This is not a photo of two young guys in matching, bright green t-shirts and matching peeing poses, their backs to me, feet wide apart, beer bottles in the back pockets of their jeans. It was 6 p.m., and my husband, son and I were walking to the pizza shop to pick up some dinner. We met up with them again at the pizza joint, where they were a bit sheepish and on best behaviour, despite their obvious inebriation.
(with apologies to unphotographable)
When I first started volunteering at the drop-in centre, I made all kinds of assumptions. I figured that everyone who came there must be suffering, they must be at the end of their rope, the most marginalized people in my small town. I thought the drop-in centre was a last resort.
But now I see differently. Certainly some people are at a low point in their lives, I’m sure, but I think a lot of people come for different reasons. Maybe they live alone and come for the home-cooked meals that are just too resource-intensive to make themselves. Maybe they come for the community.
When I started photographing people there, I originally intended to publish the photos with text, with information about the person in the picture and how they came to be at the drop-in centre. But more and more, I’m realizing two things:
1. I can’t really find that out. For one thing, the stories of how we came to be at any particular place and time are complex; it’s never a simple cause and effect. For another, that’s not information people generally share without being asked. And I have no interest in asking things like, “What are you doing here?” since it suggests that “here” is a place you wouldn’t just choose to come. Yet many of us do just choose to go there.
2. Their stories are ultimately irrelevant to me. It really shouldn’t matter whether a person just left an abusive relationship or just got out of jail for bank robbery. And I think posting stories with faces would invite either judgment or pity, and I don’t want to do that.
Last night I talked to my husband about my drop-in centre project, wondering if I might have to take a different approach to achieve what I want to with the images. Some of the responses I get to the photographs are disappointing, like when someone says, “Great picture of a hard life…” or something like that. I don’t want you to see a hard life. I want you to see a life: a human being, plain and simple.
My husband mentioned the concept of ubuntu. He mentioned it specifically in the context of a Zulu saying (which he actually said in Zulu but which I couldn’t attempt to spell here) that is loosely translated as “We are who we are through other people.” The more I think about this, the more I think this is really what I’m trying to convey through my drop-in project. I like the double meaning of the phrase too, that we are who we are because of how other people have treated us and also through how we treat other people. We are no better than our worst treatment of other people.
Later I did a bit of research into ubuntu. Archbishop Desmond Tutu described ubuntu as “the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation.”
Nelson Mandela explained it in a way that I think is particularly apt in the context of the drop-in centre with its fairly transient population: “A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects.” You can see him explaining it in this video.
* * *
I love going to the drop-in centre. I love the conversations I have there. I used to find my camera was a barrier to openness among people. But now I find it can open up conversations, bringing me into contact with people I wouldn’t otherwise approach, and deepening the contacts I already have.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, when I walked in for my shift, it was overcast. I glanced into the smoking area as I opened the door, and three guys I’d seen around but never really spoken to were there. It took me a few steps to register, but the light was amazingly soft, not only from the overcast sky but it also reflected back up from the snow. When I got inside, everything was already taken care of for the meal prep, and nobody was at the counter for coffee. I was feeling brazen that week (Tony Fouhse’s posts about approach really helped me figure out how to approach people to photograph), so I decided to take my camera back outside and ask those guys if they wanted to collaborate on some photos.
I felt really nervous (and a bit like an asshole) just asking them out of the blue, and trying to explain what I’m trying to do, but two of them were game. I started with JP, and put him up against the brick wall. Immediately, he looked at me for direction, a bit nervous, and I froze. “DO SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING!” my brain screamed at me, and finally my mouth said, “Why don’t you just take a drag of your smoke?”
He complied, and by the time he exhaled, his face was relaxed.
What I find interesting is that at the time, I thought the picture of him exhaling would be the one to go with. But now that I see the actual shots, I like the tension of the first one, with his mischievous and slightly self-conscious smirk, and the knowing tilt of his head.
Overall, however, I think maybe I should stick with my usual but much slower approach. My usual approach involves waiting for a rapport to develop with someone, then asking if they want to be involved in my project. It means that my project will never really be a documentary project, not really representative of the people who come to the drop-in centre at all. It will only be a document of the people I’m drawn to, or who are drawn to me, or to having their picture taken if they see me photographing someone else. And that somehow seems more genuine to me anyways.
Just over a week ago, I walked to the drop-in centre on a glorious sunny and mild day – the first day of the year when you could comfortably walk outside without your winter coat. As I was walking across the parking lot, Tony saw me, and said something flattering. I smiled and he called, “Has anyone ever told you you have a beautiful smile?” (Or something like that.)
I had to think. “Well, I think it’s been a long time.”
Anyways, we talked, about the weather, about my age and experience, and whether I had to come here for some reason. He seemed impressed that I just volunteer there because I want to, and he shook my hand. The subject of photography came up naturally, and when he said he liked pictures, I told him about my project. He wasn’t just willing, he was probably the most enthusiastic person I’ve photographed. He performed, he rode his bike with the coloured ribbons on the handlebar, and put on the fur hat he had just found.
I also had a great conversation with a man who used to be into photography. He asked me if I’d bracketed my shots, and I had to confess that I hadn’t. He once had a rolleiflex and a full darkroom and everything, but over the years he’s had to sell most of his stuff. He said it was hard to keep it while he was on the streets. He still has some prints, though, and promised to bring some in next time I come.
I can’t figure out exactly what it is that I love about the place. Something about the blurred lines between the served and serving, and about the sense of community that exists among a pretty transient population. There are a few regulars, but there’s a lot of people you won’t see for weeks or months, then they’ll show up for a while, then disappear again. I never know if the disappearances are a good thing: they could be working or have a new place to live or have left town; or they could be relapsed, in jail or the hospital. And there’s no way to tell unless or until you see them again.
I’m addicted to Zack Arias‘s new critique videos. I watched all four of them today when I should have been doing many other things. But I couldn’t stop. Not only are his comments spot-on, but I love his candour, his self-awareness, the little asides with his wife, and his dog who seems to drink a lot of water (which I probably wouldn’t have even noticed if they hadn’t commented on it every time).
He’s really got me thinking about my website, and what I’m trying to do with it. When I first set it up, I chose images that I thought other people might want to buy. But it means that the bulk of my photography, even the stuff I really like, just doesn’t fit. I don’t want to sell the portraits I make at the drop-in centre, certainly not anonymously over the web, but I would really like people to see them. Besides, I’m just not selling that much. Sometime in the future I’m going to have to overhaul the galleries. But first I want to develop my work more.
Anyways, check out the critiques…
It feels like it’s been a really long time since I posted any recent photos here. My computer broke more than a week ago (The Horror!), but we now have a solution so I can go back to processing my photos. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with these shots, though, since I shot them before my computer broke.
Last week, I discovered Elinor Carucci’s recent photographs of herself and her twins. I love them, and I love that she calls it “A limited glimpse into my most recent body of work — my children.” Once you see them, you’ll see the emphasis on body. (Go look at them, but they’re probably not safe for work.) I first discovered Elinor Carucci’s work last fall when her work was exhibited on Women in Photography. I was transfixed by her images then, and they stayed with me long after I stopped looking at them over and over. Her new work is no exception. For me, they present the sheer physicality of motherhood in a way you can’t ignore. And they’re challenging to look at; they really make you question our ideas about motherhood. I especially love the one where she’s standing naked, soon after giving birth with her c-section incision still covered with gauze and a linea nigra (or whatever it’s called – I can’t remember anymore) striping down her belly, her engorged breasts standing out above eye level like a porn star’s. Somehow that really speaks to me about how oversexualized breasts are in our culture.
A few days after seeing Carucci’s new work, I saw this blog post, which wonders why it seems that only thin, conventionally beautiful women do nude self-portraits, and they cited Carucci as one of those. I have noticed that trend too, although more in the context of flickrites’ work, where photographers seem to be capitalizing on their conventional beauty. But I see Carucci’s work differently. Her beauty isn’t the subject of her self-portraits, and in some of her pictures she even looks a bit freakish. For me, that’s part of the appeal of her images, that willingness to show herself in less than flattering ways.
I went to a portraiture workshop today that was all about making people look pretty in pictures. I thought it would be good for me to learn these techniques, so I can employ them when I want to, but after a day of learning rules and formulas, I’m just not that into it. I remember at the workshop with Ruth Kaplan I went to last summer, there was at least one professional portrait photographer attending. And Kaplan commented on how awkward it must be to photograph the person who is paying you.
That said, I’m really beginning to doubt myself. Tonight I saw a quote where a photographer remembered being asked by his teacher, whether his photographs were interesting enough to get him to leave his naked girlfriend in bed to go out and make them. The pictures I make at the drop-in centre would get me out of bed to make them. But I’m worried the images aren’t achieving my intention. I want to make portraits that make you wonder, about the person you’re looking at and their experiences, but also about the interaction that went on between me and the person, about what drew me to them (or them to me). That said, I can’t control how people see my pictures or the people in them, and as I realized from The True Meaning of Pictures, what you see in a photo is informed more by your own mind and preconceptions than by what’s in the photograph or the photographer’s mind.
Last week was a good week for me finding inspiring photographers. Nymphoto did an interview with KayLynn Deveney, whose work I hadn’t seen before. I can’t wait to buy her book, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings. She made pictures of her neighbour, then had him caption the photos in a notebook. So the book shows her selection of images, and his captions in his own beautiful handwriting.
I also found her other portfolio, Edith and Len, fascinating, as it combines her pictures of an elderly couple in their retirement home room with her own introspective journal entries about the process of documentary photography. I want to pick out my favourite bits from her journal entries, but I think it’s better just to go through the whole portfolio and experience it yourself. I will say that I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling some ambivalence about photographing people.
[insert thoughtful and insightful conclusion here]
Hoo boy did I experience some major blogger’s remorse last night. I had another look at the photos I was talking about and decided they were all crap and I was stupid to think they might make an interesting collection and there was no way I could meet the expectations I’d just set. I think the self-doubt was triggered in part by this article and its suggestion that maybe all the photos you’re trying to edit suck. This morning, however, was a new day, and I think it’s still worth exploring the possibilities.
So I’m still trying to figure out an effective workflow for editing these photos. Tonight I cracked open Lessons in DLSR Workflow with Lightroom and Photoshop by Jerry Courvoisier, which I picked up at the library a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might have some good ideas. Sure enough, there it was on page 44: “Tough Decisions: The Editing Process.” Now, I have no doubt that as I get further on, this book will yield great ideas and lessons, but I disagree with pretty much everything he has to say about deleting photos, and not just because I’m a hardcore pack rat with a fondness for the underdog.
He suggests the following criteria “to start the editing process:
Now, I’m all for selecting the best photos and ignoring the others. I do it every time I upload photos to my computer. And those are even good criteria to start thinking about. But deleting a photo just because it doesn’t follow the Rule of Thirds? I don’t agree with that at all. But then, I’ve always believed that rules were made to be broken. And I think that we can often have unconscious intentions we’re not aware of until after the fact. Just because a photo didn’t meet your conscious intention doesn’t mean it doesn’t do something else equally or perhaps even more valuable.
I almost never delete photos. Not when they’re blurry or tilted or didn’t capture what I intended. I might delete near-duplicates, but then my pack-ratness usually kicks in and I just can’t bear to. More and more I think this is a very good idea. I find more and more that the further I get away from shooting an image, the more able I am to really judge its merit. And sometimes photos that I originally rejected turn out to be some of my favourites. For example, all of these photos were rejects on the first past for at least one of the reasons Courvoisier cited.
These photos I shot all on the same January day, and I came home cold, discouraged and frustrated that nothing seemed to work. Now I quite like the bleakness and geometry:
This one, one of only a very few I shot in District Six in Cape Town, I rejected because of the tilt, and because the frame cut part of one boy’s foot off (it was a drive-by shooting). But now this remains one of my very favourite of the whole trip.
I could go on, but I think you get the drift. Hard drive space is relatively inexpensive.
Can I just say how much I love the Internet? 10 years ago, the only ways to learn about photography were through expensive courses or magazines and books, which added up to almost as expensive as courses. For a poor student like me, those weren’t really options, especially since I never wanted to be a commercial or professional photographer, at least not in the models that I saw available. Libraries had books too, but the collections weren’t exactly cutting edge, and I ran through them pretty quickly. And while I believe that looking at photographs is one of the best ways to improve your own, it’s not a great way to learn the technique or craft behind them.
This is something I’ve only learned with hindsight. I guess you can’t know what you don’t know. Back then, I had no idea of the possibilities. For example, I thought the only way to use artificial lights was in a studio, and I had no desire to work in a studio (it helps that I didn’t have access to one anyways). Until the past year, when I started reading Strobist and Joe McNally, I had no idea of just how much you can do with a small flash (or several). I also had no idea until recently that so many of the photographs I’ve seen whose beauty has made me gasp – portraits in particular – often used small off-camera flashes.
I also had no real concept of a “body of work” until the past year. I’ve pretty much always just shot for the single image, based on what interests me in any given moment or place. I was aware of photo essays, but I never really had much interest in them; in my mind, creating a photo story requires you to choose lesser images that move the narrative along over great images that don’t move it, and I’m just not that into compromise.
When I first started thinking in terms of a body of work, I thought it was something the photographer had to set out to do in advance, and that approach made me really uncomfortable. I have become more comfortable with exploring my intentions, and I’ve even enjoyed the exploration, but I’ve also discovered – through the Internet – that many photographers aren’t consciously aware of their intentions until they’ve shot most or all of their project. I’ve seen a number of interviews with photographers about a project or body or work, who said they started out on the project not really knowing what they were doing or why, but they trusted that they would figure it out eventually. This makes me feel much better.
* * *
I’ve spent the last week or so going through all the photos I’ve made since 2006. I was doing it for something else, but in the process I discovered all kinds of photos that at the time I thought were rejects but that now are quite interesting. When I collected them all together, I made my husband sit through a slideshow of them, and at the end we both concluded that they were pretty dark. They present a pretty bleak picture of where I live. Which is strange because we don’t live in a bleak place, and I’m actually pretty happy with my life. I wondered what was going on in them. I’ve been worrying at that question throughout the week too, already kind of knowing the answer, but unable to put it into words.
Remember how I wanted to find a way to represent motherhood through photography without using pictures of my kid? Well I think I figured out how. Not only that, but I think I’ve already done it. That’s what I was doing for the last two years.
All these pictures show undervalued and overlooked things and places: back doors and alleys, garbage cans, ripped old posters, graffiti, peeling paint, crumbling bricks, strange things abandoned in the river – you get the drift. I think I was drawn to make those images to express my experience of motherhood, how our culture both undervalues and overlooks the hard and important work of mothering. I think that could explain why I’m also so drawn to photographing people I meet at the drop-in centre.
Also with the benefit of hindsight, going over the last two and a half years of photos, I discovered a shift in my photography, a shift that really began early in 2008 – coincidentally enough, right around the time of my son’s second birthday. There are many reasons for that shift, I’m sure, but I’m equally certain that one of them has something to do with the shift from mothering an infant to mothering a toddler-slash-preschooler. It’s still intense, but I’m more confident and have more resilience, thanks to free evenings after about 8:30, more uninterrupted and consistent sleep, and more freedom physically. This weekend I went through my journal from the same period, and found the same shift in my words also right around my son’s second birthday.
I’m pretty excited to discover that I already have a body of work sitting right in front me, and that it’s reached a kind of closure (although I know that being a mother will always be integral to my photography). Now I just need to edit it.
I’m pleased to announce that two of my images from Cuba are hanging at the Whitestone Gallery for the month of March. If you’rein the neighbourhood, come check it out:
Whitestone Gallery
80 Norfolk St.
Guelph, ON
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
There’s also an opening reception for Michelle LeBlanc’s solo show in the front room next Saturday afternoon, March 7, from 2 to 4 p.m., which I plan to attend.
I’ve joined the artists’ collective, so I’ll have work hanging there every month.
On Sunday morning I got to sleep in. I awoke to a loud argument between my husband and my son, on either side of the bathroom door.
[bang bang bang]
My husband: “I’ll be out in a minute.”
My son: “But I want to come in.”
My husband: “I’m peeing, and I want to be alone. I’ll be out in a minute. Just one more minute.”
My son, crying now: “But I WANT. TO. COME. IN.” He had his toy camera he got for Christmas. “I just want to take a picture.”
I think I’m a little bit in love with South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky. I first discovered his work a few months ago, via JM Colberg. I was immediately drawn in by how he taught photography to the prisoners he photographed and got their work exhibited as well as his own. And of course, anyone who knows me knows I have a thing for South Africa and its people (my husband is South African too and almost all his family is still there). Subotzky reminds me of my husband’s cousins, who are smart and articulate and so much more engaged in the world around them than the young people I meet here in Canada. For all the country’s problems (and yes there are many and they are big), I think there’s something amazing going on there, culturally.
Anyways, Colberg published an interview with Subotzky the other day, and it made me fall a little bit in love. Every word of his responses made me think. In particular, I liked how he responded to Colberg’s question here:
“JC: I don’t know whether one would have the same impression living in South Africa, but looking from the outside – and from far away – it seems like South Africa had such a bright moment of hope when apartheid was dismantled and when Nelson Mandela was elected President, and so much has gone wrong since then, for whatever reason. Do you see it as your responsibility (if that’s a word you’d be comfortable with) to record what’s going on? To preserve this moment in time, maybe to foster some awareness and change?
MS: I am not sure if I believe that photographers can effectively take responsibility for such things. I do believe in the power of bearing witness, but I see it more as responsibility to ourselves – that we each have a responsibility to try and make ourselves as conscious as possible. Looking at the world around me through photography has become my way of doing that. While I am very happy that I can share images with others and try and show them things that they haven’t taken in, that isn’t the primary motivation for doing what I do.”
And later: “I think it is great to show people things they choose or are conditioned to ignore, and I admire those who can effectively do that. But I do have a real problem with the assumption that photographers can change the world by telling these “truths”. Some photographers have precipitated amazing change with their images. But it cannot be assumed – especially when the medium for this “preaching” is the traditional western media. As for me, I want to do many things with my work… sometimes I do want to try and show people things that they ignore, sometimes I do want to make a political point, but sometimes I also just want to express myself and try and qualify my experiences.”
* * *
My husband’s granny, my son’s only living great-grandparent, is in a hospital in Cape Town, and the prognosis isn’t good. I’ve had the good fortune to meet her twice, both times with the awareness that it could be the last time, and yet her voice is so strong and her eyes so clear, that part of me didn’t really believe it. I wish we could be there, especially since her recent hearing loss has made a phone conversation with her virtually impossible.
* * *
The other night, I discovered Katharina Bosse’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother” series (also through JM Colberg). I find her work really interesting, and as I’ve already written here, I’m particularly interested in explorations of motherhood. Apparently, a professor of photojournalism dismissed her work in a German publication as “irrelevant and a calculated provocation” (Colberg’s translation — I can’t speak or read German so I trust his representation). I find that statement pretty telling: motherhood is irrelevant – and yet highly prescribed – in the western world, and any attempt at making that experience central or subverting those presciptions is a calculated provocation.
Being a mother myself, Bosse’s images don’t really trouble me, but I can see how they might trouble people who aren’t mothers. Motherhood is such a physical experience, and I think our culture has a deep discomfort with and resistance to acknowledging that physicality. That is what her photos made me think about, that physicality, and this morning, when I went back to her site to link to it here, I noticed her artist statement, which I love (especially since it says pretty much the same thing but much more eloquently):
“After living in New York for six years, I moved to Germany and became pregnant. Nothing in my career as a photographer and artist had prepared me for this experience. Not only were the physical demands of carrying and caring for the babies demanding. It was a forced change from everything I had learned so far: individuality, ambition and workaholism. I felt like a teenager again, changing rapidly into a new person, not knowing the outcome. I started to look for articles, and images about this process and found lots of advice, but very few actual descriptions of the unsettling shift in identity I was experiencing. And so, over the course of four years, I brought to life two children and eight photographs. I felt compelled to undress (or dress up) and create images of motherhood I had not seen before. I gave up control of the shutter release, and got in front of the camera to extract a knowledge only my body could tell.”
* * *
Now here’s where I came to a dilemna. I discovered that another body of Bosse’s work is very similar to a project I’ve just begun (which I’m not ready to blog about yet). I only glanced at a few photos of that other series before I decided not to look any more. If I end up doing the same kind of project, at least I could say I hadn’t seen her work or been influenced by it. But I’ve always felt strongly that influence is good. I remember when I wrote poems in university, getting royally irritated on more than one occasion when people declared themselves poets (there goes that noun thing again), and in the same breath announced that they never read anyone else’s poetry, lest they be influenced. I still think that’s crap. The only way to be good at something is to be influenced by practitioners who are better than you. So I think I just have to see this as the opportunity it is and dive in.