

So I tried iPhoto. You CAN export a quick time movie with music, but you can’t control the transitions between images, so it was much choppier than the Lightroom version, AND it didn’t match the music. So then I bought Quicktime Pro 7 or something like that, and discovered that I can’t control the transitions there either. I tried some other free programs that sucked for one reason or another, but came back to iPhoto. In the end, I followed the math I found here, which didn’t quite work, but got me close enough where I could tweek it further with trial and error. I just had to live with the choppy transitions.

All this to say:

Dear Adobe,

Please, please, please add the ability to export a slideshow with music to either quicktime or Flash. I mean, you OWN Flash now, so surely it can’t be that difficult to get your Lightroom developers and Flash developers to lunch? Lightroom is fantastic, except for that one thing.

Yours…

Anyways, back to my slideshow, I’d love some constructive feedback on it. On the selection and sequencing of images, and all that. The song is Chad vanGaalen’s “Sing me to Sleep.”