Good news! My calendars are now available for sale. There are four to choose from: South Africa, Parking Meters in Lunenburg, Cuba, and Guelph. Click the pictures below to go to redbubble to see previews of every page. They’re priced at $28.50 CAD, and because Christmas is coming, I’ll donate all the proceeds from any calendar sales to the Stephen Lewis Foundation instead of my usual 50 percent. That means $9.50 from every calendar.

Don’t forget to vote for me at the Canadian Blog Awards!

My calendars aren’t ready yet – sorry. But I do have news. This blog was nominated for a Canadian Blog Award in the category of Best Photo/Art Blog. So please go vote, before November 30.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple self-portraits I made last week.

why my house is so messy

Just wanted to let you know that Imagekind has a new promotion: 25% off custom framing until 10 pm PST on November 20, 2008. Just enter the code HOLIDAYART08 when you check out.

I’m working on creating four calendars for 2009. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to put them up for sale.

I’ve decided to use redbubble for my calendars. There are lots of options for calendars out there, but I chose redbubble because I think the quality is the best. And I really don’t think it’s in my interest to have poor-quality stuff out there. I figure redbubble is looking to fill the art niche, and all the reviews of I’ve read of its calendars are enthusiastic.

Cafepress’s website was totally un-intuitive to use, and I ended up having to create my test calendar twice. I wish Imagekind made calendars, because I love being able to just import my images from flickr, titles, tags and all. Redbubble’s site is pretty handicapped because as far as I can tell, you can only upload images one at a time, which is a REAL pain in the ass.

I’m a bit concerned about pricing my calendars. Redbubble’s base price is $19 CAD. My first thought was that this is way too high. Who’s going to buy a calendar for more than $20 plus shipping when you can pick up any old calendar for $15? And that would leave me virtually no profit to donate. But then I thought about how my prints start around $20, unframed, and go up depending on the paper and size.

It seems to me that if the images are reproduced well on good paper, a calendar is like buying 12 unframed prints, and getting to look at a new one every month. Or like hanging pages from a photo book on your wall. Now THAT is worth more than $20 to me. So I’m pricing my calendars at a 50% mark-up, which sets them at $28.50 CAD. That leaves between $5 and $9.50 for donation. So stay tuned for calendars…

I picked up The Writing Life by Annie Dillard yesterday. I didn’t expect it to have anything worth mentioning on this blog, but here I am four pages in, and already proven wrong.

“Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: ‘You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?’ The young photographer said, ‘Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.’”

A couple of weeks ago, someone whose opinion I respect described my photos as painterly. She went on to say that I apply the overlays with a very aesthetic consideration. I got the sense that she’d *heard* about the trend of using overlays but that she’d written it off as a fad, that she’d never thought it might have aesthetic value. Until she saw my pictures. I took it as the compliment I’m quite sure she intended, but the word painterly bothered me.

Somewhere, some time ago – I can’t remember when or where – I heard or read someone say that they don’t put much effort into trying to explain their photography. That’s the critic’s job. The photographer expresses him or herself visually, not verbally. What a relief that was for me! It gave me permission to stop pressuring myself to explain everything. That said, I think it’s important to question myself, to explore my intentions, and to challenge myself. I try to use discomfort as a signal to look at something more deeply.

I’ve never set out to make a photo painterly. I very much agreed with David Hurn in the summer who said photos should never attempt to be painterly because paintings will always do it better. I didn’t make note of that comment in my post about the Contact Festival, but he said it and I still remember it.

So what *have* I been trying to do with all these overlays?

My initial thoughts on the subject were that overlays introduce an element of spontaneity to the post-process. It’s all about trial and error, and some overlays change the lighting in an image and bring focus to an area previously ignored. I mostly just thought they looked cool. I don’t use overlays on all my images, although sometimes it’s just because I couldn’t find the right overlay for the image. That said, I’m not at all tempted to use overlays on my portraits from the drop-in centre – I wonder why? I think that may be a question for another post.

When I apply an overlay, I think I’m trying to make the image look old and worn or damaged. I’m trying to call attention to the edges of the frame, to push the contrast and distort the colour ranges beyond the plausible. I can see how someone might see the effect as painterly; I do want to make it look less real, I think, more processed, although I’d hate for anyone to see them as anything other photos. Why? Is that contradictory? I wonder if I’m trying to emphasize the fallibility of any single image? To challenge the expectation that photos carry capital-t Truth? I don’t believe there is such a thing as Truth, only a plurality of truths.

What do you think? If you’re a photographer, what kind of effects do you use in your work and why? If you’re a viewer, what do you think of images with overlays? Do you react differently to them than to less processed images?

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this already, but I’m taking a continuing photo class with Trina Koster. The people I’m meeting are great, and I get to shoot things I probably wouldn’t otherwise. Last week, she brought in two beautiful, tattooed models and some body paint supplies. I have to say, I’m not sure the body paint thing really worked — I mean, that’s a whole other skill! But it was certainly an interesting exercise. And Sue and Yves had lots of tattoos so we could photograph some without body paint. Here are a few of my favourites from the shoot:

I think this one is my absolute favourite of all:

Sue and Yves were so generous, there are A LOT of other shots I like, which you can view in a slideshow.

I finally got my hands on Shelby Lee Adams: The True Meaning of Pictures, thanks to a very kind coworker with a zip (or something like that) membership. I watched it twice, I found it so thought-provoking. This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. But, as I’ve discovered, it’s a hard one to lay your hands on. None of the video rental stores in my town had it. If I didn’t have a friend with a zip membership, I would have had to buy it from amazon. So because it’s so hard to get and because it was so good, I’m going to attempt a real review of sorts here.

The central questions in the documentary seem to be: Does the work of Shelby Lee Adams perpetuate stereotypes of Appalachian people or challenge them? Are the subjects being exploited? To pursue answers to these questions, the film uses footage of photo shoots and interviews with Adams himself, academics, other photographers, and the people he’s spent 30 years photographing.

There are three main parts to the film. In the first part, we meet the Napier family, a family who lives very remotely and whose way of life is very similar to that of 100 years ago; the second part moves onto the religion of serpent handlers and preacher Wayne Riddle; and the third part introduces us to the Childers family, a family with three adult children who are developmentally challenged, and three other adult children who continued to live in the family home with their spouses.

Towards the end of the first part on the Napiers, Adams says, “People say I photograph the worst. I don’t photograph the worst. And with the Napiers… I don’t photograph them anymore.” When Adams started photographing the Napiers, there were 16 children in the family; since then, 12 of them have died.

The photography critics and academics in the film all seem very concerned with how the photographs are presented or labelled, whether they’re presented as documentary or fine art. They say some of his work would be acceptable in a fine art context but as documentary it’s far too troublesome. In particular, they were concerned that Adams bought the pig that the Napiers slaughtered in “The Hog Killing” and built the entire scene around his personal vision. The Napiers were far too poor to buy a pig.

The critics said that the picture essentially looks like a document but because Adams constructed the scene it isn’t. Personally I don’t see any problem with that; I thought the myth of the photo as document was debunked a long time ago. Even images that the critics might accept as “documentary” are not objective records — I thought that was common knowledge. Besides, the Napiers got to eat a pig they couldn’t afford on their own.

I have to say, the critics come off looking rather like assholes. Most of what A.D. Coleman had to say sounded reasonable right up until he said that ultimately, these are people he would not want to meet in a dark alley at night. He also said that Adams’s subjects are not educated enough, visually, to read what was really happening in the photos they helped create. His implication that Adams is exploiting his subjects reminded me of Pieter Hugo’s comment that there’s always an element of condescension in the view that people are being exploited.

Another critic, a sociologist I think, ends his part of the film saying, “This is deploying so many stereotypes that simply reaffirm that the poverty of the Appalachian is that person’s own fault; after all it’s got to do with centuries of violence, inbreeding, moon-shining, laziness and bad genes and bad socialization. I don’t have to worry about it. They’re doing it to themselves.”

By the end of the movie, two things are clear to me; even more so on the second viewing. One, Adams truly loves the people he photographs. He celebrates and mourns and feasts with them. The photos are a collaboration. And, two, what others see in the photos is more the result of what’s behind their eyes than what’s in front of them.

The best example of this is a woman who reports that she was once poor, but she’s pulled herself up, she’s gone to school and she’s not poor anymore. She says she’s just grateful that nobody took a picture of her when she was poor and showed it all over America. She goes on to say that Adams photographed her sister, in this picture. She says Adams disgraced her family with that picture, and she wonders why he couldn’t just take a pretty picture?

When I look at that picture? I see a beautiful image of a beautiful girl in beautiful light. For me, it’s pretty much the least troubling picture in the movie. But when the older sister looks at it, she sees a dirty, underfed girl with uncombed hair standing in the broken-down doorway of a house that must surely be a mess inside. I can only believe that for that woman, her background is something to be ashamed of, so all of what she sees in that picture is shameful. But I believe that Adams doesn’t see anything shameful. I believe he sees, and shows – as much as he’s able – dignity and mutual respect.

The first time I watched the film, I found Adams’s work troubling. I didn’t know what to make of it. Who were these people? What caused their scars? What are they saying (their accents were definitely a barrier for me)? But the second time around, I understood more of what they were saying, and instead of noticing their differences from me, I noticed their similarities. We’re all just living: having babies and eating and laughing and grieving and all the rest of it.

This seems the essence of Adams’s last word in the film: “I’m not trying to objectively stand back and say look at this. I’m subjectively engaging and involved. I’m pushing you, the viewer, and challenging you. That’s why I’m in there with the camera six inches away from Selena’s face. I think you need to he confronted with that. By getting in there with the camera, by creating some distortions, I’m hoping to make everyone think. What is our job here as a human being? Stop making judgments and experience life. I’m experiencing this environment. I’m trying to share with you, in an intimate way, that experience.” For me, he’s succeeded.

* * *

Just as I was finishing this post, and trying to find verification that I’d gotten Adams’s last quote right, I found this article, which is a far better discussion. And this one, which draws very different conclusions from mine.

Last weekend I brought prints to the Drop In Centre. But none of the people I’d photographed were there, so I brought them again today. I showed Terry’s pictures to him. His first response was, “There’s a hard-looking man.”

“Really?” I asked. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” he said. “He looks like maybe he’s depressed about something.”

He flipped through them, commenting on each one. When he got to the one with his hand to his forehead, he said, “There’s a man with a migraine.”

I always worry when I show my prints to the people in them. I suspect for many of them it’s been a very long time since they’ve seen a photo of themselves, and it’s always a little shocking to be confronted with yourself as others see you. So far, everyone’s been happy with them, once they get over any shock, and they’ve been very pleased to be given copies. Today, Terry asked if they were for sale, and I said no, thinking he meant to other people. But I soon realized he was actually asking if he could buy the prints. “These are for you!” I said, and he was surprised and happy. I’m so flattered he would have paid money for them.

* * *

My workplace is having a photo contest as a fundraiser for United Way. I’m considering entering some, since the Drop In Centre receives funding from the United Way. So I asked John, who I photographed back in July, if he would mind if I submitted a photo of him. He replied that it was fine and he was flattered that I would even want to. These conversations are helping me feel more confident with my project. I’m ready to keep moving forward.

Most Saturday afternoons, I go to the Drop In Centre and help serve dinner. I always bring my camera with my 50 mm lens, but until last Saturday I never actually took it out. The one time I’ve taken pictures there was a special trip, not one of my volunteer days.

Anyways, last Saturday when I showed up, a man I hadn’t seen in quite a while called out to me from the smoking area. So I sat down and started chatting. There were only four of us there, so I felt comfortable bringing my camera out of my bag and they felt comfortable with my shooting them. Here are a few of the results:

We even got a bit silly: