I’m so stoked. I just signed up for a documentary photography workshop in May, with Donald Weber. He’s originally from Toronto, but now lives in Russia, photographing all kinds of people. The workshop is offered in conjunction with an exhibition of his work during the Contact Festival.

I’ve been searching for a good documentary photography class for ages, but they’re either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or for a price I can’t afford (especially when it’s all of the above). But this one’s perfect. Two full Saturdays, one after the other, with a shooting assignment in between, and a portfolio and assignment review on the second day. On top of all that, I really like Weber’s work, especially “ZEK. In the Prisons of the East.”

I can’t wait.

Knowing that the forecast was calling for a high of minus 15 degrees Celsius today, my day off, I decided to make it a stay at home day – no errands, no obligations, just chillin’ with my son. Add to that a night of crappy sleep and slightly upset stomach, and we downgraded to a pyjama day. It was great. We watched Wall-E this morning, then we both had a nap, then made banana bread this afternoon. Here are the pictures:

Right before he started screaming, “No don’t take my picture! DON’T. TAKE. MY. PICTURE!”

Something about having such a big bag of flour makes me feel more grown up than anything.

We are so doing this again.

Lately I’ve been investigating motherhood and photography; not representations of motherhood so much as photography by mothers where their motherhood is the subject. If you google “motherhood and photography,” you get a whole lot of portrait photographers marketing to mothers, not so many photographs from mothers. That tells me that there is something about photography that relates to motherhood, but it also tells me that there is a gap.

Along my recent web travels, one of my first stops was a post by Heather Morton on the subject saying that motherhood is the new black in photography, and giving three photographers’ work as evidence. (Edited to add this link to another photographer exploring motherhood.) Let’s hope so.

Indeed, there seems to be more evidence to support that notion. A couple of weeks ago, I discovered this film, which is yet to be released on dvd, so I haven’t actually seen it. But it looks very promising. Something about the words, “Who does she think she is?” grabbed me from the sidebar of one of the blogs I read, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get my eyes on it. On the surface, the problem of balancing motherhood with art seems analagous to balancing motherhood with a career. Except that I think art is viewed as optional at best and self-indulgent at worst, definitely something that should be sublimated beneath motherhood.

I’m also interested in checking out:

• The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power
• Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project
• In Their Mothers’ Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children, which seems to be out of print.

* * *

When I read Between Interruptions: 30 Mothers Tell the Truth about Motherhood last year, I started every new essay hoping find a story like mine. I see lots of stories of women who lose themselves in maternity, who have to redefine themselves in new terms that are compatible with motherhood, and not just in that book. And I don’t mean to deny their stories, not at all; there are as many experiences of motherhood as there are mothers, and we need to respect them all. But when that is pretty much the only experience I hear, I wonder. Am I selfish? Am I doing something wrong?

My experience of motherhood hasn’t been defined by sacrifice or losing myself; if anything I’ve rediscovered myself and my passion. Before I became a mother, I was a drone. I went to work and came home and watched tv or read escapist fiction. But being a mother made me want to live meaningfully, or at least pursue meaning. Or something like that.

* * *

Ever since I got back into photography after my son was born, I’ve viewed my pictures of my son, our home, our family, as a silly maternal exercise, a duty, less serious or important than my other photos. But now I’m looking at the photos from a political perspective. This is life. This is domesticity. Why shouldn’t it be a serious subject of photography?

(I can’t help but think, though, of the photographer who kept bringing his prints to a mentor, even the image that the mentor declared bad year after year. The one the photographer had to climb a mountain to make.

Maybe I’m not really in any position to judge the merit of my domestic photos. Maybe, when I look at pictures of my son, our family, I see the mountain I climbed, the mountain I’m still climbing.)

* * *

Our experience of motherhood doesn’t equal our children. And making photographs of our children isn’t the same as finding a way to photograph motherhood. I don’t know the answer, but I’m interested in looking for one. So here are some of my recent efforts:

No idea how this will turn out, but I’m thinking of calling it “Domessticity” or “Do-mess-stick.”

CBC Radio 2 just mentioned a conversation that supposedly took place between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Cohen reportedly asked Dylan how long it took him to write “Tambourine Man,” to which Dylan replied that he jotted it down in 10 minutes. When Dylan asked how long it took Cohen to write “Suzanne,” the answer was four years!

CBC is working on Obama’s Playlist, the 49 songs from north of the 49th parallel that best define our country to the incoming president. I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with the songs on Section A: “Bobcaygeon” and “Wheat Kings” by Tragically Hip – which although I made a big show of hating when I was in university just to be contrary and as a soapbox from which to rant about how underplayed the Rheostatics were, I’ve been enjoying the Hip with new ears in recent weeks; “Northern Wish” by my beloved Rheostatics, although I would have chosen “Record Body Count,” Northern Wish is still among their best; k.d. lang’s version of “Hallelujah,” which I still haven’t heard but which is reportedly amazing (and which, just in case you didn’t know, was written by our own Leonard Cohen); “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen; “Helpless” by Neil Young; and representation from Feist, k-os, and of course Stompin’ Tom Connors. All in all, a pretty cool little thing. So if you’re Canadian, get over there and vote! You have until this Friday.

* * *

I’m beginning to think something’s wrong with me. I’ve always had a habit of listening to certain songs or artists over and over again, until my husband stops letting me near itunes. But it’s different right now. Not only am I playing all our Chad VanGaalen songs over and over again, but they play themselves in my head over and over again, so that nothing else will do. I just have to listen to more and more. Which has nothing to do with anything really, except that his songs have been playing in my mind or ears while I shoot, edit and process my photos. So how about you listen to my current favourite song while you finish this post?

On Saturday, I collaborated with my friend and her mother to photograph the making of a lemon pie. Sadly, I had to go before the meringue got made, so I didn’t get to see the final product, but another time… here are some of my favourite shots:

I totally want to shoot her some more with the horse head with a more thought-out flash and no wire… She seemed a bit self-conscious at this point (I think I squeezed off more frames than she ever expected), and when I asked she admitted she was a bit embarrassed by the attention. So I said I’d shoot the horse instead, to which she replied, “No don’t shoot the horse!”

And now for what I think is my most favourite image of all, although I might want to process it a bit more:

“Sometimes you’re a fly on the wall, sometimes you’re a chameleon, sometimes you’re a – mud wrestler, you know, you can’t hide anything.”

Larry Towell, “The World from my Front Porch“

So the Just Posts are coming to an end. Because of the last two years of Just Posts, we started sponsoring a child in Lesotho through Help Lesotho. I started this website to raise funds for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, around the time that I started volunteering at my local drop-in centre. Now, for the last hurrah of the Just Posts, it’s time to pump up our giving again. I’ve been trying to decide what to do, and I keeping coming back to my own tiny piece of the world. So I’m going to make monthly donations to the local drop-in centre. I had hoped to do this through CanadaHelps but for some reason the monthly giving option isn’t available for this particular charity. Oh well, I’ll just have to do it manually.

One of the things I love about the drop-in centre is that they (we) don’t treat the people they (we) serve with pity. People are expected to behave appropriately, and yet we make sure to never leave more than a dollar or two in the cash box, coats get locked away, and we are told to avoid leaving sharp knives on the front counter. I’m not sure how exactly to articulate it, except to use the term I discovered in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté: unconditional regard. To me it means treating people with compassion but not pity, with humanity but not rose-coloured glasses, if that makes any sense. I saw a reference somewhere, maybe to a music album, maybe something else, but it was along the lines that we are all broken and beautiful. The drop-in centre teaches me that over and over.

It’s easy to become complacent. To tell yourself that you give here and here so you’ve done your part. But if you *can* afford more, why not? Especially with the economy tanking, more and more people are going to need help. Every time I get complacent, every time I think I’m doing enough, the Just Posts challenge me to rethink. Or I discover someone who puts me to shame. And the answer is that I might be doing enough, but I can do more.

The end of the Just Posts doesn’t have to be an ending; I prefer to look at it as a graduation. The Just Posts have taught me the basics, now it’s time for me to continue the journey on my own.

Here are some new pictures:

I just finished Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I loved it. It was informative, engaging, funny, and inspiring. Everyone should read it.

* * *

In my day job, I am leading a plain language campaign. I seek out burueacratic language and jargon and try to uncover their secret meanings. I get a charge from revising things like, “we attained significant knowledge tranfer” to “we learned a lot.” Pollan uncovered one of his own: “‘The most intellectually demanding challenge in the field of nutrition,’ as Marion Nestle writes in Food Politics, ‘is to determine dietary intake.’ The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?”

* * *

Here’s another tidbit I found fascinating: “In one experiement, [Paul Rozin] showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. ‘Guilt’ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’”

And: “Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

* * *

So many people have been duped by the food industry. I’ve been a label reader for a long time, and I’ve always chosen real, high-fat foods over lower-fat imitations with their frightening ingredient lists. So a good amount of what Pollan talks about was a refresher for me. What was new for me, was the history that has led us to this point, and his emphasis on how we eat and our attitudes towards food, and that is something I want to change this year. Read it. That’s all.

I finally got around to ordering a media kit from Imagekind, so I could see firsthand the differences between their paper options. Which means I can finally make confident recommendations for choosing a paper.

Just going by visual appearance, my favourite paper is, somewhat surprisingly, the modestly priced Epson Premium Photo Glossy. I expected to prefer Epson Premium Photo Lustre paper, but it has a faintly textured surface, which I personally didn’t like. Mind you, I was inspecting the papers a lot more closely than I think anyone in real life ever would.

I also quite liked the Hannemuhle Fine Art Pearl, which is pretty much the most expensive photo paper Imagekind offers. It seemed to carry more detail and sharpness than the glossy, so I’d probably use it for exhibition prints.

I would most definitely not recommend the Epson Enhanced Matte for my photos; it’s just too flat. It’s really more of an art paper than a photo paper, much to my surprise. And I wouldn’t bother with the Hannemuhle Photo Rag 308 for the same reason. It feels more like card stock to me than a proper photo. If you want a flatter surface than the glossy, go for the Epson Premium Photo Lustre.

So now I have to update my prints page…

Saw this over at Hannah’s and decided I had to do it.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? I spent a weekend in Nova Scotia with a bunch of women I’d never met before. And I watch all seven seasons of Buffy (in about seven weeks) and all five seasons of Angel (in about eight weeks).

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t make resolutions. I figure you make lifestyle changes when you’re ready, and that rarely synchronizes with a new year. I think this year was the first year I thought about goals, and I kinda liked it.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? A number of coworkers did, but no real close family. Unless I’m forgetting someone (I can be a real ass that way). (Hannah did, but she’s not close, being in Nova Scotia and all.)

4. Did anyone close to you die? No, not this year. Thank goodness.

5. What countries did you visit? So what’s with the plural in this question? Makes me feel all inadequate with Cuba, even though I thought it was a pretty sweet year for travel.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? Sleep.

7. What date(s) from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Probably January 12, 2008, the date of my best friend’s goodbye party and something else unbloggable. Or maybe my son’s birthday. Not many days stood out all on their own.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Getting this website up, and keeping shooting. Or watching all seven seasons of Buffy in seven weeks.

9. What was your biggest failure? I didn’t see my brother’s family very much, and I didn’t even realize it until Christmas.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing major, a cold here, a stomach bug there, a neck spasm here, a back spasm there, the usual…

11. What was the best thing you bought? I’d love to say the D700 but I’m still feeling some ambivalence about that.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration? My son has taken to spontaneously changing the toilet paper when the holder runs out. If it weren’t for him, the toilet paper would remain forever on the counter.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? Tony Clement’s when he said that doctors working at InSite were unethical.

14. Where did most of your money go? The house we moved into in August.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? A family member securing stable, affordable, decent housing. And photography.

16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2008? The Buffy theme song. Or maybe the Angel theme song since it’s unlike I’ll ever watch that series again, and I will most definitely watch Buffy over and over.

17. Compared to this time last year, you are… A buffyhead.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Belly dancing. It’s just so good for me physically and mentally. And volunteering — but at this point in my life, that would require an eight-day week.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Overall, I’m pretty happy with the things I’ve been doing. I’d kind of like a lot less sleeping three to a bed, but at I’m ok with that choice.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Spent it with my family. Christmas Eve at our house with the in-law, then Christmas afternoon and my birthday (Boxing Day) at my parents’ place with my siblings and their families. A very nice time.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? Yes, first with Angel in seasons one and two of Buffy, then more so with Spike in seasons five, six, and seven.

23. How many one-night stands? Well, I had a few in my dreams, mostly with Spike, but that would probably not count as a one-night stand then, would it?

24. What was your favorite TV program? Buffy.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Why yes, there are a few: Angelus, Warren, Caleb…

26. What was the best book you read? Ack! All the good books I keep thinking of (Shutterbabe, the Harry Potter series, 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa) I actually read in 2007. Oh wait! The Time Traveller’s Wife. Now THAT’s a book. And I read it in 2008 (barely).

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Girl Talk. There were other bands and songs I discovered and drove my husband nuts with how much I played on repeat, but Girl Talk felt like a real discovery for me.

28. What did you want and get? To sell a print of one of my photographs. And speaking of which, look what just arrived in my inbox tonight:

That’s my photo in Mad’s living room. I can’t believe how good it looks! (I’m not sure the small file here really does it justice — the big one she sent looks like a virtual frame generator it looks so good.) Thanks, Mad!

29. What was your favorite film of this year? I have to change this one to favourite dvd, since I didn’t watch many movies. The answer is – what else? – Buffy.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I went to my brother’s house and ate vegetarian chili and carrot cake with most of my family. I turned32. (Heh, my fingers just slipped and I accidentally typed 21 – paging Dr. Freud!)

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? I wish Buffy and Spike had had a more real relationship, and before the end of season six.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? Some people have a personal fashion concept? That changes by the year? My personal fashion concept does not change from year to year. Here are my fashion guidelines: Comfort above all else. If an item is especially comfortable, wear it until it literally falls off. And whenever possible, wear brown.

33. What kept you sane? My husband, since my best friend is on the other side of the world, and we have nobody nearby to call on for help. Him, or Buffy.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Spike.

35. What political issue stirred you the most? Probably the whole InSite thing.

36. Who did you miss? My best friend. And Mad.

37. Who was the best new person you met? At the risk of sounding like a kiss-ass, my boss.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008: I’ve been learning a lot about compassion this year, or at least trying to.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

“When things get rough
He just hides behind his Buffy
Now look, he’s getting huffy
‘Cause he knows that I know
She clings,
She’s needy
She’s also really greedy
She never–
His eyes are beady
This is my verse,
Hello? She– “

(So who can identify the song and singer I just quoted?)

I sure know how to live it up on a Saturday night. I spent most of last night poring over the flash photography tips on this site. Everyone knows about Strobist, which I also like (I loved his interview with Rembrandt a while back), but I need a more basic education right now, and planetneil provides it.

I also spent considerable time discovering the down side of having a brilliant new monitor: I’m becoming a pixel peeper! And my pixels aren’t measuring up. For one thing, I discovered that some of the pictures from my new camera have horrible noise in the shadows, even at low ISOs.

During my obsessive research about the D700, I learned that Nikon’s RAW converter, Capture NX2 sometimes gets better results than Adobe Lightroom on Nikon RAW files. Luckily, Nikon thoughtfully provided a 60-day trial of Capture NX2 with my camera (I’m being sarcastic, since the price tag on the full software is about $200 – couldn’t they just throw it in when you buy a crazy expensive camera???). Anyways, I opened up some of the troublesome files in Capture NX2, and sure enough they’re better. It seems like Lightroom tried to lighten the shadow areas, which introduced noise, whereas Capture NX2 left those areas darker, as I intended, but still with some detail and very little noise. Unfortunately, now that I’m so familiar with Lightroom, Capture’s interface is just confusing and frustrating.

As well, when I produced jpgs from the files in Capture NX2, I discovered they’re much darker and have less detail when viewed through my Windows explorer and web browsers than they do in Capture, which kind of negates the whole thing. See how a new monitor can drive you crazy? Or maybe it’s just me.

* * *

Other things I’m thinking about:

I can’t get Alec Soth’s NIAGARA out of my mind. It started when I kept seeing quotes from him all over the place, quotes that really spoke to me. I wondered who was this Alec Soth (I’m horribly ignorant about contemporary photographers)? (Answer: established Magnum photographer.) When I went through the first few photos of NIAGARA, I thought I had it sussed out: a study of cheap motels around Niagara Falls. But then we see couples, love letters full of creases, a soaked and muddy newspaper, and we go into the hotel rooms. And the series becomes a meditation on our culture’s ideas of love and its end. I think it’s my first experience of a series of images with all kinds of different subjects, individually, but a single theme or statement, collectively.

JM Colberg mentioned a while back that he’d like to see fewer typologies in 2009, among other things. Given that I’ve only worked on one typology (Parking Meters in Lunenburg), and it was only for an afternoon, I think I still have some exploring to do on that front. But Soth’s NIAGARA has really started me thinking about other ways of working.

* * *

A few weeks ago, David duChemin suggested developing a plan for 2009. And I always do what David says — well, except for calibrating my monitor. I only did that last weekend because my pictures looked overexposed on the new one.

At the start of 2008, I decided to start a website from which to sell my prints and raise money for charity. My passion for the medium exploded, and I found myself just hoping the momentum would keep up for just a bit longer. Whenever I started to feel discouraged, I just told myself to never mind, just keep shooting. No matter what, keep shooting. Now here I am at the end of the year, and the momentum hasn’t really slowed. I do alternate between extremes of optimism and my work totally sucks so what’s the point negativity, but I just to observe those shifts, and keep shooting.

For 2009, I have a few more specific goals. I may not have a hardcore plan, but I have a vision and a direction. I want to focus on more project-oriented work, and I have lots of ideas. I just need to start putting them into action. I also want to learn how to use my new SB-900 to balance flash with ambient light.

Putting my ideas for projects into action will require that I get over myself and my analysis paralysis. I’m starting to wonder if I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida way too early in my explorations of the medium, and it’s just fucked me up. Which is funny, because I can’t actually remember anything specific from either of those books. Maybe that makes it even more dangerous for me; I’ve just adopted the ideas wholesale with no awareness of where they came from. The only reason I’m suspicious is because I watched part of this video last night, and I recognized a lot of Sontag’s ideas in many of my own hang-ups.

One of my ideas is to photograph some of my neighbours in their homes. I’d like to find some who are the original owners of their50s-built house, to see what things have remained from that era and what have been replaced. It might also be interesting to photograph other neighbours, like the university students in their rentals, or the few younger families around to contrast the different demographics. This project could also help me get to know our neighbours, which is something I’m not particularly good at. This project would also be well-shot in winter, since I can shoot it indoors, and the lower-angled winter sun could be nice if my neighbours have windows like mine.

Ok, I think that’s enough for a Sunday morning…