peripheral vision

I don’t think I’ve brought my camera to the drop-in since May. Having posted the first edit to my site here, I felt like the work was sort of complete, at least for the moment. I brought my camera with me on Thursday, but I wasn’t planning to shoot, I just happened to have it with me. I was hoping to find some of the people I photographed in May to give them prints, but none of them were around. Apparently Gerry is in Sudbury.

Anyways, I felt like an ass with my big honking camera there, like everyone I wasn’t sitting with was looking at me and imagining all sorts of exploitative intents in my mind. I don’t usually go on Thursdays, and it’s busier and there’s a lot of people who don’t come on the weekend when I usually volunteer. So I felt like an ass.

That’s neither here nor there, except that it felt a lot better being there yesterday. One man used to have his own darkroom and shot with a Rolleiflex, but he lost a lot of his equipment when he landed on the streets. I asked him yesterday if I could photograph him sometime for my project, and he said sure, although he didn’t know why I’d want to. I said, “Why wouldn’t I want to?” and he didn’t have a response to that. When I told him that I would want to publish them in the context of being made there, he confessed that he was actually delighted to be asked. Delighted. That was his word. It’s funny that I feel like such a vulture sometimes, when a lot of people are just happy to be seen.

* * *

This week I went to my uni library again, and I’m so impressed with its collection of photography books. They just acquired Doug Dubois’s All the Days and Nights, which I actually ordered last weekend (it’s on sale for $30 for the hardcover on Amazon.ca – a deal I couldn’t pass up, especially since I’d been scoping it out ever since it was released in June). I picked up Alec Soth’s Sleeping Along the Mississippi, and I can’t stop looking at its pages. The Internet really doesn’t do justice to his work. It occurred to me as I browsed through different photography books at the library that I want to look at photography that keeps me looking. I saw lots of books that had interesting concepts or stories, but when I looked at the pictures, I didn’t want to linger over them. The photos didn’t make me want to keep looking.

* * *

I suspect my photos do not keep people looking. The other day I had a horrible thought. You know how So You Think You Can Dance always features lots of bad auditions by really bad dancers? And sometimes they’re shocked and disbelieving when the judges tell them they suck? Like they truly can’t see the difference between their own dance and that of better dancers? What if that’s my photography? I say this not to fish for compliments – if you complimented my work right now I wouldn’t believe you anyways – but to be honest about the self-doubt I’m feeling. I kind of hate all my pictures.

I found a ray of hope on Nevada Weir’s blog when she outlined the ten stages of a travel photographer’s development. I suspect it can be reasonably generalized to any photographer? Anyways, the ninth stage is when you hate everything you’ve ever done, so fingers crossed I’m on the threshold of some enlightenment or breakthrough.

* * *

Apparently, my judging part is working overtime these days. Photolife magazine published their list of emerging photographers. I got excited at the thought of discovering some Canadian photographers so I bought it. Some of the images grabbed me so I came home and checked out the photographer’s websites. And I was really disappointed. Most of the sites I visited had slick-looking sites, but they were totally unusable. The navigation was impenetrable, they took too long to load, and in one case the only way to see someone’s photography was to click next on each image with no indication of how many pictures there were to get through, or any kind of categories. So when I hit a bunch of work that did nothing for me and bore no resemblance to the work published in the magazine, I just gave up because I couldn’t see any other way around. It just amazes me how many web designers there are out there with absolutely no concern for the user experience. <Ok, end of rant.>

* * *

Oh wait, just one more thing. The other day I was sorting through my pictures of John. I have date with him later today to go to pretty much the diviest bar in town — also the only bar downtown that I never once visited during my uni years — where he occasionally goes for a beer. Anyways, I discovered this picture, which I rejected on the first pass-through, but now I think it’s pretty good.

I like the little wisp of smoke, the red ember, the outlet coming out of the wall, the box of cereal beside him and the carefully closed bag from the box on the arm of the couch.

I can hear Don Weber’s voice now, “You’re a LOUSY editor.” It wasn’t originally directed at me, but I think it fits. Now how can I learn to be a better editor?

Tony Fouhse in his post today talked about ways of shooting and editing, and how one influences the other. He concluded that he prefers to shoot a lot and give himself permission to make mistakes, bark up the wrong tree, and edit them out, than to restrict his shooting and show every single frame. I definitely have the same approach.

However, I shoot a bit compulsively; I take the same picture over and over again, almost as a kind of insurance. I do try to move around and explore the subject from many angles, but I suspect it’s all a bit excessive. I’d like to blame digital, but I remember shooting an entire roll of 36 frames in South Africa of exactly the same scene, and not one of them was remotely usable.

For example, I’m working on a series of photographs about John. I think I mentioned him here before? Anyways, back in July he invited me to photograph him while he got a tattoo. I was delighted. And I knew that because this was part of a larger series, I’d probably only end up with one shot in the final edit. So I went and I shot. I shot close to 500 frames, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was thinking. The thing is, I knew only one frame would end up making it, but I didn’t know which one that would be. Maybe it will come with more experience, but the Decisive Moment doesn’t present itself to me when I’m shooting with trumpets and stars. I’ve had way too many experiences where six months or a year down the road, I find a photo I’d initially labelled as a reject but now discover it’s actually really good. I’d just been too close to the experience of shooting and the expectations I developed in the moment. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 8 frames.

I’m not sure how I’ll proceed from here, but since I still have more shooting to do with John, I’ll let the project unfold before I get my knickers in too much of a twist.

Image Makers, Image Takers revealed some interesting takes on this issue.

William Eggleston had this to say: “It happens so fast. I compose very quickly and without thinking, but consciously. I take a picture instantly and never more than one. Sometimes I worry about the picture being out of focus, but I take that chance. 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.”

Whereas Tina Barney said, “My theory is, the more pictures you take, the better you get. It’s like a sport. I never wait to get a particular shot because wonderful accidents can happen when you shoot a lot.”

Also, I’ve recently seen some collections with different frames from the same scene or almost the same moment, that I find quite thought-provoking and compelling. The first was in David Goldblatt, Hasselblad Award 2006, which I got from the university library. The book contains several fold-out pages that show three different views of the same scene, and they don’t feel self-indulgent like someone just couldn’t decide at all. Each image adds to the other in a meaningful and important way. Laura Pannack’s series, “grams,”is another example of several shots from the same day and scene.

Nevertheless, I’d like to find a way to be a little more deliberate and sparing in my shooting without closing myself off to the unexpected.

I’ve added a new gallery to my site. Long-time readers might remember my post about photography and homelessness and postpartum depression, which included a quote from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City:

“Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play – can these still be called the glory days of the Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner – are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone – no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.”

That quote has been rattling around my head ever since, and I’ve decided to use it as a statement for this latest collection of images. Together, they make a sort of meditation on the idea of home and the boundary between inside and outside.

* * *

I’ve been reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and he says something that I think is also relevant here:

“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”

* * *

Inside out

So last week we went to my parents’ cottage. My brother and his family weren’t able to come after all, so for several days it was just me, my husband, my son, and my parents. Which means I got to read a lot more than I expected. I read Image Makers, Image Takers cover to cover first. It was fascinating to read about the methods, approaches, and philosophies of so many different photographers. Before we went to the cottage I went on an Alec Soth binge, reading his old blog and any interviews I could clap my eyes on. It was on his recommendation that I bought Image Makers, Image Takers, and it was also his recommendation that brought me to Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography. I just happened to find his later book, Why People Photograph, which I also read at the cottage, and I think I actually like it better than Beauty in Photography. His essay on Paul Strand I found especially illuminating, not just about Strand’s work, but about how to read photographs and what makes great photographs great.

Back when I first watched The True Meaning of Pictures, I thought that the critics who said that Shelby Lee Adams’s subjects weren’t sophisticated enough to really understand what was happening in the photographs of them were just snobs or assholes. But I’m coming to realize that there are degrees of visual literacy, and mine is deepening.

I even read some poetry. My mom bought Jeramy Dodds’s Crabwise to the Hounds, which just won a Trillium Book Award and made the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. I actually have a lame claim to fame with this book, because I went to high school with Jeramy. He even dated one of my very good friends for a couple of years. Another friend from that time read his book a while back and said she’d always known he had the soul of an artist. But I knew no such thing. To me he was kind of intimidating; I had no idea he was interested in reading let alone writing – I thought just liked to get drunk and play mailbox baseball. Anyways, turns out he’s a really good poet. The language is so good and dense that I had to stop and think about each line, and I could only read a poem or two at a time. I meant to bring it home with me, but by the time we left my son had developed a tummy bug, so my packing was rather distracted and I forgot it.

I have to say the vacation had some big ups and downs. My husband lost his wallet in the torrential rains we drove through for two hours before we finally stopped at a Tim Hortons. We realized the next day his wallet must have fell out of his pocket when we ran back to the car. So he had to make all sorts of phone calls and trips into town to deal with that.

On the up side, we got to meet my new nephew, who my sister and her husband adopted in May. He’s 22 months old and utterly charming.

Also, the lake happened to have its annual corn roast and fishing derby, and my son caught his first fish — in fact it tied for first place in the under 6 fun fish category.

He also ran in the egg and spoon race. And you know how there’s ALWAYS one kid who runs away? That was my kid this year. I was laughing too hard to get a decent picture, but I did manage to squeeze this one off showing one of the organizers in hot pursuit. I’m kinda proud to see him breaking the rules at such a tender age.

We stayed at my parents’ farm for a night too, which is where I made these next few pictures.

And now for a few more pics from the cottage:

This morning I went to my local university to find out what would be required to upgrade from my three-year BA in English to an Honours BA in Studio Art. Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s a whole wide world that I’m missing, a sort of lineage and vocabulary that I’ve learned enough to know of its existence, but not enough to know it. You might think that vocabulary doesn’t matter, especially in a visual medium, but I’ve always found that words influence our experience and perception. Sometimes you don’t feel something until you have a word for it. Or you can feel it, but you can’t distinguish it precisely. Or something. Naming is power.

I remember one time last summer at the drop-in, it was hot, and I felt like I was moving through molasses. Everyone else seemed to be moving slowly too. “I’m so lethargic,” I complained. And the other volunteer asked me what that word meant. I said it meant tired, even though I knew it wasn’t really doing the word justice. But I felt so awkward, like my language kept me an outsider. And it kind of does. I still think of that little encounter, mostly with guilty feelings for not letting him in on the nuance of lethargy.

Anyways, I want to learn more about the history of photography and critical ways of talking about it. Especially since I’m thinking about a project on suburbia, I figure it might be a good thing for me to know what work has come before me on the subject. So that is why I found myself at the university.

This need for knowledge also had me looking for ways to get books from the university library, and I discovered that alumni can get a free alumni card and borrow up to 20 books for two weeks at a time. So I got my card today and visited the library and even though it’s been almost a decade, I remembered exactly where the photography section was. It was kind of surreal walking among the stacks after so long. And like many places I return to have a long absence, it has its own smell, which although I didn’t notice it before today, I know hasn’t changed. I used to write poems when I was younger, and lately I’ve been feeling like that was good training for photography. Both art forms require you to really see. Anyways, walking through the library I remembered a poem I wrote that was actually published, a poem called “The Library” that when I read it last summer I decided was nonsense because I couldn’t make sense of it, but today, it made sense. So many rows upon rows of books, they really muffle the sound.

Anyways, the photography section is delightful. Barely a Digital Photography for Dummies or Catalogue of Dogs to be seen. I picked up Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography, and devoured it this afternoon. Incidentally, one of the first essays talked about the importance of freshness in art and the resulting necessity of knowing who’s come before to create that freshness.

After dinner tonight, I devoured Charles Traub’s In the Still Life while my son dug nearby in the sand. I both loved and hated that he didn’t display captions with each image. It made me look longer and harder at each one though, and that’s always a good thing.

I also got Why People Photograph, also by Robert Adams, which I’ll take to the cottage next week. (Mind you, it’s a two-bedroom cottage that will be housing 8 adults and 6 kids, so it’s possible I may not be able to read it.) And finally, I’m excited to have discovered Thomas Daniel, with the catalogue to his exhibition Into My Eyes. I haven’t read it yet, but glancing through it at the library I was really taken with his portraits, and the obvious respect he has for the people he photographs.

All in all, it was a good day. And now it’s time for So You Think You Can Dance. Perfect.

The blog has been pretty quiet for the last several months because I’ve been working on lots of stuff in the background. One of those things is a book, which I’m excited to officially launch today. Two-Powered: A Diary of Motherhood and Apple Pie combines words and images I created during the first two years of my son’s life. I was also granted permission to include a beautiful poem by Adrienne Rich, a poem I discovered during the same time period.

I thought about searching for a publisher for the book, but I decided to self-publish for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that I have no patience. I’m guessing it would take at least a year to get to print, and possibly much, much longer. And I’m more into making stuff than selling or pitching stuff.

This book doesn’t fit easily into a specific genre – is it a momoir or a photography book? I don’t know. I’ve read that genre-bending books are considerably less attractive to publishers, who need to figure out how to market their books. If there isn’t a tidy demographic to market to, it’s a much riskier venture. I thought about trying for photography publishers, who could foot the bill for producing it in fantastic quality, but these really aren’t fine art images. They’re not about beautiful colour or good tonal ranges; the digital files themselves aren’t particularly high quality either – some of them I even made on my husband’s crappy little point-and-shoot.

The bottom line is that I really feel the collection contains a message that needs to get out sooner than later. So I decided to publish it on demand through lulu.com.

I think it’s very difficult to mother in a culture that has no space to admit real ambivalence into the discourse. When my mom read my book, she said, “Wow, you were in a real depression.” But I don’t believe I was. I don’t think it was pathological at all – I think it’s normal to be ambivalent as a mother, and healthy to acknowledge that it’s really f-ing hard, especially in the first two years. Can you think of anything in which you have a bigger stake than in the growth and well-being of the most important and helpless person you’ve ever had the fortune to know?

My husband developed a website to showcase the content of the book. We still have to put a link to it on my home page, but in the meantime, you can get there from here. I thought about only including the first 15 images to encourage people to buy the book, but I felt that if my goal was to speak through this cultural silence, I should my money where my mouth is and put it all out there. If you do buy the book, you do get treated to Adrienne Rich’s wonderful poem, which isn’t on the site.

So there. It’s done, it’s out there. Wow does this ever feel anti-climactic.

Check it out here.

This is probably not something I should admit here, but I didn’t really know who Annie Leibovitz is until that video of her shooting the Queen made the rounds on the web a while back (just google it if you’re interested). I’d heard her name of course, but when I heard it, my brain exchanged her name with Anne Geddes and made me cringe involuntarily. But I know very well who she is now, and I’ve seen enough of her pictures to know that it bears not even the slightest resemblance to the babies in pea suits pictures.

Last weekend I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s At Work, and I’m quite enjoying it. Halfway in, here are a few things that I’d like to share:

“I was in awe of Robert Frank. Here was the great master. I couldn’t believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, ‘You can’t get every picture.’ That was comforting advice. You do miss things. [...] Robert Frank didn’t seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.”

“I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, of course. I was just throwing up a light haphazardly and hoping the picture would come out.”

“It was a popular picture, and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. [...] There are different criteria for magazine covers. They’re simple. The addition of type doesn’t destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.”

“I’m always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone. A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.”

Last night I went to see Dr. Gabor Mate talk about “The Four Compassions: A humane community response to addictions” at a local church. He is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he works with patients who suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three. He’s written a number of books, including The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I read last fall.

He is a tremendous speaker. Apparently he only prepared his talk as he arrived, but it was very well-structured, so he obviously gives a lot of talks. I could have listened to him for hours. Way back when, I wanted to talk about his book, but it took me a while to finish, and by the time I did, I’d lost touch with the first half of the book. His talk last night was a great refresher.

He believes that the basic, instinctual response of humans is compassion, unless experience shuts that response down. The four compassions are:

1. acknowledging the suffering of other people
2. understanding, and a drive to find out what’s behind the suffering
3. recognizing ourselves in others’ suffering
4. possibility, transformation

He also said that even referring to someone as an addict diminishes our understanding, because that is not what or who they are. They are human beings in deep suffering. He talked about InSite, the safe injection facility in Vancouver where people get clean needles and rubbing alcohol, and if they overdose, health professionals are there to revive them. He mentioned the RCMP head’s official stance on reviving people from overdoses, which is that it shouldn’t be done since it sends a message that it’s ok to use drugs. Dr. Mate said he couldn’t fault the logic of that, but if we’re going to take that stance, the entire medical system should take it, so that the workaholics who have heart attacks don’t receive bypass surgery, and the smokers don’t get antibiotics for their bronchitis. Which is just inhumane, of course.

He talked about how judgment hurts all of us, because it separates us into us and them, and denies the unity of human beings. He also said that if we find ourselves making judgments we shouldn’t feel too bad about it, because the human brain is wired to make judgments all the time. We’re just there. But the trouble comes when we believe the judgments. So the trick is just to observe the judgments without becoming attached to them. He also said we judge most harshly the things we are ashamed of in ourselves. So to serve his patients compassionately he needs to take care to deal with his own addictions (workaholism and compulsive cd shopping) so he doesn’t lash out in shame.

In the Q’s and A’s after his speech, he said that he believes nobody is beyond help. If a person is alive, then their soul is alive, and the soul is infinite possibility. He also talked about recovery, how the word recover means to find again, and you can’t find something again if it wasn’t there in the first place. What people find again when they recover is themselves, their wholeness, their infinite possibility. To do that, they need confidence, some hope of victory. And our judicial and medical systems don’t nurture that hope at all.

He ended the night answering a question about parents who let their kids cry it out to train them to sleep. Essentially, he said it wasn’t good for the child’s emotional wellbeing, even though explicit memory doesn’t begin until after age 2. But the practice teaches kids that the world is an indifferent place. He said it isn’t the child’s problem that our world requires both parents to work full-time. Now, I pretty much agree with him, to a point. And it wasn’t something that we were able to do. However, I also bristle at anything that smacks of prescribing what a mother should or shouldn’t do. Fortunately, I have the benefit of having read his book, and he did advocate that our culture needs to support mothers and families much better than it currently does. Because early experiences have such influence over a person’s brain development and later wellbeing, a mother’s job is quite literally the most important task there is. But if I hadn’t read the book, I might have left the church all set to ream somebody out for doing what they think is best for their family.

That said, I’m so glad I went to hear him speak. And I enjoyed the irony of hearing him critique certain Christian approaches up at the pulpit.

I will leave you with my memory of something he quoted at least a few times through the night:
“Do not pay attention to the things that others do or fail to do. Only pay attention to the things that you do or fail to do.”

Hoo boy did I experience some major blogger’s remorse last night. I had another look at the photos I was talking about and decided they were all crap and I was stupid to think they might make an interesting collection and there was no way I could meet the expectations I’d just set. I think the self-doubt was triggered in part by this article and its suggestion that maybe all the photos you’re trying to edit suck. This morning, however, was a new day, and I think it’s still worth exploring the possibilities.

So I’m still trying to figure out an effective workflow for editing these photos. Tonight I cracked open Lessons in DLSR Workflow with Lightroom and Photoshop by Jerry Courvoisier, which I picked up at the library a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might have some good ideas. Sure enough, there it was on page 44: “Tough Decisions: The Editing Process.” Now, I have no doubt that as I get further on, this book will yield great ideas and lessons, but I disagree with pretty much everything he has to say about deleting photos, and not just because I’m a hardcore pack rat with a fondness for the underdog.

He suggests the following criteria “to start the editing process:

• Clarity: can you tell what the subject is? Is the image blurry from camera shake?
• Tilt: Is your photo tilted or level? (This can be adjusted through cropping.) Unusual angles can in some cases present a new perspective or introduce tension for the viewer – maybe good, maybe not.
• Soft focus: Depends if you were after this effect. Sharp focus is overrated in some cases. Motion blur and dragging the shutter as a technique are often experimental techniques and require close examination.
• Severe underexposure or overexposure: Too much noise in underexposure is not good unless used deliberately as a creative effect. Extremely blown out highlights can’t be recovered.
• People’s emotions and expressions: Does the picture communicate a feeling you like? Are the faces expressive? Backs of heads do not engage the viewer unless artistically placed within the frame.
• Composition: Poorly framed images? Delete in cases where the images cannot be improved with cropping. Delete most pictures with people running out of the frame, with middle horizon lines (remember the Rule of Thirds), and with subjects in the centre.
• Poor selection of point of focus: Focus point distracting? Delete.
• Reflections that interfered with subject.
• Too many similar images when shooting a series of sequences.
• Too many frames with the same perspective on the same subject.
• Experiments that just don’t work visually.”

Now, I’m all for selecting the best photos and ignoring the others. I do it every time I upload photos to my computer. And those are even good criteria to start thinking about. But deleting a photo just because it doesn’t follow the Rule of Thirds? I don’t agree with that at all. But then, I’ve always believed that rules were made to be broken. And I think that we can often have unconscious intentions we’re not aware of until after the fact. Just because a photo didn’t meet your conscious intention doesn’t mean it doesn’t do something else equally or perhaps even more valuable.

I almost never delete photos. Not when they’re blurry or tilted or didn’t capture what I intended. I might delete near-duplicates, but then my pack-ratness usually kicks in and I just can’t bear to. More and more I think this is a very good idea. I find more and more that the further I get away from shooting an image, the more able I am to really judge its merit. And sometimes photos that I originally rejected turn out to be some of my favourites. For example, all of these photos were rejects on the first past for at least one of the reasons Courvoisier cited.

These photos I shot all on the same January day, and I came home cold, discouraged and frustrated that nothing seemed to work. Now I quite like the bleakness and geometry:

This one, one of only a very few I shot in District Six in Cape Town, I rejected because of the tilt, and because the frame cut part of one boy’s foot off (it was a drive-by shooting). But now this remains one of my very favourite of the whole trip.

I could go on, but I think you get the drift. Hard drive space is relatively inexpensive.

If I fall behind in blogging, then everything gets so jumbled up in my head that I can’t seem to compose a coherent post. So you’re going to get an extremely long, rambling, incoherent post.

On Saturday, I went the local youth drop-in centre, which has a gallery afternoon on weekends, before I started my volunteer shift at the (adult?) drop-in centre. The youth centre is run by Edward Pickersgill, whose name keeps popping up everywhere. He was the NDP candidate in (I think) the last provincial election (or maybe the one before that – at any rate I voted for him). He runs a housing resource centre as well as the youth centre, and he’s been advocating strongly for a youth shelter ever since June 2007 when the youth shelter closed suddenly and under strange circumstances. I’ve known his name for a long time, but I’ve never taken the time to match his name with his face – until a few months ago.

Rewind to October 2007: Outside the housing resource centre, which also had a drop-in program for youths, I saw some kids sitting on the sidewalk. I talked with them for a bit about the need for a youth shelter, and asked if I could take their picture.

I turned around and saw this:

Sometimes when I get excited by what I’m seeing, I yell inside my head, “Seriously?!?” like an intern in Grey’s Anatomy. Sometimes I just can’t believe I get to come upon scenes like this.

As I shot, I heard one of the kids call him Ed, but I didn’t think too much of it. After a couple frames, the man saw me and one of my shots shows this, me watching him watch me. I probably lowered my camera, and smiled and shrugged sheepishly, then turned and walked away, which is what I usually do when people bust me taking their picture.

Anyways, since then details have started to niggle on my mind to make me wonder if perhaps this was Ed Pickersgill. A few months ago, I googled him and found some photos that confirmed it was. I shot Ed Pickersgill without knowing it. I started to feel guilty, that I had this picture of a recognizable local figure, and he didn’t know I had it.

In December, I wanted to submit some photos to a newish gallery in town, along the theme of Guelph architecture. That picture of Ed immediately spang to mind, as he’s sitting in front of the grand old post office building, which is now used by the county I think. But what if it got accepted, and he saw it?

So I tracked him down on facebook and sent him a message, confessing that I’d taken his picture and did he want to see it? He did, and I think he loved it. He called it iconic and took me up on my offer of a print, which is why I went to the gallery afternoon last Saturday – to give him a print.

Which is a very long preamble to get to the point, a point that’s suddenly much more difficult to articulate than I expected. I’ve struggled with the ethics of photographing people on the street and publishing them online, mostly because I imagine people who aren’t involved in online communities being horrified at the thought of having their picture On The Internet. But I keep doing it, because I can’t not. It’s like a compulsion.

So hearing such praise from someone who didn’t choose in advance to collaborate with me in making a photograph… well, it just felt REALLY good.

Of course, since I shot that picture, my photography and my approach have evolved. I’m less interested in just shooting people, and more interested in interacting with them. In the beginning, I knew that I didn’t have the skills yet to make the photography a part of an interaction. Any attempt would have destroyed the image before it was even made. My self-consciousness would have translated to the person, and added to whatever self-consciousness the person brought all on their own. I had no idea how to make them comfortable.

* * *

Last weekend, Tony Fouhse touched on the subject of exploitation, and give a few nuggets of his process, how he works with the people he shoots: “I believe the art of what I do is in my encounter with the subject. The photograph is merely a document of that encounter.”

* * *

I remember at the portrait workshop I went to in July, standing with the camera up to my face, and being able to see the discomfort of my subject, but I was absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I froze up. I flailed about fruitlessly, saying stupid things like, “Pretend I’m not here.” or “Relax.” (Is there anything more stress-inducing than someone commanding you to relax?!?)

* * *

Going into the lemon pie shoot a couple weeks ago, I was nervous. How would I make my friend and her mother feel comfortable in front of the camera? What if I froze up again? I decided I just had to fake it. I had to pretend that I knew exactly what I was doing, and then just wing it and hope for the best. In the end, it wasn’t an issue anyways. There was only a moment of discomfort, and we all got past it.

* * *

I’m reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. I noticed it for its fantastic title, but it was the description that made me buy it. Nick Flynn was working in a homeless shelter when his father, who he’d never really known in person, showed up there, homeless. And I’m loving it. The writing is brilliant, and the themes of family, home and homelessness are right up my alley these days.

He keeps bringing up the notions of inside and outside. If you have no inside, no home, then outside IS your inside. It reminds me something Ruth Kaplan brought up in that July portrait workshop, when she said photographing people on the street, in public spaces, is fine. But it gets problematic when the person is homeless, because the street is their home, the public space is their private space.

A few quotes from the book:

“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.”

“Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play – can these still be called the glory days of the Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner – are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone – no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.”

“I drive slowly past a blanket shaped like a man – here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to mis. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal. Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again?”

“I see that I really don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m adrift, as the Buddhists say, on a river of forgetfulness. A hungry ghost.”

(Which brings me to another book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, which is accruing library fines big enough to buy it three times over while I try to write some kind of review about it. But I just don’t think it’s going to happen. So can I just tell you to read it? It’s that good and that important. A review quoted on the cover said that it should be required reading for anyone struggling with addiction or who loves someone struggling with addiction, but I think it should be required reading for anyone who can read.)

* * *

On Sunday night, I watched a documentary called Pardon my Postpartum.

Someone talked about how inappropriate psych wards are for treating mothers with severe postpartum depression, because they have to be separated from their babies. In the UK, apparently they’ve had maternal wards in hospitals for 40 years, where women and their babies are checked in as a pair, regardless of which one is actually receiving medical treatment.

One woman lost custody of her children when she checked into a hospital for treatment of her postpartum depression. I think her going to hospital coincided with the end of her marriage. When she came out of hospital, all her visits to her children had to be supervised. She said that felt way worse than the postpartum depression had ever felt.

Another woman prepared for the birth of her second or third child, after severe postpartum depression with her last baby, by developing a postpartum plan rather than the birth plan every other pregnant woman develops. In the plan, she identified friends she would feel comfortable calling on at the last minute for a meal, or a break. She decided in advance not to breastfeed so she could take whatever medication she needed to without worrying, and also so that anybody else could feed her baby.

Sometimes I wonder if I had mild postpartum depression, breastfeeding every two hours around the clock for months and months and months.

* * *

That night I dreamed I went to Malawi for five days (how crazy is a five-day trip to a place that takes 35 hours each way just to get there?!?) with my entire family: my son, my husband, my mother, my father, my sister and her husband and their daughter, even. The flight was fine, and we arrived in a very busy international airport. We had to be driven in a big bus to a resort, which the travel agency hadn’t told us about. I carried my son, while someone else had my passport, my wallet, phone numbers, everything. We got separated in the busyness, so that I was all alone with my son in a totally foreign place.

My best friend appeared out of nowhere (she’s currently IN Malawi, coincidentally), and told me she’d take me where I needed to go. My son was amazingly still in my arms, almost like a big baby. We rode escalators and got on subways and buses and all kinds of transportation, all amidst a crazy crowd. A man suddenly took a knife to my throat, and I prayed he wouldn’t notice my son, that my son would stay still and quiet. I didn’t care so much about my throat, only my son. The man left, and we carried on in our journey back to my family. Then another man held a gun to my head, and again, I prayed for my son to remain still and unnoticed. The man left because I had no money. And I just felt terrified by all the hazards I had to protect my son from with no resources and no community.

Later the next day, I realized with a jolt that my dream was quite the metaphor for postpartum depression and my fear of having another child.

Last night I mentioned to my husband that we only have a few weeks to go until our friends come home. “Our only friends,” he said.