peripheral vision

A while back I put together a print portfolio of portraits I made at the Drop In Centre to show to Sister Christine. I still haven’t the guts up to show her, but I did bring it in one Saturday to show Alberta, who runs the place during my shifts. My intention was only to show her, but people gathered round and looked through them. It turns out that Alberta knows Gerry, who moved back to Sudbury before I could give him a print. She mentioned that she’d like to have a print of Gerry’s picture, so I took it out and gave it to her. He comes down for cancer treatments and from the look on her face it seems like his prognosis may not be so great. I felt so pleased she wanted it.

Alberta’s partner also looked at the photos, and commented that he thought they were really good. So I asked him if I could photograph him, and he answered no. I’ve also long wanted to photograph Alberta – I did once but the light was awful and the picture didn’t turn out at all – she looks like a 50s movie star. However, after she saw my pictures, she said no.

That kind of threw me. What were they seeing in my photographs that made them not want to be included? She’d agreed before, so what had changed now that she the pictures? I tried not to dwell on it, but I was concerned.

Anyways, a few weeks later, Alberta’s partner Paul sat down with me and said he’d perhaps been too hasty in responding to my request. He’d been caught a bit off guard but now that he’d thought about it, he realized they didn’t have any pictures of each other, and they would like me to photograph them after all. I feel so honoured to be asked, and of course just plain delighted. So last weekend I went to their home and photographed them. Paul does all of Alberta’s eye makeup; he’s largely responsible for her movie star looks. So they allowed me to photograph him doing her aesthetics. They also asked me to share any pictures online until they’d seen them, and they haven’t yet so I can’t share them, but I’m really happy with the shots.

I am often amazed by what people will share with me. I love that they let me into their home and into their daily rituals. For me, it is always an exchange, one I don’t take lightly.

This is what I’ve been meaning to blog about for two weeks straight, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. And now that I have, it seems a lot more boring than I’d intended. Oh well…

Less than two weeks until we go to New York!

Faulkner said you have to kill all your little darlings. He was talking about writing but I can see how the exact same principle applies to editing your photographs. And I’ve heard or read several photographers say that their favourite photographs almost never make it into the final edit.

I’ve finally updated the galleries on my site with an edit of my Drop-In Centre work. In selecting and sequencing the images, it really felt like killing my darlings. Except that in the end there were some darlings I just couldn’t kill. I discovered that I have no emotional distance from which to properly judge these images. In some ways I’m closer to this work than I am to my family work. Mostly because I know I can always shoot more with my family. But with the people from the Drop-In Centre, it doesn’t work that way. Some people I haven’t seen since I photographed them. I think others might think it’s weird for me to photograph them again.

Anyways, the bottom line is that the edit is loose and I have no idea at all whether these photographs are any good or of value to anyone else. When I started making these portraits, I wanted to make photographs of people, not people in distress or people dealing with a particular set of circumstances. I wanted to move away from photographs of poverty or homelessness or mental illness or addiction. At the same time, I didn’t want to romanticize or gloss over or turn away from those very real issues that real people are living with. I don’t know if I’ve been successful at any of that, especially since I have no control over what viewers will see in these photographs. I know what I see in them, but I also know these people outside of the context of the photographs.

So… why don’t you go have a look? I’d be very interested in any critiques you feel like sharing — although please keep it constructive.

My friend Beck wrote a post a while back about community and how they can’t really be built. They’re organic. Jennifer responded with some of her own thoughts. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of community and its absence lately on a number of fronts. I blame the rise of the nuclear family. I remember reading about research (I can’t remember where for sure but I think it was in Sheila Kitzinger’s Ourselves as Mothers) that found in cultures where people lived close to their extended families, new mothers wanted mostly to parent just like their mothers. But in cultures like North America, where adult children move far away from their parents because, as Beck says, “moving away is what we do now,” new mothers generally want to do the opposite of what their mothers did.

The benefit of the extended family model, I’m guessing, would be more support for parents and in particular mothers. But that system also perpetuates the status quo and supports (depends on?) rigid gender roles. The benefit of the North American nuclear family is that it affords significant social change – probably an essential ingredient for the women’s movement. But it also makes for instability and uncertainty on an individual level.

It struck me reading Beck’s and Jennifer’s posts that it also makes it very difficult to forge real-life communities. Because there are as many different ways to raise children as there are parents, I feel like I can never step in and parent other people’s kids. And while I would welcome someone else stepping in from to time to parent my kid (like if he misbehaves at the playground), I wouldn’t care for it at all if it doesn’t align with my values and approach to parenting.

For the last several months I’ve been working on a book of some of the images I made and words I wrote during my son’s first two years of life. I’ve been remembering how angry I was, especially at parenting books with their prescriptive tone, contradictory advice, and dire consequences if I didn’t follow their instructions to the letter. But the only reason there’s so darn many of them, and so much need (I remember clearly my desperation to find some kind of solution to my son’s sleeping issue – little did I know the solution would be accepting that I can’t control it), is because of our lack of community. As much as I love my mother, I couldn’t always trust her advice because she got duped herself as a young mother by the parenting book industry. And I didn’t have any close friends with kids who were enough older than my son to offer comfort but not so much older that they couldn’t remember the reality of life with an infant. And so my husband and I struggled, and I made bleak photographs, and the three of us survived.

* * *
Ever since the workshop with Donald Weber, when he said that you need to know what you have to say and that takes time (and how he’s figured out that his work is all about power and the wounds it inflicts on those who don’t have it), I’ve been wondering what my own work is all about. And my initial thinking is that it’s all about community, or the lack thereof. More specifically, I think I could drill it down to being all about the rise of the nuclear family and its impact on society.

For my first volunteer shift at the Drop-In Centre, I was also in need of its services: one of my family members had been evicted the night before and was homeless. The thing about mental illness is that family cannot come together in the same way you can with physical illnesses – if you try, the mental illness will suck you all in. Sometimes I am ashamed at my distance from my family member, and I wonder if people around her wonder where her family is and what’s wrong with us that we aren’t doing more to help. The fact is there is a limit to how much hardship and distress a single nuclear family can withstand and overcome. I believe this may very well be the case for everyone who comes to the drop-in centre: the woman with a chronic disease who didn’t want me to photograph her because her family disapproves of her coming there but she keeps coming nonetheless; and the man whose mother is in a nursing home a few hours away and the man whose daughter will soon be moving in with him, and the man who walked here from the east coast, and the man whose daughters thought he was dead for the last decade, and the boy whose parents dropped him off to stay at the shelter, but stayed to eat a meal with him before they left. There is a limit to what one family can do, and places like the Drop-In Centre fill in the gaps.

I think this is also very much the subject of my Two-Powered series, which I have yet to unveil here – the photographs I made during the first two years of my son’s life that are darker than I remember. My parents were wonderful, but if the nuclear family hadn’t taken over our culture, I would have had no need for parenting manuals, and struggle to reject them and find my own path. Don’t get me wrong: my family is wonderful and they were very supportive during my orientation into motherhood, especially my mother. But I live two hours away from them, and there is a limit to what one family can support. Moving away is what we do now.

My belly dancer series gets a little more difficult to link in, but I believe it’s there. That I can’t articulate the link is probably the reason I’m making those photographs instead of writing about it. I started belly dancing when I most needed community, and it played a significant role in me overcoming severe anxiety and panic. Visually, the photographs are probably more about isolation than community, but the act of photographing these women has revived that part of my community. Yet I photograph them mostly alone and a bit overwhelmed, visually, by their harsh surroundings.

I’m shocked at how my camera, or perhaps more accurately, my compulsion to photograph people, is widening my community. I’ve said it before in relation to the Drop-In Centre, but I’ll say it again because it’s important. Photographing people deepens my encounters with strangers or near strangers. The other day, I found Nadia Sablin’s website, which has some beautiful photography. In book five, she shows “Portraits of friends and strangers. And strangers that have become friends,” which I thought was bang-on.

My newest project, still very much in its infancy, involves photographing original owners of houses in the neighbourhood we moved into last fall. The suburb was built mostly in the 50s and 60s, at the same time as the nuclear family rose to power in North America. So I’ve been going door to door to find original owners. Now, when I walk to work in the mornings or to the playground in the evenings, I know some of the people I’m passing, and we wave in a neighbourly way. I wouldn’t have otherwise met them were it not for my compulsion to photograph. Nothing else could make me knock on strangers’ doors – certainly not needing a cup of sugar or a sympathetic ear. But already I feel like this project could lead to the possibility of living near friends.

Last night I went to bed with visions of the images I could make today, of people I’d begun talking to yesterday that I would approach for photographs. The visions were the first thoughts I woke to this morning. I went to the centre with more spring in my step than I’ve had all week.

Shortly after I arrived, however, Sister Christine told me not to make anymore pictures. She said I had enough already, and besides this isn’t a place for taking pictures. She told me to go to a church or Tim Horton’s. I tried to explain what I was doing, but she didn’t remember the conversation we’d had about a year ago, when I thought I’d gotten her permission to photograph there, provided I always got consent.

Well, shit.

(I get why she said this, I do. And I’ll totally respect her wishes. But I’m sad. Partly about project, but also about what she may think of me.)

These are the key points from Donald Weber’s workshop last weekend that I’ve been trying to put into practice this week, in no particular order:

1. You have to take risks.
2. Just shoot it. You never know.
3. Know what you want to say. This one is hard. It took him four years to figure it out for himself.
4. Shoot when you don’t feel like shooting.
5. There’s always something going wrong. It’s all about how you deal with it.
6. You need a body of work. Get that first before you chase assignments. They will come from the body of work.
7. Connect with people. Have empathy. Eat and drink and laugh with them. Be willing to put yourself out there.
8. Editing (that is, selecting and sequencing, not post-processing) is key. It’s not just about choosing the best pictures. It’s about stories and concepts, both literal and figurative.

I’ve been going to the drop-in centre every morning. On Monday, I tried to go all day, but I ran out of steam and dropped into an exhausted and stressed-out heap as soon as I got home. I didn’t feel like going back. I worried that people thought I was intruding, exploiting. I worried that I actually was. I felt uncomfortable, and yet compelled to continue.

I went back Tuesday morning, even though I didn’t feel like it. But this time I knew I had to pace myself. So I only planned to go for the morning, and I had to meet someone else at noon anyways. I was exhausted again when I got home around 2. I had scheduled a photoshoot with a belly dancer for the evening, and I was dreading it. I didn’t know how I’d get my energy up for it. And what was the point anyways?

But I remembered Don’s words, about shooting when you don’t feel like it, so I did it. And I got my energy back and we had a lot of fun. Here are a few of my favourites:

This morning, I went to John’s house, who very kindly agreed to let me photograph him there. It was kind of intense. I left feeling a bit weird. Emotional or something. Feeling bad again, that I’d invaded his privacy even though he invited me in. I felt like my photographing him and his home made him sad. He talked about having distanced himself from everyone in the 24 years since his MS diagnosis.

Afterwards, I almost didn’t go to the drop-in centre. I was feeling raw, and like I’d probably just annoyed people anyways. But I also felt like if I didn’t go back today, I might never. And I really didn’t want that to happen.

I saw Tony there shortly after I arrived, who I photographed a few weeks ago and whose prints I’d been carrying around almost ever since. He was delighted with the pictures. “You’re a good photographer,” he said. “Has anyone every told you that?” He was even more delighted when he realized the prints were for him to keep. “Thank you SO much for taking my picture,” he said, and then he gave me a huge bear hug.

The woman on the right is Jenny. I’d talked to her about my project on Monday, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask her if it was ok for me photograph her. Today (before I took this shot), I asked her. “Oh!” she said. “That’s so nice you asked. Some people don’t.”

She said it reminded her of something she learned in rehab. There, they had to make sure to ask people permission before they touched anyone, even just a light touch. Because some people don’t like being touched.  I really like that analogy, of photographing being like touching. Certainly, it feels like that to me.

Throughout all this, I noticed a guy I hadn’t seen there before. I would love to make a picture of him, but I refrained, not sure of whether he’d be ok with it. So instead I just smiled, and he smiled back. After a while, I realized in fact I’d photographed him a few years ago, outside the youth drop-in centre (he’s in the first picture in the post I linked to). He came up to me and introduced himself. His name is Door, like front door. We talked about the photo I’d made, and I offered to give him a print and we talked about how I could get it to him. Our conversation seemed to be coming to a close, when he said, “I just have to tell you, I get a really good feeling from you. I just have this good feeling about what you’re doing, that you’re doing a good thing. So keep doing it.”

I went home and cried, but it was kind of a good cry.

I still don’t know if I’ll be able to make the kind of photos I want to make on this project, but I feel a lot better about trying.

Today I was all grumbly when I headed out for my weekly stint at the Drop-In Centre. I thought about quitting, because it blocks my time in the middle of my Saturdays and cuts into my family time. Today is gorgeous and sunny, and I’d really rather hang with my boys. But I went, and I’m back into my usual enthusiasm for the place and for the time I spend serving coffee and lunch.

One of the men I’ve photographed was there, and I had prints in my bag to give him. But he was erratic and didn’t seem to really recognize me. He just talked about having to deal with the police and their threats of putting him in the local psychiatric facility. I’ve never seen him like that before. Obviously, he’s gone off his meds, and although I definitely don’t think psychiatric drugs are a cure-all, seeing him like this made me sad. Anyways, I didn’t give him the prints. I thought if he’d forgotten, seeing them in his current state of mind might upset him. I hope he’s able to get things sorted out soon.

More and more, I’m feeling like my drop-in pictures just aren’t doing it. I think they’re just not going deep enough. But because of the nature of the centre, the services it provides, and the transient nature of the population it serves, I can’t go any deeper while I’m actually there. I can’t capture the moments of community I see because people need to be assured that they can go there somewhat anonymously, without worrying about their pictures being posted on the Web. That’s why I make sure to not only get consent but to make sure the people I photograph understand that I will at least publish them on my website.

Anyways, I want to go deeper. I think I need to follow some of my friends home. So today I asked one of the first people I photographed if he would be willing to let me into his home. He understands the possibilities of photography as an art form, so he gets what I’m trying to do. He said he most definitely is willing, so expect to see some more photos of him here in the coming months. I expect it will take a while to get something up and going with him, but I’m kind of hoping it might become longer term.

I will still continue with occasional photographs of people who are willing there. But hopefully this other project will take some of the pressure and urgency away, so I can go back to pursuing the portraits a little more organically.

I was about to go off on a long and involved tangent, but instead I’m going to get outside and enjoy some of the 22-degree (Celsius) sunshine.

When I first started volunteering at the drop-in centre, I made all kinds of assumptions. I figured that everyone who came there must be suffering, they must be at the end of their rope, the most marginalized people in my small town. I thought the drop-in centre was a last resort.

But now I see differently. Certainly some people are at a low point in their lives, I’m sure, but I think a lot of people come for different reasons. Maybe they live alone and come for the home-cooked meals that are just too resource-intensive to make themselves. Maybe they come for the community.

When I started photographing people there, I originally intended to publish the photos with text, with information about the person in the picture and how they came to be at the drop-in centre. But more and more, I’m realizing two things:

1. I can’t really find that out. For one thing, the stories of how we came to be at any particular place and time are complex; it’s never a simple cause and effect. For another, that’s not information people generally share without being asked. And I have no interest in asking things like, “What are you doing here?” since it suggests that “here” is a place you wouldn’t just choose to come. Yet many of us do just choose to go there.

2. Their stories are ultimately irrelevant to me. It really shouldn’t matter whether a person just left an abusive relationship or just got out of jail for bank robbery. And I think posting stories with faces would invite either judgment or pity, and I don’t want to do that.

Last night I talked to my husband about my drop-in centre project, wondering if I might have to take a different approach to achieve what I want to with the images. Some of the responses I get to the photographs are disappointing, like when someone says, “Great picture of a hard life…” or something like that. I don’t want you to see a hard life. I want you to see a life: a human being, plain and simple.

My husband mentioned the concept of ubuntu. He mentioned it specifically in the context of a Zulu saying (which he actually said in Zulu but which I couldn’t attempt to spell here) that is loosely translated as “We are who we are through other people.” The more I think about this, the more I think this is really what I’m trying to convey through my drop-in project. I like the double meaning of the phrase too, that we are who we are because of how other people have treated us and also through how we treat other people. We are no better than our worst treatment of other people.

Later I did a bit of research into ubuntu. Archbishop Desmond Tutu described ubuntu as “the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation.”

Nelson Mandela explained it in a way that I think is particularly apt in the context of the drop-in centre with its fairly transient population: “A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects.” You can see him explaining it in this video.

* * *

I love going to the drop-in centre. I love the conversations I have there. I used to find my camera was a barrier to openness among people. But now I find it can open up conversations, bringing me into contact with people I wouldn’t otherwise approach, and deepening the contacts I already have.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, when I walked in for my shift, it was overcast. I glanced into the smoking area as I opened the door, and three guys I’d seen around but never really spoken to were there. It took me a few steps to register, but the light was amazingly soft, not only from the overcast sky but it also reflected back up from the snow. When I got inside, everything was already taken care of for the meal prep, and nobody was at the counter for coffee. I was feeling brazen that week (Tony Fouhse’s posts about approach really helped me figure out how to approach people to photograph), so I decided to take my camera back outside and ask those guys if they wanted to collaborate on some photos.

I felt really nervous (and a bit like an asshole) just asking them out of the blue, and trying to explain what I’m trying to do, but two of them were game. I started with JP, and put him up against the brick wall. Immediately, he looked at me for direction, a bit nervous, and I froze. “DO SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING!” my brain screamed at me, and finally my mouth said, “Why don’t you just take a drag of your smoke?”

He complied, and by the time he exhaled, his face was relaxed.

What I find interesting is that at the time, I thought the picture of him exhaling would be the one to go with. But now that I see the actual shots, I like the tension of the first one, with his mischievous and slightly self-conscious smirk, and the knowing tilt of his head.

Overall, however, I think maybe I should stick with my usual but much slower approach. My usual approach involves waiting for a rapport to develop with someone, then asking if they want to be involved in my project. It means that my project will never really be a documentary project, not really representative of the people who come to the drop-in centre at all. It will only be a document of the people I’m drawn to, or who are drawn to me, or to having their picture taken if they see me photographing someone else. And that somehow seems more genuine to me anyways.

Just over a week ago, I walked to the drop-in centre on a glorious sunny and mild day – the first day of the year when you could comfortably walk outside without your winter coat. As I was walking across the parking lot, Tony saw me, and said something flattering. I smiled and he called, “Has anyone ever told you you have a beautiful smile?” (Or something like that.)

I had to think. “Well, I think it’s been a long time.”

Anyways, we talked, about the weather, about my age and experience, and whether I had to come here for some reason. He seemed impressed that I just volunteer there because I want to, and he shook my hand. The subject of photography came up naturally, and when he said he liked pictures, I told him about my project. He wasn’t just willing, he was probably the most enthusiastic person I’ve photographed. He performed, he rode his bike with the coloured ribbons on the handlebar, and put on the fur hat he had just found.

I also had a great conversation with a man who used to be into photography. He asked me if I’d bracketed my shots, and I had to confess that I hadn’t. He once had a rolleiflex and a full darkroom and everything, but over the years he’s had to sell most of his stuff. He said it was hard to keep it while he was on the streets. He still has some prints, though, and promised to bring some in next time I come.

I can’t figure out exactly what it is that I love about the place. Something about the blurred lines between the served and serving, and about the sense of community that exists among a pretty transient population. There are a few regulars, but there’s a lot of people you won’t see for weeks or months, then they’ll show up for a while, then disappear again. I never know if the disappearances are a good thing: they could be working or have a new place to live or have left town; or they could be relapsed, in jail or the hospital. And there’s no way to tell unless or until you see them again.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, in case you didn’t already know. While I was at the Drop In Centre, two people came in with big signs offering free hugs. I thought this was pretty cool, so I pulled out my camera and started shooting. I’ve never just pulled out my camera there before, not like that, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity.

As it turns out, the huggers also volunteer at the centre, during the week. The woman who led the free hugs (sadly I didn’t get any good shots of her) ended up helping us serve the meal, because somehow we seemed short-handed. Anyways, she told me that she first saw the free hugs idea on youtube, and she was just really touched by it, so she wanted to do it herself, and on V-day. She said a few people said it was exactly what they needed.

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.

So the Just Posts are coming to an end. Because of the last two years of Just Posts, we started sponsoring a child in Lesotho through Help Lesotho. I started this website to raise funds for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, around the time that I started volunteering at my local drop-in centre. Now, for the last hurrah of the Just Posts, it’s time to pump up our giving again. I’ve been trying to decide what to do, and I keeping coming back to my own tiny piece of the world. So I’m going to make monthly donations to the local drop-in centre. I had hoped to do this through CanadaHelps but for some reason the monthly giving option isn’t available for this particular charity. Oh well, I’ll just have to do it manually.

One of the things I love about the drop-in centre is that they (we) don’t treat the people they (we) serve with pity. People are expected to behave appropriately, and yet we make sure to never leave more than a dollar or two in the cash box, coats get locked away, and we are told to avoid leaving sharp knives on the front counter. I’m not sure how exactly to articulate it, except to use the term I discovered in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté: unconditional regard. To me it means treating people with compassion but not pity, with humanity but not rose-coloured glasses, if that makes any sense. I saw a reference somewhere, maybe to a music album, maybe something else, but it was along the lines that we are all broken and beautiful. The drop-in centre teaches me that over and over.

It’s easy to become complacent. To tell yourself that you give here and here so you’ve done your part. But if you *can* afford more, why not? Especially with the economy tanking, more and more people are going to need help. Every time I get complacent, every time I think I’m doing enough, the Just Posts challenge me to rethink. Or I discover someone who puts me to shame. And the answer is that I might be doing enough, but I can do more.

The end of the Just Posts doesn’t have to be an ending; I prefer to look at it as a graduation. The Just Posts have taught me the basics, now it’s time for me to continue the journey on my own.

Here are some new pictures: