One of the derby girls I photographed is a barber. She sent me a link to this delightful short about an old-school, lifestyle barber.

I’ve been a fan of South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky’s for quite some time now. When I saw the announcement last year or the year before that he was working on a project about Ponte City (I thought of it as the Vodacom building) in Johannesburg, I was excited. The building really does dominate the Joburg skyline, and when I visited the city, I was told it was “full of Nigerians.”

Yesterday, dvafoto featured Subotzky’s new website, which shows the working book dummy for Ponte City and the installation and details of every window, door and television in the building. It stuck with me all day yesterday and into today. I love this work. I also love that Subotzky’s showing it as a work in progress.

I cannot WAIT to get my hands on this book! It looks absolutely stunning. Truly epic, which is fitting for a building that carries such mythology.

Derbygirls Blog has been featuring guest posts by derby girls about what drew them to the sport initially and what keeps them in it. This post by Rachel MadHo about being queer and a derby girl stood out to me in particular, especially this part:

“Within the derby community, minority though I may still be, I am neither invisible nor spectacle. I can’t think of another context where being a minority does not mean being in the margins. My difference, my queerness, is known and acknowledged—yet I am not treated like the Other. Most of my leaguemates see the real me, and appreciate instead of gawking. They get it. Even the straight ones.

“Because, I think, there is a queerness about rollergirls—whatever their gender preference in partners. There is an understanding that as women, the world we’ve been given and the roles we’ve been assigned aren’t quite right, don’t quite fit. There is a determination to do things differently, to in fact do everything we aren’t supposed to do: act out, speak up, take up space, know ourselves and be true to ourselves, own our sexuality and whatever it means to us, fight for what we want instead of accepting what we get, always have each other’s backs.”

A day or two before that post showed up in my reader I was just remarking to myself that my latest images are feeling awfully heteronormative to me, and I don’t want that. So at some point I’m going to have to seek out queer derby girls. It feels a bit mercenary but I think it’s important to include that perspective.

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I’ve been working on editing my show coming up in March. Editing is HARD. Especially with this derby girls series, where I have some definite ideas I want to get across. I find myself getting attached to particular items in a derby girl’s home, and I want to use the images with those things in them even if they don’t really work. I can’t seem to get any distance from the things… is there a word for inappropriate attachments to things? To give you a few more examples, I’ll start with Lawna Mower who I photographed a week or two ago:

I love the Barbie/pageant winner topping her tree. But I wish I’d chosen a better height for my camera because I’m pretty sure nobody else’s eye will go there. And there’s too many angles for my taste.

I love the tinsel on her light cord, the repeating lines of the plates in her dish rack and the vintage high chair. But they’re all a little too far apart and too close to the edge of the frame. (I’m constantly crushing myself into corners to try to fit stuff in…)

This is probably the best picture from the shoot. The light was nice, but the only thing I was attached to was her green toille (?) curtains, which I couldn’t fit in anyways. What to do?

Of the images you’ve seen before, I offer these confessions.

I LOVE Suzy Slam’s candle. Is there a name for that gesture? (I also love her socks!) But I think she’s just a little too centred in the frame somehow.

Baroness von Spike’s husband is a famous cartoonist and I just loved seeing the word Gynecology on the wall. But do you even notice it?

Hey! Maybe you can help me out. Will you tell me if you even noticed the things I love? That might be a first step to letting go.

Anyways, editing is HARD. I wish there were resources to help, but I haven’t seen any. Don Weber and Alec Soth are both great editors, imho, and they’ve both helped me, but I’m pretty sure it’s such an intuitive thing you can’t really teach it.

On weekends throughout January, Flak Photo has been featuring images from Yolanda del Amo’s series Archipelago. I love love love it.  The stillness and the tension, the crisp details of the interiors… love. I even had to buy the publication Light Work put out.

I also love this video:

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

And because it wouldn’t be a blog post here if I didn’t post a new derby girl, I like derby girls. Here is Mandy Maggotbone:

It seems to be all derby all the time here in this space, but these days that’s pretty much the extent of my engagement with photography. It’s not only the pregnancy, but I’m in full-on, shut-down hibernation mode.

Anyways, on the weekend I went to Suzy Slam’s house. It was such a pleasure to photograph her and her family, I really enjoyed myself.

I’m pretty sure this is my favourite shot of the family, but there were several to choose from and I have a huge fondness for their vintage kitchen.

Again and again, I am learning that I get good results when I listen to my subjects’ ideas. When I first went to Sue’s house in September, I was pretty skeptical of her bathroom idea. I was worried it would read too much like a punchline or something, but I don’t think it does at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s my favourite.

So it’s the start of a New Year. I’m not sure what to make of 2010. My first impulse was that it was a fantastic year — and it was, photographically, especially towards the end. I won a prize at RMG Exposed (which I didn’t get around to mentioning here, although I did tweet about it) and I’ve been invited to participate in a three-person show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in summer 2012. I’m also going to be in a two-person show at the Elora Arts Centre this March. I made good progress on a project that brings me into the homes of intriguing women. And of course, I got to meet and hang out with and learn from Alec Soth for five days in May! That was probably the highlight of the year.

But then I started to remember the disappointments. The disillusionment and disappointment of our trip to South Africa — even though, granted, nothing really bad happened. The first half of the year I was a big anger ball, especially at my day job, though it spilled over into the rest of my life. In July we almost bought a house in our favourite part of downtown, but then the deal fell through and our current house didn’t sell anyways, and we couldn’t find anything else that interested us in our price range. In August I fell into a mildish depression, likely a combination of burnout from the first part of the year and disappointment that we weren’t moving forward on plans that could support future life changes. My day job got better in September with a series of projects that were big enough for me to get my teeth into but finished in a few weeks each so I could feel a sense of accomplishment. And I got pregnant, which is good, even if I did feel poisoned by the little parasite until very recently. And of course, it’s also scary as hell, given that my son didn’t sleep for five hours straight until he was 17 months old, and then it was just occasionally. I’m not even exaggerating.

So… 2010. I have friends for whom the year was much, much worse to them, so I’m not really complaining. But there’s definitely significant room for improvement for 2011 (please let it include a baby who sleeps well). Photography-wise, my goal for this year is to keep shooting. My goal for 2010 was to finish a project, and I’m not sure I really achieved that, although I did close the project with John. At any rate, I’m not troubled by that anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if the derby girls keep me busy and engaged beyond 2011.

This morning I photographed a derby girl for the first time since early October. It felt good. This is Vixcyn and her family:

So how was 2010 for you and what are you hoping for from 2011?

Sorry for the silence here. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks or so completely horizontal, laid low by the extreme exhaustion and nausea of early pregnancy. I was barely capable of forming whole thoughts for a while there, and I had to use that at my day job, leaving nothing for this space. I even put my derby project on hold, because I needed all my spare time for napping or figuring out some kind of food that I might be able to swallow. I’m now 12 weeks and although I still feel fairly crappy I know I must be nearing the end. The evidence:

• I’ve eaten — and even mildly enjoyed — a couple of meals that bear a trace of FLAVOUR.
• I’m sitting on the computer typing this instead of lying on the couch, even though I’ve been mostly upright all day today.
• I went grocery shopping by myself this morning. And I actually bought food. That I can imagine eating.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll be back in the derby saddle and moving forward on the project. The other night I experienced my first real night of crazy pregnancy dreams, and in one of them I discovered that all my best derby pictures were behind me. None of the set-ups I was trying really worked and I didn’t know what to do. I woke feeling determined not to let that come true.

I’ve actually gotten some pretty positive feedback from the industry on the series.

The Center for Fine Art Photography just opened New Normal on Friday, and my portrait of Leigh-zzie Border is in it! New Normal addresses the evolving ideals of social relationships, ecological engagement, media and culture in our ever changing world.

“Seen in the photographic work selected here are the changes of our pursuits and social relationships, the dynamics of international expansion and interconnectivity, the technological complications of our evolving environment and experience of the world. Photography plays no small role in pursuing such ambitious questions… welcome to New Normal.”- Juror Edward Robinson

There’s some really great and intriguing work included, and Edward Robinson is the Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art so it’s pretty huge to me.

I also submitted work to RMG Exposed, a juried competition to raise funds for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, and my image of Inna’ Goddess Da-Vida at the piano is a finalist.

The finalist pieces are donated to the gallery’s silent auction on November 13. You can see the finalist images online, and my image was even posted on the Photo Life blog. Oshawa’s very close to where I grew up — in fact I often went out in Oshawa when I was a teenager and home from university on holidays — so I’m planning to go the auction. Having my work hang in a public gallery is pretty cool — even if it’s just for a few nights.

So. Now you have all the news.

In case you were wondering what this whole derby thing is…

(The bout footage was filmed at the bout where I previewed my portraits…)

I’ve photographed a few more derby girls.

This is Kim Scarsmashian. She also injured herself badly just before I went to visit her:

I tried something different with Spunky Rooster and her new husband:

This is Baroness von Spike:

Just the other day, the Globe and Mail covered a recent study that showed that “On average, men were 4.5 per cent more likely to receive promotions at any level than white females, 7.9 per cent more likely to get promoted than minority males and 16.1 per cent more likely than minority women. These results remained true, even when controlled for age, education, years at the company and performance evaluation.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in the literary world recently, started by the critical acclaim for Franzen’s Freedom. This article from Slate is the best I’ve read on that topic. Here is an excerpt that really speaks to what was on my mind in my first post:

“All this is speculative, you might find yourself thinking. I agree. All we can do here is speculate. But one example comes to mind, concerning a New York Times review of Schooling, a poised, ambitious debut novel by Heather McGowan, which made use of stream-of-consciousness and other experimental fiction techniques to tell the story of a precocious girl who has an intense relationship with a male teacher at her boarding school. The reviewer—a man—concluded that such difficult, “fissuring” techniques were justifiable in Ulysses, when Joyce was writing about Leopold and Molly Bloom and a post-war world, but not in Schooling because, “By comparison, the small, private story of Catrine Evans and Mr. Gilbert at the Monstead School has no greater reach. Where is the experiment in this experimental fiction?” To this reader, the reviewer’s outright dismissal of crucial issues in female experience—the way male desire shapes female ambition and sense of selfhood; the way authority is always located in male attention—betrayed a telling assumption about the smallness, the unimportance of women’s experience. Ironically, his very dismissal only underscored the significance of the issues Schooling was exploring.”

I saw a letter responding to a white man (not being in the tech industry I don’t know his name at all, but he’s probably important) who claimed that the tech industry was “more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.” The response to his claim pointed out that it does in fact matter how old you are and what sex you are. She went on to call the guy out for sitting on the sidelines of discussions about how to get women more involved in the industry.

And here is an excerpt from the letter that I thought particularly compelling:
“You are a successful, young, white male who has the ear and eye of many powerful men in the tech industry, and you – like too many of them – have sat on the sidelines over the years scratching your heads or scratching your balls. Not many of you have taken positive actions to make positive changes in the system to create more opportunity for ANYONE who is not white and male.

“I’m not talking tokenism. I’m not talking special “Minority-only” or “Women-only” forums – but tearing down and rebuilding a foundation that truly addresses the inherent and deeply-entrenched barriers that keep women back and to a lesser extent – but no less important – keeps minorities back as well.

“I’m not looking for a handout, however, as long as the foundation under us all favors men – and in the case of tech startups young men – we’ll never get to parity or even a reasonable representation of women helming tech startups. ”

And just in case you’re at all skeptical about the existence of gender bias, I offer this video about the Bechdel test for movies. I saw it first a few months ago and it kind of shattered me.

Getting back to photography, I did find a few competitions that offer hope. Critical Mass is a contest in which photographers pay an initial fee to submit 10 photos. They’re reviewed by an initial small jury, and the best 175 are moved onto the next round, which gets judged by a whole lot of influential and renowned jurors. They announced the top 175 finalists recently and I counted the men and women. There were three I couldn’t figure out from their names or googling whether they were men or women, so I just didn’t count them. But of the other 172 finalists there was a precisely 50/50 split between men and women. I thought this must be the result of a blind judging process, because it’s the highest ratio I’ve counted yet, but they don’t judge blindly. The photographers’ names and biographies and statements are part of the judging process. Kudos to Critical Mass!

*I started this post more than a week ago, so the numbers are at least a week out of date and I’m too tired to update them… He was at 125 I think when I last counted.