peripheral vision

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.

I just finished Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I loved it. It was informative, engaging, funny, and inspiring. Everyone should read it.

* * *

In my day job, I am leading a plain language campaign. I seek out burueacratic language and jargon and try to uncover their secret meanings. I get a charge from revising things like, “we attained significant knowledge tranfer” to “we learned a lot.” Pollan uncovered one of his own: “‘The most intellectually demanding challenge in the field of nutrition,’ as Marion Nestle writes in Food Politics, ‘is to determine dietary intake.’ The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?”

* * *

Here’s another tidbit I found fascinating: “In one experiement, [Paul Rozin] showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. ‘Guilt’ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’”

And: “Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

* * *

So many people have been duped by the food industry. I’ve been a label reader for a long time, and I’ve always chosen real, high-fat foods over lower-fat imitations with their frightening ingredient lists. So a good amount of what Pollan talks about was a refresher for me. What was new for me, was the history that has led us to this point, and his emphasis on how we eat and our attitudes towards food, and that is something I want to change this year. Read it. That’s all.

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

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

Recently I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 from the library. I flipped quickly through the images, slightly disappointed, and set it aside to go through more slowly. Unfortunately, my new addiction to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on dvd intervened at this point, and I only picked up the heavy book again the other day. Luckily, I soon figured out that reading it at the table would save me from the surefire carpal tunnel syndrome of trying to read it on the couch.

Anyways, the other day I read the text first and then looked at all the images, and I definitely got a lot more out of them. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but over and over again we see that words and pictures can enhance each other. That there are things pictures can’t say as well as words, and things words can’t show as well as pictures. I think I’d like to spend more time exploring ways to put words and pictures together.

A few bits that stood out for me from the text:

“There are truly intelligent photographers who work in the studio, but it’s not for me. Richard Avedon’s genius was that he was a great communicator. He pulled things out of his subjects. But I observe. Avedon knew how to talk to people. What to talk to them about. As soon as you engage someone, their face changes. They become animated. They forget about being photographed. Their minds become occupied and they look more interesting. But I’m so busy looking, I can’t talk. I never developed that gift.”

“It wasn’t a single moment. It was a flow of images, which is more like life, so we designed the book using four images across two pages quite frequently to keep this effect.”

“It seemed like a return to the kind of work I had been doing in the beginning, but I wasn’t able to go back to reportage in a completely pure way. I knew too much by then. Too much about how a picture can be set up, how you can manipulate a picture, when it should be taken.

“I’m not a journalist. A journalist doesn’t take sides, and I don’t want to go through life like that. I have a more powerful voice as a photographer if I express a point of view.”

The text makes many of these images more harrowing – for me at least. This woman lost her partner and her father within six weeks of each other.

“That summer, I moved the material for this book to Rhinebeck and set up a workshop in the barn. Rosanne Cash had given me an advance copy of her new CD, Black Cadillac, which she wrote after both her parents and her stepmother died. I would go into the barn every morning and put it on very loud and cry for ten minutes or so and then start working, editing the pictures. I cried for a month. I didn’t realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving process. It’s the closest thing to who I am that I’ve ever done.”

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the book store at the photography section. I have to give the store credit, every time I look at the photography section, it always has new material. Two books tempted me; I narrowed it down to one: A Camera, Two Kids and a Camel: My Journey in Photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt. I was really excited to discover a mother who made a career in travel photography work, and I wanted to know how she did it. That the book was text-heavy was a selling point for me: I wanted to hear all about her experiences as a mother and photographer, how she balanced it all. When I saw the opening quote from fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen, I was in:

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

I finished it the other night, and I have to say it was a bit of a disappointment. Now, it could very well be that my expectations were unrealistic. Perhaps I should have known from the coffee-table-book presentation (hard cover, large size) that it probably wasn’t going to give me what I was looking for.

The photos were great, although they did have a sort of National Geographic-ness about them that I didn’t quite care for, a datedness I guess. Many of them made me feel 10 years old again, looking through my brother’s stacks of National Geographic magazines, and not in a good way. It’s probably not fair of me to hold this against the photos, since the woman has enjoyed a very long career that began around the time I was 10, but oh well. I very much enjoyed her later work, especially her photos for Habitat for Humanity.

The text is where it was really disappointing though. I feel like this book couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be. Is it a coffee table book? A memoir? A travelogue? While I’m all for fusion and postmodern blurring of boundaries, I think it was a bit of a failure in this case.

Where I was hoping for a sustained discussion of her experiences, perhaps bound by the theme of motherhood or feminism, I got merely a series of chronological anecdotes. None of them delved deep enough for my satisfaction. It was like taking a survey course, where just as you begin to grasp a subject or theme, you’re forced onto the next one.

My disappointment may also stem from the fact that within the first few pages, I very quickly realized that I will never make a good travel photographer. I’m far too risk averse for that. And my sense of smell is too keen.

According to Myers-Briggs, I am an NF, an idealist. I am an abstract thinker who prefers to deal with information that comes from my intuition, with underlying patterns rather than concrete facts. I suspect Griffiths Belt is an SP, an artisan, who prefers to deal in concrete facts and information that comes through her five senses rather than intuition. And I suspect that fundamental difference is at the heart of my disappointment. I want to see how her experience fits into the big picture, and she’s really not so interested in the big picture.

Disappointment aside, there were a few moments in her writing that really spoke to me:

“As a photographer I have learned that women really do hold up half the sky; that languge isn’t always necessary, but touch usually is; that all people are not alike, but they do mostly have the same hopes and fears; that judging others does great harm but listening to them enriches; that it is impossible to hate a group of people once you get to know one of them as an individual.”

And:

“The most touching aspect of my work has always been how quickly people open up to me and my camera. I do try to appear as non-threatening as possible. I travel light, never wear a photo vest or camera bag, and work very simply. I believe that it’s far better to look like somebody’s mother than like a photographer. But despite my efforts to connect with people of other cultures, I know that I remain an aberration in their world. I arrive in my jeans and T-shirt, a middle-age white woman in a baseball cap, speaking a strange language and wielding a big fat camera. And yet the openness and generosity of the people I encounter always takes my breath away.

“Whenever possible I try to communicate without an interpreter, because it’s so easy for an interpreter to actually become an unwitting wall between me and the people I’m trying to photograph. I’d rather make an idiot out of myself pantomiming and using whatever few words of the local language I possess than to rely on an interpreter. And I have learned that even without a shared language, it’s easy to let people know that their children are beautiful, their homes are lovely, their tea is delicious, and their stories are worth sharing with the world.”

I just this minute finished reading How do you Photograph People? by Leigh Wiener, a professional photographer. I’m sure it’s well overdue at the library, but I wanted to take my time with it, to get the most out of it. The book seems to be out of print, but if you can find it, I highly recommend it.

Wiener uses an interesting structure for the book: questions that his celebrity subjects have asked over the years, often accompanied by the very portraits that came from the interchange. Along with some technical tips (like shooting from above helps eliminate double chins — self-portraits here I come!), he also talks about the psychology a portrait photographer must understand and make use of to get his subjects to relax and reveal parts of themselves they would rather protect. Some quotes that will circle my mind for a long time:

“I never worry about composition, but I am constantly aware of it. There is a difference.”

and

“There are many, many decisive moments, and this brings us to the best reason for taking many pictures: the subject himself. Once rapport has been established and the subject is relaxed, he begins to reveal many portraits of himself. I want as many as I can get.

“There is no such thing as a single best picture of a person.”

Carrying on in the same theme, he asserts later,

“Since the beginning of time, there has never been a decisive moment — or an indecisive moment for that matter… Moments are like minutes and hours, days and weeks: one just follows another.”It is people who are decisive or indecisive; not the moments in time. As a photographer, you create hte image. You decide when to release the shutter. You, the photographer, are the decisive element in the taking of the a photograph, not some hyped-up moment. Your sensitivity and your understanding of the subject matter, and your point of view, will determine whether your photograph is decisive or not.”

This past weekend, my dad turned 65 and I decided to try to document our family, potentially for a belated gift. Wiener’s book has definitely changed my approach to portraits — where before I (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to be an unobtrusive observer with a lightning fast trigger finger, now I try to make the person in front of me comfortable, and not to show my self-consciousness.

My one niece has no shyness with the camera… she was so absorbed in her play, I’m not even sure she noticed me. (This shot was totally unset-up by the way. She chose her outfit — the tutu was compliments of the Easter Bunny — and she just started playing with these plastic masks my parents brought home from their recent cruise.)

But my other niece said she hates getting her picture taken, and it showed. Most of the shots I made of her are blurry from camera shake (I ordered a new Nikon 50 mm F1.8 lens yesterday because I can’t stand how slow my kit zoom lens is so hopefully that won’t happen again), but I did get one sharp shot that I think is not bad.

Here are some other people shots I like from the weekend:

My brother opened another art show this weekend, and it was great to get the chance to go. This is my mom, looking at some of the reading material. I’ll post more pics from the gallery later, because I like them, and I think they’ll go nicely together.

Yesterday I went shopping. I’ve had a $50 gift card to Chapters burning a hole in my pocket since Christmas, and I finally decided what to do with it. I was going to buy The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby, which I got out of the library a couple of months ago and saw it would be a great reference book to own.

When I got there, however, they didn’t have any copies left of the CS2 book, only the CS3. So I browsed the photography section, and along with the 2008 Photographer’s Market, I decided to get Forsaken by Lana Slezic.

Immediately I knew this was a special book. It is the only book I own that I won’t look at or hold if I’m eating or drinking. Something about it makes me want to keep it pristine.

What started as a six-week assignment in Afghanistan for Canadian photographer Lana Slezic quickly lengthened into a two-year project. She and her friend/translator, Farazan, quietly travelled the country, speaking to Afghan women and listening to their stories. Over and over again she heard horrible stories of forced marriages, abuse, illiteracy, murder and suicide, stories that made it clear that the end of the Taliban has not freed Afghan women in any meaningful way. I flipped through the pages in the bookstore enough to identify a collection of beautiful photos, more engaging than any of the other photo books on the shelves. That it was created by a Canadian woman was a bonus.

Last night I sat down to go through the book more slowly, cover to cover. I was transfixed and finished it in one sitting. I can’t imagine how tightly edited the colletion must be, since Slezic spent two years shooting, and I found the structure of the book really enhanced my experience and exploration of the images. The preface by Deborah Ellis situates these photos and stories in a country destroyed by a quarter-century of war.

I’m normally a pretty quick viewer of photos; I decide very quickly whether I think it is good or bad, beautiful or boring, then move on. I rarely spend time lingering over an image, but I did with many of the images in Forsaken.

The text is concise and it seems to me that rather than trying to tell every story Slezic heard, the stories are included only as an introduction to the magnitude of the force oppressing women in Afghanistan. The stories are an entry to the photos, where the real narrative is. In the images, we see women gathered in a dress shop, covered in burkas, the mannequins behind them modelling the dresses that must be hidden on the real-life women. We see a woman weeping on a crude, snow-covered grave, her head pressed to the stone. We see hands holding photos, a single eye illuminated by a strip of sunlight in darkness, we see burkas, we see children playing and living in crumbling buildings. And those are just a few of what linger in my mind, more than 12 hours after my last viewing. If a photo has a story with it, you only find out after you turn the page, and none of the photos have captions, which forced me to examine the photos for information. I was pleased to discover captions for all the photos at the back of the book, but by the time I got there, I was resigned to experiencing the photos on their own terms. If you enjoy photography and feminism, I definitely recommend this book.

You can see most of the images from the book at Slezic’s website and several of her other projects. All of her images are simply beautiful. She’s working on her next book, which will collect images of her family’s home town, Dubrovnik, Croatia.