peripheral vision

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:

Timothy Archibald, Echolilia.

Katharina Bosse, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother, which you can order directly from the artist it looks like.

Philip Lorca diCorcia, A Storybook Life.

Ian van Coller, Interior Relations.

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?)

Rodarte, Catherine Opie and Alec Soth.

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.”

I’m mad at Gerry Badger. It’s been a few months since I read most of The Pleasures of Good Photographs, mostly cover to cover. But if anything, my anger has grown with the passage of time.

It may be my expectations were too high. I was interested in reading it when I first heard about it, but when Joerg Colberg mentioned the essay “From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman,” shortly after my first gender post, I felt like I had to read it.

It’s a good book. I love reading critical analyses of photography, and Badger’s writing is great. His essay, “From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman: An Exhibition Proposal,” is smart and insightful. He gives a brief history of the significant contribution of women to photography, from the first published photobook (not William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature after all, but Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions) to women who were at the forefront of photographic modernism (I don’t know whether to blame my ignorance or the great patriarchal eraser of art history for the fact that I haven’t heard of Germaine Krull or Florence Henri). Badger even argues that Imogen Cunningham’s nudes are better than Weston’s. The main focus of the essay is a more recent generation of American women photographers who worked from 1965 to 1985, which he describes as a lost generation, because they haven’t been given their proper due in the history of late twentieth-century photography. He names Judith Golden, Bea Nettles, Marcia Resnick, Joyce Neimanas, Susan Rankaitis, Eileen Cowin, Barbara Crane, Betty Hahn, Jo Ann Callis, Joan Lyons, Ellen Brooks, Barbara Kasten, Nancy Rexroth and Barbara Blondeau. Have you heard of any of them? I hadn’t.

Badger suggests that one of the reasons for their exclusion from the photographic canon lays at the feet of John Szrkowski, the director of the MOMA’s Department of Photography from 1962 to 1991, and his tremendous influence in the art photography world. He promoted straight, NYC-based street photography, and all the women above had more studio and darkroom-based practices elsewhere, often taking a more directorial approach. “Although male photographers, including Arthur Tress and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, for example, would arrange scenes to be photographed in the 1970s, this approach seems particularly suited to women photographers, partly because they had something specific to say – something metaphotographic, one might propose – and perhaps also because photographing outside on the street was not without its attendant dangers for a woman.”

(I just need to take a detour here and respond to Badger’s claim that photographing on the street is more dangerous for women than for men. This is flat-out wrong, and perpetuating this myth just contributes to rape culture. In fact, statistics show that men are the victims of violent crime in public far more often than women and girls. Most violence against women is perpetrated by people they know, in private spaces. Presumably Badger thinks street photography is more dangerous for women than men because our vaginas can be penetrated. But stranger rape is very rare. Unfortunately, sexual assault by friends, family and acquaintances is not. Sorry for the sidetrip but I just couldn’t let that fallacy pass without addressing it.)

Let’s look at what women had to say thirty to fifty years ago. I recently found a used copy of Michele Landsberg’s Women and Children First, which was published in 1982. It contains essays that bring together some of her feminist columns from the Toronto Star, which she started writing in 1978. The title comes from Landsberg’s argument that government programs for women and children are always the first to be cut (or not even started in the first place). The book provides a fascinating history of feminism in Canada, and imho should be required reading for all Canadians, men and women.

Thirty years ago, Canada’s Criminal Code did allow a maximum sentence of life in prison for rape, but only with proof of vaginal penetration. “And if proof of vaginal penetration can’t be found, the importance of the attack is so diminished in the eyes of the law that no matter what terror was experienced, no matter how prolonged or ugly the nature of the attack, from forced fellatio to jamming objects into the woman’s orifices, the maximum sentence under the law [was] five years. Of course, if the attack was committed against a man, the maximum sentence [was] ten years.” Landsberg writes about a case in the US where a man violently raped his estranged wife in 1978 (in the presence of their two-year-old daughter no less) and he was acquitted solely because he was her husband.

Thirty years ago, there was no pay equity legislation. In 1979, the average earned income of Canadian women who worked for the full year was 63 percent of the full-year earnings of men. (Today that figure is 71 percent.) Landsberg writes, “Consider: a man and a woman, both with the same experience, are working side by side at the same job. On the average in Canada, he will be earning two-fifths more than she will, despite the fact that she is, statistically, better educated and more reliable. What is the difference between them? Privilege, based on owning the right set of reproductive organs.” A 1979 survey, by Dr. Margrit Eichler of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, found that roughly half the male teachers interviewed thought that women should be fired first when there are job cutbacks.

My own mom, a registered nurse, told me about her own experience in 1966 when the pay of (female) public health nurses was reviewed and compared to the pay of (male) health inspectors. While registered nurses need four years of post-secondary education, health inspectors take a six-month course. In the end, it was decided that health inspectors should be paid more than nurses because they have families to support. This despite the fact that most of the nurses my mom worked with were single mothers (of course, back then, there was no maternity leave so women quit when they got pregnant – so it makes sense that the only working women with children would be the sole earners for their families). “Affirmative action for women is another topic of furious debate. I have often heard men sneer at affirmative action as the most contemptible of reverse discriminations. ‘Wouldn’t you be ashamed to have it said that you only got your job because of special discrimination?’ they often say to [Landsberg]. Why, I wonder, do these men never feel ashamed that they almost certainly enjoy their jobs, status, and income because of the overwhelming special privilege given to men?”

Thirty years ago, two-thirds of people living in poverty were women. Landsberg blames this fact on the mythology that women’s primary task is wifedom and motherhood, and that task comes without material reward in our economic system: “Why aren’t women rewarded then, for the housewifery and motherhood that are so sentimentally exalted in the mythology of ‘the little woman’? Why is poverty the mostly likely lot in life for women who have devoted themselves solely to these sanctified tasks? The answer is simple. Her worth is defined only in relation to man. The whole world beams upon her devoted motherhood until her husband leaves her. Then what avails her secret brownie recipe, her gleaming floor? She has no skills worth selling in the outside world and so must become that most despised and impoverished of all humans in Canada, the welfare mother. Now her motherhood has something tainted about it; intimations of filth and degradation surround her. The shudder we once reserved for illegitimacy is now awarded to the women unlucky enough to have children but no longer any man to serve.”

Thirty years ago, the (female) editor of Roget’s Thesaurus neutralized a number of gendered terms, like changing mankind to humankind. “The Globe and Mail was outraged. ‘Neutered!’ exclaimed the headline of its editorial — a Freudian slip if there ever was one, since the Globe has always argued that ‘man’ words like ‘mankind’ were neuter, not masculine, to begin with.” If you think these language changes are not important, Landsberg suggests you “imagine a small boy growing up in a fictional Amazonia, where phrases like womankind, she, chairwoman, God created woman in her own image, all women are created equal, womanhood, and all of woman’s history, are the dominant norm, and everything male is a kind of subvariant, afterthought or abnormality. Would you expect little George to grow up and apply for jobs as chairwoman of the board, or even waitress, actress, or alderwoman?”

(It might be tempting to say we’ve come a long way since then, but I’m not convinced. We may have stronger penalties for rape and a broader definition of sexual assault, but something like 60 or 70 percent of rapes still go unreported. We may have pay equity legislation but somehow we still don’t have pay equity. There remains a 21 percent income gap between men and women – not much better than the 10 to 25 percent Landsberg cited thirty years ago. We may have paid maternity leave in Canada, but we still don’t have enough affordable childcare and the work culture still doesn’t help dual-income families balance work and family. Women remain among the poorest of the poor in Canada. Almost one-quarter (24 percent) of Canadian women raising children on their own are poor and 14 percent of single older women are poor.)

Now, I’m not saying that the women photographers listed by Badger all dealt with these issues directly in their work. I’m not familiar enough with their work to know. I’m just saying that thirty to fifty years ago, women had a lot to say.

So why am I mad at Badger? Here’s a man who gets it. He understands the complications of what feminists are trying to dismantle. Before his essay, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that my general preference for ’straight’ photography might be the result of sexist conditioning. Obviously, as my first post on gender shows, I was approaching the idea that our visual tastes might be shaped by sexist preferences. But I didn’t think as far as Badger does. When I first saw Cindy Sherman’s work — I remember pulling the book down from my university library’s shelf — I hated it on sight. In fact, I often find that my first response to a lot of women artists’ who work along the alternative or directorial themes Badger sees is that I just don’t like it. Give me Edward Weston and Stephen Shore and all the rest of the photographers Szarkowski promoted any day. As Michele Landsberg points out, “the more we talk about the ways in which women are victimized and oppressed, the more we alienate the many young women who very naturally scorn to identify themselves as underdogs. [...] The very individuals whose wrongs are to be exposed and sufferings relieved would much rather see themselves, thank you very much, as winners, not losers. Happily deluded that they themselves are invulnerable, they reject the critique along with the sackcloth and ashes.” That is how I felt when I first saw Cindy Sherman’s work.

Well, I’m mad for a few reasons. For one, he only shares these insights after most of his book focuses on white male photographers, all practitioners of the ’straight’ photograph, all pretty well-known already: Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Richard Avedon, Martin Parr, John Gossage and Robert Adams. Of the essays in the second part of the book, two focus on the work of one woman photographer each: Susan Lipper and Anna Fox. Other than the essay I’m discussing here, the rest are mostly about men. Badger does use one of Eileen Cowin’s images for the cover, but it feels like too little too late. And he starts the essay with a long excuse about why he’s focused on men, even though he’s well aware of the bias:

“I am sure that the kind of photography I particularly like is made primarily by male photographers. The reason why I like it is probably because I am male, and have been conditioned to like it, and so on and so forth. [...] As a critic, I have not written as much about women as I have about men, but then again, I haven’t been asked as much. Critics tend to write about certain things because they are asked, and I think that many women photographers quite naturally ask fellow women to introduce their monographs or review their shows.”

Don’t critics have a responsibility to bring good work to the public’s attention? You could argue he’s trying to do just that by writing the essay, but giving women photographers an essay or exhibition of their own just doesn’t cut it for me. Badger offers “a suggestion for an exhibition that would rectify this state of affairs, or at least illuminate a corner of recent photographic history that has been somewhat neglected.” But one exhibition is not going to rectify this state of affairs at all. If women and minorities are only represented exclusively in the context of women and minorities, their work remains outside the canon, an alternative to it. It doesn’t do anything to get at the root of the problem: privilege. And that’s just not acceptable.

That said, you have to start somewhere. And an exhibition is as good a place as any. My biggest beef with Badger, though, is that he makes the suggestion, but it seems like he wants someone else to act on it. Maybe I’m not being fair, but I didn’t get any sense of urgency or agency from the essay. I don’t think he’s actually interested in making this exhibition a reality. He just wants to point out the gap and have someone else make it happen. No doubt he thinks it’s a job more suitable for a woman, since it’s really a woman’s issue. Joerg Colberg, not usually one to step down from a contentious discussion, did the same thing when he said, “I hope that especially ‘From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman’ will not only be read and discussed widely, but that it will also result in the exhibition (and re-evaluation!) of overlooked female photographers Badger proposes.” He’s not going to discuss it beyond that sentence, but he sure hopes someone else will.

It seems to me this is a major part of the problem. There are good, smart men of influence who understand the issues that feminism is fighting, but they don’t see it as their place to take up the fight. Badger says, “I can lay my hand on my heart and say that I never consciously consider the gender of a photographer when looking at work.” But maybe it’s time that he did. How else to combat unconscious bias but with conscious thought and action? If not him, then who?

____

* The first essay in Women and Children First, “Drink Up Your Shrinking-Potion” is positively brilliant. So brilliant and so out-of-print that I’m seriously considering breaking copyright and retyping the whole thing, just so more people can read it.

Wow. There’s been quite a flood of traffic here over the last few days, but it’s slowing down now. Last week I corresponded a bit with the author of 500 Photographers about some of the issues I mentioned in my recent post about women in photography. He refused my request for permission to quote some of his emails here, saying that he didn’t want to enter the discussion publicly because he doesn’t know enough on the subject and his blog was never intended to engage in that subject. I suppose I could quote him without his permission, but I’d prefer not to.

Still, the correspondence got to me. On the same day, I attended training at work about the requirements of new legislation regarding workplace violence and harassment. The training raised three stories from the last decade(ish) involving workplace violence and harassment. Two of the three stories involved women being harassed by men in positions of power in their workplace while their employers did virtually nothing. Lori Dupont and Theresa Vince. They are horrible stories. When I got home, I got a package in the mail from one of the derby girls I photographed. She had a document on her fridge when I went to her home called Domestic Violence Bill of Rights. She left an abusive relationship three years ago, and she still needs this reminder on her fridge. I asked if I could have a copy of it for my project, and she was happy to oblige. She said, “Every time I think about throwing it out, I put it back on the fridge.” When I opened her envelope the other day, it was the original that she sent, while she kept the copy. So it was a heavy day.

The next day, a friend sent me to this book review. It is worth reading. No doubt the book is worth reading too. I’ll do it when I’m feeling less raw.

Anyways… Friday was my day off, and I was still thinking about women and photography. I decided to do the numbers on resources that I think represent women fairly well. I also want to find out more about how many women are studying and practicing photography, to see how those compare with the people getting shown, but I think that will take more effort. Anyways, I emailed Flak Photo to see if there was an easier way to count the contributors, like a textual list of names or something. As part of the correspondence, I gave him a link to my post, and he decided to broadcast it through his channels. It caught me off guard, because it’s such a rambly and barely coherent piece of writing, but now people are commenting on it and discussing it elsewhere too.

Most of the discussion seems to be happening on Flak Photo’s facebook page and in the comments on the original post. But it’s also happening on flickr here and a little bit on the original thread I referenced. It seems to be dying down now.

I spent a couple hours counting the proportion of women on Flak Photo and Fraction Magazine. They both show photography I like, so it was quite enjoyable. My numbers were off on Fraction, as the editor, David Bram, pointed out in the comments to my post. He got 43 percent. My counting on Flak is probably a bit off too, but it’s a large enough sample size that it’s probably reasonable. On Flak, I went back to Nov. 1, 2009 and counted 211 photographers in total that have been shown since then. 41 percent of them are women.

Also, one of the admins from La Familia Abrazada asked for clarification of my comment that the photos of mine that got in were cheesy or overly sentimental. When I went through the photos that made it in the pool, I realized there were two that made it in that I quite like and think are good photos and not cheesy. But two made it in that I do think are cheesy. Don’t get me wrong, I like them. As pictures of my kid. But not as fine art photography. Anyways… I would share the images, but I don’t want to sidetrack the conversation, which I never really intended to be about my work. Some commenters, particularly on the facebook thread, have gone down that rabit hole, and honestly, I’m fine with the idea of my work being crap. I don’t think it’s all crap, but I’m not convinced that the photos I posted in my post are at all good. I’m still very early in my journey, and I still have a lot to learn. Maybe I would be more concerned about people thinking my work is bad if I was further along in my journey, but I’m not. I guess I just needed to get that bit off my chest.

We live in a sexist world. I was about to get sidetracked into a rant about how thoroughly our society encodes gender in our children despite our best efforts, but thanks to the delete key, I just saved you from it. So I will just say, read this book review.

I’ve been thinking about the subject I’m about to write about for a long time. But there’s a real risk in writing about it… Ever since a wee run-in with a certain very well-known photography blogger shortly after I started this blog, I’ve shied away from saying anything potentially contentious here. Sometimes I feel handicapped because I don’t have any formal education in art, so the words don’t come easily to talk about photography. Or I worry I’ll say something that’s just plain wrong, and I don’t know it yet. But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I think the time has come.

So I might as well just get into it.

Have you noticed that feminism seems to have become the new F word? When you utter it in polite circles, people – both men and women – often respond as though they’ve been slapped. Well, maybe more like you just started talking about the time you had a pilonidal cyst. Some horror, some revulsion and a generous helping of fear for what’s about to come out of your mouth. When I was in university in the 90s, feminism, in those circles at least, was almost always referred to in the plural, because there were as many feminisms as feminists. But a decade later, it seems like in more mainstream circles there is only one kind of feminist, and she hates men and she’s frothing at the mouth she’s so enraged. That is not the kind of feminism I subscribe to.

I don’t blame individual men for the changes that still need to be made to achieve gender equality. Men are subject to the same cultural messages we women are. To me, feminism is about equality for all and about challenging our beliefs about gender; not about disempowering men to empower women. And membership is open to men as well as women. My husband considers himself a feminist. I consider him a feminist too, in case you’re wondering.

It seems like the singular, currently popular definition of a feminist only serves to hinder discussion on issues that we really need to talk about.

For example.

500 Photographers, which I’ve been really enjoying following, as far as I can tell, has only covered 17 women out of the 94 photographers it’s so far covered. That’s 18 percent. Now, I’m not blaming the author of the blog. I think it’s a great undertaking, and as I’ve said, I’m really enjoying it, for one. The fact is photography is dominated by men. Although women have been using cameras ever since their invention, they just don’t seem to stick around in the canon in the same numbers as men. Just look at Magnum’s group photo from its annual general meeting in June. There are 3 women. Out of 38 full members, that’s 8 percent. Not even 10 percent. And that’s rounding up!

I really think the problem is that the standards by which photography is judged are male standards. There are women who can meet the standards, obviously, but what about the women who can’t or don’t want to?

I couldn’t help but notice that work from my Two-Powered series was very well-received in art circles outside of photography. My work was included in Mother/mother-*, an exhibition about motherhood (duh) that included works in ALL media. My work was seen there, and is being included in an academic book now about mothers in contemporary art. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to notice that my work has seen zero interest in photography circles. Maybe it’s just because the pictures suck, and I’m ok with that possibility. But there are photographers, and women photographers too, whose work is renowned in photography circles that also suck in formal terms. That are more about what’s in the photo than how beautiful it is.

* * *

There’s a group on flickr I’ve been a member of for a couple of years now, called La Familia Abrazada. It’s an interesting pool of work, inspired by such photographers as Nan Golden and Tina Barney among others, and it was even featured on Burn magazine last fall I think. Last summer, someone posed the question, why are there only women and children in the group’s pictures? Where are the men? Well, there certainly are more male contributors to the pool. It’s a moderated pool, so contributors first add their image(s) to be considered, and the moderator(s) decide whether to admit it into the pool. At the time of the discussion, there were no women moderators of the pool. I don’t know if that’s since changed.

But the discussion stayed pretty rooted in the question of subject matter, and how to get the male photographers out in front of the lens. Because the important thing, I guess, is to SEE men. I did try to broach what *I* think should have been the focus: who’s behind the camera of the images. I mean, if your pool is lacking women photographers, there’s a reason, and it’s not simply that only men are drawn to photograph their families. I’ll stick my neck out and say that in fact, I would guess MORE women are drawn to photograph their families than men, since it’s still a fact that women are more often primary caregivers than men. So the pool should at least have even representation.

Anyways, after the discussion, I gamely submitted a few images of my husband. But the pictures were rejected by the moderators. When I privately messaged one of them to ask why, he said they did not strike him, that they weren’t bad, they just didn’t have enough ooomph for him. The thing is, he’s right. They do lack oomph. But that was kinda the point of them. Domestic life is kinda like that, mostly lacking oomph. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family life, but it’s not really given to grand moments. I like my family/domestic pictures if they have ambiguity, if they’re open-ended. I like it when they’re a bit surreal, when you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, or when they suggest something that had absolutely no bearing in the original situation.

Just in case you’re wondering, these are the pictures I submitted then.

Maybe they are lousy pictures, I don’t know. But I do know that throughout my participation in the group, I’ve experimented with submitting photos to see which ones get in. And honestly? I have to say the ones that get in are the ones that I generally find to be a bit cheesy, overly sentimental, or plainly humourous. Which is odd since the pool itself is not cheesy or overly sentimental.

Now this isn’t a complaint about my pictures not getting in, and certainly not a complaint against the moderators, it just seems like this is yet another example of male domination in photography, and kind of a huge blind spot when discussions come up. I don’t think the discussion should be about subject matter all. Well, it’s part of the issue, but it’s more of a symptom, I think. And I hate essentialist ideas of gender, so I need to be careful here. And of course, I really don’t want to come off as a Rabid Manhating Bitter Old Feminist. Or sour grapes.

Gah. This is the part where I can’t find the words.

…

Ok, so I’m stuck. I decided to check out the ratio of men to women in some of my books. Image Makers Image Takers has interviews with 20 photographers. Five of them are women. (Incidentally, it was edited by a woman.) That’s 25 percent.

The photograph as contemporary art, by Charlotte Cotton, which I highly recommend btw,  discusses 219 photographers, give or take a few. Ninety-one of them are women, which is 42 percent. I went from the index, and I may have double counted one or two, so take the absolute numbers with a grain of salt. But still, that’s a vast difference from 8 or 18 percent.

I currently have Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies from the library. It has a foreword by Anne Tucker, in which she sites a source that says that by 1910, women made up 20 percent of the photographic work force in America. She goes on to say: “Women actively participated in every significant photographic movement and school of the twentieth century. [...] As a young historian I discovered that a little digging in any period yielded important women who had been exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally. Women’s representation and the acknowledgment of their contributions declined or disappeared only when later historians evaluated a movement. The more general the compendium, the less likely women were to be well represented.” Tucker goes onto to recount her experience in 1973 of writing The Woman’s Eye, which featured 10 women photographers. She notes, “Those knowledgeable about photography tended to dismiss it; general book reviewers and women’s publications praised it highly.” (I actually saw it at the library before I picked out Reframings, but I thought from the title it would annoy me, since woman and eye were singular. I didn’t notice the author’s name or I probably would have gotten it. Next time.)

Anyways, Reframings. I’m disappointed to tell you that I have only heard of four of the 45 women photographers in the book. I was planning to write that I’d heard of none of the photographers in the book, but I figured I’d better make sure that was true and finish looking through the images. That was when I discovered Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie in the final chapters. I’d like to believe it’s just a coincidence that three of those four photographers were in the chapter entitled, “Sex and Anxiety,” but I’m not buying it. The fourth, Opie, is a lesbian, and much of her work is concerned with queer identity.

And the photographers I hadn’t heard of? A lot of the work is really good. I’ve seen other books of feminist art, and to be honest a good chunk of it left me flat. But that wasn’t the case with Reframings. So why I haven’t I heard of them?

I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this. It’s complicated, I know. Tucker said it too, when she noticed that Beaumont Newhall only mentioned 13 women photographers in The History of Photography – out of about 500 photographers in total! (I got tired of counting all the photographers by the L’s in the index, so I just estimated.) A footnote explains, “Evaluating Newhall’s support of women is complicated. In over 400 articles written on art between 1925 and 1971, he wrote about only six women: Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, Nell Dorr, and Barbara Morgan. Whatever his basis for excluding women from his publications, Newhall proudly supported his wife’s career and never discriminated among his students. He generously responded to men and women equally with shared research, advice, and recommendations.”

* * *

I started this post with 500 photographers, so I may as well end with it. Here are some ideas for women photographers he might want to consider sharing, in no particular order:

Rineke Dijkstra – This series brought me to tears when I saw it in a book the other day. She photographed three women with their newborns, one was one hour after birth, another one day after birth, and another one week after birth. It was the one with the c-section incision that especially got to me.

Kate Hutchison – I’m particularly fond of her model husband series and also why am I marrying him, but all her work is great

Jodi Bieber

Katharina Bosse – especially Portrait of the artist as a young mother

KayLynn Deveney

Laura Pannack

Jen Davis

Araminta deClermont

Juliana Beasley – especially Rockaways

And that’s just off the top of my head. And being fair, I’d also have to recommend Don Weber. Because I haven’t counted, but there probably aren’t enough Canadians either. But that’s another post.

*Updated: Ugh. This damn post took me all morning, and now I see 500 photographers is up to 95. And it’s Canadian Joey L.

Now that a major project at my day job has slowed down a bit, I’ve been getting a bit of mental space and potential blog posts have been squeezing into my consciousness. But I keep second-guessing myself. Here are a few examples:

Alec Soth’s publishing venture, Little Brown Mushroom Books, just published a book by Trent Parke. This is Parke’s first book in 10 years and it’s a numbered edition of 1000 for only $18. I waited until after I’d ordered mine, but by that point I figured anyone who would be interested would already know anyways.

I adapted this recipe for rhubarb custard crisp on the weekend to include strawberries. I served it with whipped cream, and it was wonderful. All I did was cut the rhubarb to 3 cups and added a generous cup of strawberries, and reduced the sugar to about one a half cups. I will definitely make it again, and it just felt like a public service to share the recipe. But this is a photography-centred blog, not a recipe blog.

I also discovered, via Tony Fouhse, this great project of 500 photographers. Pieter Wisse is showcasing 5 photographers per week for 100 weeks, and in most cases he includes video of the photographer speaking or working. In particular, I liked the video he chose of Elinor Carucci (photographer #28) speaking about photographing her children. I think this will be a great resource, and every time I see a photographer whose work I’m already familiar with, I get a little thrill. But then I wondered if perhaps twitter was really a better avenue for this kind of thing. And chances were I was already way late to that party and anyone who would be interested would already know about it.

I also started a post about the new campaign the City of Guelph has going on with cheeky road signs and how I’m not convinced the clever, hip tone really suit the body that handles property taxes and maintains essential infrastructure like our water supply and roads. But that sort of brought in discussions about my day job and that’s all new territory here that I wasn’t sure I wanted to explore.

So… can you help me out of this quandary a bit? I realize you can’t help me stop second-guessing myself, but maybe you could introduce yourself and let me know what your interests are? As much I created this space for myself and my own interests, I know I have a few regular readers and I kind of want to know who you are and why you come here. So what do you say?

Ever since I got back from South Africa, I’ve been feeling pretty dissatisfied with the work I shot there. The workshop with Alec Soth unlocked what I think was at the root of that dissatisfaction. So since then, I’ve been working on the images and the edit, and I think I finally have something I’m happy with. So I’ve made a new gallery here. As always, I’d love critique if anyone cares to offer it.

This week I also learned that Jodi Bieber has a new book coming out about Soweto. I haven’t pre-ordered yet (I absolutely have to get Mikhael Subotzky’s Beaufort West first), but I’m pretty keen to get my hands on it.

I used my lunch break today to drop by the Drop-In Centre. I’ve decided to stop my Saturday shifts, at least until the fall, and I wanted to tell Alberta in person. I just feel like I’m not fulfilling any of my commitments very well, so something has to give. As much as it’s the right decision for me right now, I still feel very sad. I’ve been going for two and a half years now, and I really enjoy the people there. Rick is usually the first person I see when I walk in; he always sits in the same seat at the same table, right next to the back door. He was the first person I saw today, and I felt a lurch when I thought about not seeing him for a while. While I waited for a moment to talk to Alberta, Mike called hello and then Paul and I talked for a bit. I had rehearsed a little speech for Alberta, and I gave it to her then. She said they’ll struggle along without me and they’ll never forget me. I was still choked up when I got back to work.

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Timothy Archibald has finished his book of Echolilia and it’s now for sale. He’s got some of the contents posted and it looks absolutely beautiful. Time to start saving my pennies because I really, really want one. Philip Toledano’s Days with my father was also just published as a book, and I also want to get my hands on that too. I love seeing work in print that I’ve already enjoyed online.

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On a lighter note, we went to my parents’ cottage last weekend to hang out with my sister and her husband and two kids who are visiting from the Dominican Republic. I was a very, very bad auntie and didn’t take any pictures of the kids. But I did photograph my mom’s band-aid solution to a broken screen. Literally.

And the very old lawnmower that my dad used to mow the sparse whisps of green that sprouted in a patch in front of the cottage. As far as I know he gave up on that when I was a teenger.

And Wing’s, which has been in the nearest town for as long as I can remember. Sadly, the General Store across the street from it burned down in my early teens.

It was my son’s birthday on Sunday. We left the decorations up, because why not? (Also because I knew the ones on the window would make interesting shadows and because I love balloons in photographs.)

[insert segue here]

I forgot a few bits from Transforming Cape Town that I wanted to share in my last post. One is that in a 2001 survey of 65 schools across all provinces of South Africa, 76 percent of grade seven students didn’t know what Apartheid was and 98 percent were unaware of township grievances under Apartheid. A principal of an innovative primary school in Lavender Hill (an Apartheid-created township in Cape Town), says, “I want to teach these children why they live in Lavender Hill, why Lavender Hill exists, why life here is thew ay it is, why the government would build a sewage treatment plant across the street from a primary school in the middle of the community. I want them to know it’s not their fault that they live here.”

And this, which I think is true around the world:

“For those who live in material comfort, the possibility of being irrevocably drawn into a relationship with the impoverished can be unsettling; the need is so great, one’s contributions are never enough, so to protect onself perhaps it’s best to carefully limit one’s associations and contributions. The fear of being confronted with uncomfortable truths — anger, rage, resentment — looms large.”

I have about 50 pages left in the book, and I’m keen to finish it before we get on the plane.

Wow, this interface looks different! (Not the one you’re looking at as you read this, but the one I’m looking at while I type.) My husband upgraded wordpress for my blog last night for the first time since I launched it nearly two years ago now. And it’s totally different. This on the same day that my employer switched to Microsoft Outlook for its email platform. Oh well.

So I finished the Chelsea Hotel book and have tentatively booked a room there for our trip. Photographer Claudio Edinger lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the early 80s and published the book in honour of the hotel’s centennial in 1983. Did you know Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there? Or that William S. Burrows wrote Naked Lunch there? And Henri Cartier-Bresson stayed there too. I just found all that out yesterday, in this book. Anyways, in the introductory text, Edinger describes the problem of photographing one’s neighbours: “Then my problems began. A woman from the fifth floor, who saw me taking pictures, was convinced that I was with the FBI. She called me to let me know she knew. A notorious Lothario, once convicted of rape, menaced me with black magic, because I photographed him in the halls without his permission. For weeks afterward I checked around my door for little dolls bristling with steel pins.”  He goes on to describe the parade of people who lived in the room next to his, saying “I probably could have done a book just on my next-door neighbors, but at what cost to my safety and sanity I’ll never know.”

In a great section on the history of the hotel and its more famous inhabitants, Pete Hamill says death is part of the romantic myth of the Chelsea, and cites the death of Dylan Thomas there, which is memorialized with a plaque, among others. “But there are no plaques for the people who still arrive, full of hope or despair, to make the Chelsea their home. Years ago, the Life magazine writer Marshall Smith described the Chelsea as ‘the world’s most tolerant, non-expendable third-rate hotel.’ That description remains true today, a hundred years after it rose over 23rd Street. There is a myth of the dead, but within Chelsea people live. When I walk by the hotel on a summer afternoon, I often think about the hundreds of people inside, writing and painting and sculpting and dreaming, and I want someone to celebrate the living. To hell with the waste of early death. Life is lived here.”

Edinger’s beautiful black and white portraits, which remind me of Cartier-Bresson’s portraits actually, do that. You can view many of the photographs in a gallery on his site that pairs photographs from Venice Beach and Chelsea Hotel.