I’m looking for more derby girls to photograph for my project, Yes these bones shall live. Especially women who live in the tri-city area and who are available during weekdays. Also especially queer families and women of size. If you’re interested in participating, even if you don’t fall into one of those categories, please send me an email at kate (at) peripheralvision (dot) ca. I can work in Guelph, Kitchener, Cambridge, Hamilton, Toronto, Oshawa or Peterborough, so even if you don’t live near me, if you’re interested drop me a line. Even if you’re farther away, email me, because I’m thinking of travelling to photograph more women.
My family celebrates Christmas, but for years now we don’t buy gifts for the adults. Instead, we donate to charities and give presents to the children. So far I love it. But over the last year or two I’ve become quite a collector of photobooks. Where once I was content to look at work online, now I want to study it in print; I want to own it and look at it while I sit on a comfortable chair in the sun and be able to show it to others. So I’ve developed quite a wish list of titles. So if anyone wants to get me a very special gift (my birthday is on Boxing Day!), feel free to choose from the following list, in no particular order:
Viviane Sassen, Flamboya. (I did get a notification from the publisher that they were reprinting it, but for the life of me I cannot find a buy button on the book’s page. What’s up with that?)
(My good sleeper has officially left the building, leaving me grumpy as all get out and overwhelmed to boot. In his defence i think he has a teensy cold, but still, it’s been more than two months now of lousy sleep…)
So, in lieu of coherently articulated thoughts, I give you some recent photos.
Alec Soth has a new flickr challenge, in honour of his From Here to There exhibition now in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse is considerably closer to me than Minnesota, but when you add a screaming baby into the car, suddenly the car ride is an eternity. (This weekend we discovered the baby has not outgrown his misery in cars after all, and our hearts and ears are still recovering from two-hour drive.) Anyways, the new flickr challenge: recreating an iconic photograph. He launched the challenge shortly after this story in the New York Times and also this blog post. This is a perfect time for me to do this kind of a challenge. I’m not quite able to dig into a full project, but I’m keen to make pictures.
So early Friday morning I decided to try to recreate William Eggleston’s tricycle picture. My neighbourhood is the exact same vintage as the one in the photo, and there are still lots of houses with carports. What could be easier, right? I just have to plunk a tricycle in front of a house with a carport and Bob’s yer uncle. As it happens, not so much.
On the way to take my older son to school, we passed a house whose driveway might work well. And there was even a blue trike tucked into a box or something. But I had only just met the owner of the house and I was shy about just knocking on her door. I had thought I knew the houses I wanted to use, but this one could be another option.
Then I started to wonder about what the right time of day might be. So I came home to study the light in the photograph. There isn’t much in the way of shadows and the sky is so white, I was a bit confused. It seems too bright to be an overcast day, don’t you think? Today was mostly sunny here, but there were light clouds in the sky that sometimes passed over the sun that took away the shadows and made the light more diffuse. I had tried last night as the sun went down but it was too dark I’m pretty sure. So here’s today’s effort.
I’m not very happy with it but that’s partly because of the proportions of my trike and the solidity of its tires and partly the huge leafy trees. I see now, though, that I was too far from the houses. I probably needed to stand right in the middle of the street instead of the less busy spot I chose. But still… not bad.
This exercise has given me SO much more respect for Eggleston’s photo. For one thing, I’m quite certain he had to have the camera on the ground. I did, and the pavement killed my knees. I even cheated and used my live view mode (which I KNOW Eggleston didn’t have) so I didn’t have to put my chin on the ground. With my five-year-old on the corner holding the baby’s stroller and calling out every time a car came towards me, that would have been just too much. So how the hell did he compose the image so carefully? Before I went out and shot I tried to mark in my mind the geometric details of the composition. The roofline does not go along the third line, as you might expect – it’s somewhere between a third and a half. There are two windows to the right of the trike and two windows to the left. The car in the carport sits neatly in the space underneath the trike, and there’s just a hint of a bumper on the right edge of the frame. Just now I notice that the angle of the carport’s roof echoes the angle of the seat bar. There’s a wee patch of dried grass between the sidewalk the trike is on and the road, and the trees way behind the houses have no leaves.
Having tried to remake the photo, I find the original more beautiful than I ever did before. I mean, did he put his chin on the ground to look through the viewfinder or did he shoot it blindly? Of course, I expect he shot from the grass on the other side of the sidewalk, so perhaps his experience wasn’t so painful as mine. My appreciation for the photo grew especially knowing that Eggleston only takes one shot of each scene that strikes him. In Image Makers Image Takers he said, “A long time ago, I would have taken several shots of the same thing, but I realized that I could never decide which one was the best. I thought I was wasting a lot of time looking at these damn near identical pictures. I wanted to discipline myself to take only one picture of something, and if it didn’t work out, that’s just too bad. But it’s pretty much always worked.”
I’ll say. When I looked up the quote in the book before I started writing, I was pretty chuffed to read this as well: “If anything I would probably like the viewer to study the entire picture and everything that’s in it, where it’s placed, the composition. I would also hope that the image would register in the viewer’s mind after seeing it in print. It’s not even so much about remembering the image but seeing it.”
I may try again with this picture, but I’ll probably wait until after the leaves have fallen.
It’s been a long time since I went for a walk and just watched and listened. Yesterday I had the pleasure of two short walks of watching and listening – and one was with my camera. I learned why they call it fall:
Bits of black walnut shell fell like tear drops from a great height – a squirrel eating on a telephone wire.
A gust became a blizzard of maple keys.
A single leaf spiralled straight down.
I like noticing things like that. Also the woman in a white sweater with big pink roses who walked beneath a big tree whose leaves were half green and half pumpkin. I would never wear a sweater like that myself, but it clashed so gloriously with its surroundings.
I photographed none of that. Here is some of what I did photograph.
Supposedly the city’s going to cut down this dead tree
after the raccoons
I never get tired of RVs
Now that I’m at home so much more, I’m thinking a lot about picking up my neighbours project again. I stopped when the derby girls picked up for a couple of reasons. Time is an obvious one. But also, I was unsure of what I was trying to do, why I was making the pictures, how it would come together. I think I’m a lot clearer on that front, and I have new ideas for how to move forward on it.
The other day Pete Brook posted an interview with Michal Chelbin. I loved it not only because her portraits are stunning (you really must click through from the interview to the sneak preview) but because she’s so clear in what she’s trying to do, what works in her photography, why she photographs in Russia and the Ukraine, and why she’s drawn to photograph the people she does. I really believe it’s not enough to make beautiful pictures. You have to know why you photograph who, what and how you do. Alec Soth said that when he’s advising thesis students, it’s almost like getting the student on a therapist’s couch, seeking to understand their own work.
Anyways… my neighbourhood. I tried to leave last summer, but the deal fell through and nobody wanted our house anyways (I think that also contributed to stopping the neighbours project — how to continue when I don’t want to be here?). I don’t feel comfortable with the houses so far apart for some reason, and there are too many streets without sidewalks. Too many garages and central air conditioners and lawn maintenance companies. It’s hard to see the people here. But my son goes to a good school and it’s not a bad place. So I guess we’ll stay for a while. And while I’m here I will try to work on the neighbours project — I think it’s a little more amenable to life with a baby than the derby project where the subjects are a little further away…
I forgot to mention in my last post some good news I’ve recently received. The first was that some of my images were included in the group exhibition of F-Stop Magazine Issue 48 Relations.
The second is that I was named a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass. This is a really interesting program that I think is great. You first pay an entry fee to go to the prescreening jury. This year, there were 20+ people on the prescreening jury. The jury chooses the top 20o finalists, whose work is then sent to an international jury of more than 200 jurors: photo editors, curators, publishers, gallery owners and other people involved in the industry. You pay an additional fee of $200 if you’re a finalist, but your work gets seen by a lot of people. This jury chooses the top 50, who I guess are the winners. A travelling exhibition is created from their work, and at least one of them wins a book award. So it’s less a competition and more a vehicle to get your work seen by the industry. What I like about the program is that you get something for your entry fee: everybody who enters gets a CD of all the entries and they also receive the final book(s) from the book award winner(s).
I entered in 2009. I didn’t become a finalist, and when I saw the CD, I saw why. So much of the submitted work was really great. It was inspiring to get to see it, and I learned a lot from that CD. I also felt quite vindicated when several of my favourites from the CD became part of the Top 50. (Dorothy Deiss, Jessica Todd Harper, Sarah Malakoff, and Rania Matar, I’m looking at you. And while I’m on the subject, if you’re at all interested in motherhood and/or the domestic in photography you really must check out Jessica Todd Harper’s work – it is absolutely stunning.) As well, I received the two books that were produced that year: Alejandro Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana and Birthe Piontek’s The Idea of North, which I’m particularly fond of.
Wow. It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’ve just had a baby. I blinked and almost more than three months have passed (I’ve now been trying to write this post for more than two four weeks). Time has a different character with a new baby – it passes both quickly and slowly. Several hours can disappear when you meant to go out somewhere but somehow it just hasn’t happened between the feedings and sleeps and diaper changes. You can glance at your baby’s sleeping face and suddenly half an hour’s gone and you realize you completely lost track of whatever anyone in the room said or what happened on the tv. The days take on a sameness, so you can’t really remember whether a particular detail took place today or yesterday or last week. But that’s not what I wanted to blog about.
In the last couple of several weeks I’ve watched two three great documentaries on TVOntario, completely by accident. The first was about Lucian Freud. I wasn’t familiar with his work before, but I loved what I saw in the film. So much emotion in his portraits. The film was almost entirely interviews with his subjects, mostly ex-lovers and family, with some famous people thrown in. And they pretty much all talked about how long and physically grueling sitting for him was. One woman said she sat for three to four hours at a time, four to six nights a week for three months. That’s a lot of time to share quiet space with someone. His daughters talked about how it was pretty much their only chance to spend time with their father, which was why they kept doing it. I don’t know much about painting, but I bet that’s how he gets so much emotion in his paintings — because with so many hours of watching the sitter, it’s all there, and then some. Although you can’t put that amount of time into a single photograph, his process made me think of the process for long-term photography projects. When you make some images (or brush strokes) then check in with your subject and see whether the pictures fit then adjust with more pictures and so on until eventually you have a body of work that fits your subject.
I think it’s that checking in process that’s been missing from my projects until my derby girls project. Granted, the project isn’t really about derby at all, but I’ve been at it long enough now to see that the work I’ve produced so far still has holes. If you look at the work I’ve made so far, there are women or types or women missing from the project that are part of derby. But I’ve gone off on a tangent now.
The next was a documentary about Disfarmer. I have to confess I’ve never had much fascination with old studio portraits. No idea why, but it’s definitely a failing I should try to address. What I liked about the documentary was the differing views on his work. One collector said Disfarmer’s portraits “are like psychological bullets” that cut right through to the real person. Or something like that. Another man, who lives in the town Disfarmer lived and worked in, said he doesn’t see that at all, all he sees are people who are trying to follow what would surely have been Disfarmer’s instructions (due to the slow shutter speed) to hold very still and not to blink. Another commenter talked about how every single child in his photographs looks scared. I find myself leaning towards the latter reading, and I like photographs of people who look uncomfortable being photographed. I also don’t understand how someone can say a portrait pierces to the essence of a person, unless they know the essence of that person quite intimately. I’ve heard versions of that idea about other photographers, and I never quite understand it.
My favourite part of the documentary, though, was the speculation around the black lines that appear in his portraits made with a white background (most have a black background). Was it deliberate or accidentally? Was it just because there wasn’t enough light to use the black background and the white background needed tape to hold it together? Had he seen some of Mondrian’s work and liked it? Nobody knows. I like to think there was some practical reason for the lines being there, and he chose to work around them.
Yesterday I watched My kid could paint that. It’s about a four-year-old who took the art world by storm with her abstract expressionist paintings around 2005 and the controversy of whether she actually painted the paintings. As the parent of a five-year-old, I have a hard time believing that her father didn’t help at all – we often suggest different techniques for handling the paint or paper or whatever. Sometimes I give him ideas and he decides whether he wants to do it. And someone had to suggest she roll a background colour on and let it dry before applying more colours. A child might come up with that idea him/herself but I doubt they’d apply it so thoroughly. That said, I found myself less interested in whether she actually painted them herself and more disturbed by the way her father and his friend, a gallerist, pushed her paintings with very little thought as to the impact on her then and in the future. Especially the gallerist, who said outright that he hadn’t been able to be part of that art world until he started promoting Marla’s paintings. I also enjoyed the film’s meta-ness, with a number of people questioning the filmmaker directly as to his intentions and footage of him questioning himself.
I guess all this is to say that if you live in Ontario, you should keep your eye on TVO, especially on Thursday nights around 9 or 10. If you don’t live in Ontario, TVO does also have a lot of its documentaries online the Disfarmer one is there, although I can’t find the others).
“Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order’s tall”
from “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver
Two weeks ago, I discovered Bon Iver’s album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Immediately I had it on nearly constant repeat, much to my husband’s delight. “Skinny Love” played in my mind while I slept the first few nights after hearing it.
Why don’t you just have a listen to it while you read this post?
Isn’t it absolutely beautiful?
I actually bought the album off itunes, so I could listen to it during my labour. Luckily for my husband and attendants, my labour went so quickly that it only repeated about eight or ten times. I’ll try not to go into details, since this isn’t that kind of blog, but I will say that labour and birth were a transcendent and healing experience for me. I actually kind of enjoyed it. There were definitely parts I didn’t enjoy, and there were moments when I felt overwhelmed and I just wanted to stop the whole production. But my support team was awesome, and whatever they said or did, those overwhelming moments stayed just moments and I was able to get past them. But I felt really powerful and like I was really coping well and that is a good feeling. I felt like a rock star for about two solid days after.
My first son was born by emergency c-section after 12 hours of fear-filled and difficult labour. So birthing my second son meant venturing into the unknown. One of my biggest fears going into this birth was that the baby would go into distress and I would have to push him out under duress. I didn’t think I could handle the pressure. I told my midwife, “If the baby goes into distress, just cut me. Don’t fuck around. I don’t want to labour with that kind of fear again.” What do you know, but the fear was realized. His heart started to slow down too much, but I was fully dilated so the midwife told me I just had to push the baby out. The funny thing was I wasn’t scared at all. The midwife was so calm that I figured if she thought *I* was this baby’s best chance, who was I to challenge her? So I just did it. Turned out it was just because the cord was around his neck and he was absolutely fine once he was born.
For decades I had a recurring nightmare/anxiety dream where a tornado was bearing down on whatever building I was in. In the dream I was helpless to do anything but watch, terrified, and wait to see if it was going to hit me or my neighbour. I knew I had turned a corner with my anxiety and panic when I stopped feeling afraid in the dream. In my most recent tornado dream (which I think I had sometime during my pregnancy), the tornado came when I was standing in an open field with nothing but a falling-down shack nearby for shelter, and I chose to stay out in the open rather than risk the flying debris of the shack. This birth felt kind of like that.
Right after he was born, I said, “That wasn’t that bad!” And everyone looked at me like I was crazy, because I’d been quite loud throughout the labour and I’d had some really hard parts. I really meant the actual birth part, which I kept thinking was going to get worse and suddenly he popped out and it hadn’t gotten worse.
It’s like the sun was shining out my ass.
I need to give a shout out to my doula, Jody Cummins-Lambert. I felt like she’d earned her fee before I even went into labour, and she offered perfect support throughout labour. I know a lot of people thought it was a bit redundant having a doula along with midwives, but it wasn’t at all. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re planning a hospital birth. She stayed in the background so my husband could be my primary support, and she helped him figure out what I needed. She also helped enormously on day 2 postpartum, bringing me witch hazel and epsom salts and throwing in a load of laundry.
I have one more thing to say. Having now experienced a highly medicalized, necessarily surgical birth and a natural birth where I was allowed to find my own rhythm and ways of coping, I feel like the attitude of “as long as you have a healthy baby, it doesn’t matter how the baby enters the outside world” does a real disservice to women. Of course, no mother would choose a better experience for themselves at the expense of their baby’s health. But the experience matters. Having a lousy birth experience is a big deal, and I think we need to do a better job of helping women have better birth experiences, supporting women during the postpartum period generally, but especially after a traumatic birth. For me, it wasn’t until I was pregnant with my second son that I acknowledged all the emotional stuff related to my first son’s birth. And the most helpful people I spoke to about it told me the best thing was to simply acknowledge the fears. I expected to feel fear during labour or have flashbacks to my first son’s birth, but it never happened, probably because it felt so different.
13 days postpartum, I may not be in the most objective position, but I think birthing a baby may be just about the most powerful thing a woman can do. I don’t want to be exclusive and deny pain medication to anyone or anything like that, but there’s a lot more we can do to make birth better for women. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something I explore in my photography down the road.
During this weekend of waiting, I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, about the story of her and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s quite beautiful, and I was surprised to find myself crying at the end. I mean, I knew what was coming. Of course, it could just be late pregnancy hormones, and the fact that Patti was pregnant when Robert first got ill. At one point, he was photographing her for her next album, and she writes, “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”
The book is dizzying with all the encounters the two young artists had with famous artists, poets and rock stars in NYC, often in the Chelsea Hotel. What a crazy amazing time that must have been. But I think what most intrigued me about the story was how long it took both Smith and Mapplethorpe to find their voices. Or maybe it’s not about the amount of time, but about the fact that they didn’t embark on a clear plan of action. And seemingly chance encounters with individuals had huge impact on their journeys. It’s fascinating.
Smith has great insight into Mapplethorpe’s work and photography too. About the portrait Mapplethorpe shot for her first album, Horses, she writes, “When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.” 10 years later, her husband remarked on the same thing: “I don’t know how he does it, but all his photographs of you look like him.”
For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking that all photographers are voyeurs. But Smith has me thinking twice about that now:
“Robert was not a voyeur. He always said that he had to be authentically involved with the work that came out of his S&M pursuits, that he wasn’t taking pictures for the sake of sensationalism or making it his mission to help the S&M scene become more socially acceptable. He didn’t think it should be accepted, and he never felt that his underground world was for everybody. [...]
“And yet when I look at Robert’s work, his subjects are not saying, Sorry, I have my cock hanging out. He’s not sorry and doesn’t want anybody else to be. He wanted his subjects to be pleased with his photographs, whether it was an S&M guy shoving nails in his dick or a glamorous socialite. He wanted all his subjects to feel confident about their exchange.
“He didn’t think the work was for everybody. When he first exhibited his most hard-core photographs, they were in a portfolio marked X, in a glass case, for people over eighteen. He didn’t feel that it was important to shove those pictures in people’s faces, except mine, if he was teasing me.”
