peripheral vision

The truth is, I am not a beach person. I burn easily, I don’t like swimming in cold water, and I don’t like getting hot and sweaty, especially if there is sand around to stick to me. I don’t actually mind getting hot if I’m walking around or doing something and have access to shade, but beaches don’t tend to offer much in the way of the shade. Maybe it’s too many childhood bouts of sunstroke.

Unfortunately my husband LOVES the beach: he loves swimming, he loves sunning, he loves it all. And my son, despite his very fair skin, is showing signs of taking after his father. So we went to Boulders Beach, which is a little sheltered from the wind and surf and therefore perfect for little kids. And you know what? I had a great day. There was enough of a breeze to keep us cool, and my son had a great time digging in the sand, and I enjoyed helping him make sand castles. When my husband and him took the beach ball to water’s edge for a while, I had a nice chat with my father-in-law, and I remained cool.

To get to Boulder’s Beach, we drove across the Cape Flats, where a lot of apartheid townships are. Some of the books I’ve been reading have mentioned Lavender Hill, which has probably stuck in my mind for its pretty-sounding name. But in fact, there isn’t actually a hill anywhere near it (it’s on the Cape FLATS), and it’s reportedly a pretty gang-ridden, hopeless place. People were forcibly moved there under the Group Areas Act during Apartheid, and I think it’s one of the poorest formerly Coloured townships. So we drove by it, and I knew it was Lavender Hill from the graffiti on the wall that ran along the highway: “Welcome to Lavender Hill where people are moved with love, happiness and diversity.” It was so well-done and cheerful-looking, if I hadn’t known better I would have been tempted to make a visit. There was also what looked like a circus tent next to the highway, which my father-in-law speculated is a temporary school.

On the way home, from up on the mountain, I could see a fire somewhere in the flats, someone’s life or some people’s lives going up in smoke while we enjoyed the beach. Fire is part of Cape Town’s nature, it’s even required for the fynbos’ life cycle, but not so much for human lives.

It was last night around 5 pm when I finally realized it’s insanely hot. And then I just couldn’t shake it. It had been really hot the day before too, but to a certain extent you kind of expect that when you’re in Cape Town in the summer, so once I dipped in the pool, I sort of forgot. But last night I couldn’t forget. At five, the car’s dash said it was 35 degrees Celsius, and it suddenly struck me that it was late enough in the day that it really shouldn’t still be 35. We had a leisurely dinner on a shaded patio and still we were hot and sticky. For once, there were no clouds over the mountain, and no wind. When I was putting my son to bed, he pointed out a bunch of lights up on Lion’s Head, all moving around and all different colours. I still don’t know for sure what it was, but I’m thinking it was hikers taking advantage of the windless, cloudless night.

I don’t think the temperature went down with the sun at all. We had the windows open wide all night but it only just started feeling comfortable when it started getting light this morning. Since there wasn’t even the slightest breeze, all the open windows did was let in the mosquitoes. My poor son gets terrible reactions to mozzie bites and he’s covered in them. He has three bites on his left ear, so it’s swelled to about twice its normal size. He refuses calamine lotion, so I just keep dosing him with Benadryl.

Anyways, it was crazy hot again today. This morning, I finally got a chance to wander the area I want to make pictures in, but it was already stifling by 9, and I really felt it. Approaching strangers for photos can be quite exhausting at the best of times, and in this heat I just ran out of steam. I have no idea what the forecast is, but I’m definitely hoping it cools a bit in the next couple days, so I can be more productive.
In one corner store, I met a retired journalist. He told me he was once invited to apply to journalism school somewhere in Canada, but when he went to apply for a visa, the Canadian embassy told him that the government had cut all ties to South Africa and wouldn’t let anyone in the country, not even if you were coloured or black. He said this would have been around 1968, and I was surprised and ashamed by that. When he was telling his story, I had thought it might have been in the 80s when the whole world had sanctions against SA.

When I got home, we went down the street to discover a fantastic cafe that we wish we’d discovered a week ago. Unfortunately, when something is just down the street here, your walk home is steeply uphill all the way. We melted in the door and almost immediately jumped into the pool

Afterwards, some cloud started appearing over the mountain and I thought that might be a sign of cool to come. Sure enough, a breeze started, and it’s now a fully-fledged strong wind, once again rattling our doors and windows and shaking our floorboards. I didn’t think I’d be so happy to hear the wind back, but it’s just an incredible relief.

We enjoyed a really great bottle of wine with dinner tonight, and when I was putting my son to bed, he said, “I love being in this country.” A welcome change from all the talk of wanting to go home. As my husband noted as we made dinner, “By the time we’re all settled in, it will be time to go home.” Such is life, I guess.

Today every time my son got upset, he cried, “I just want to be back in Canada.” Or “I want to get on the plane to Canada tomorrow!” When he’s happy, like if he’s just come out of the pool or we’re at the beach, he says, “I’m so happy to be in this country!” I understand exactly how he feels, alternating between “We only have a bit more than a week left, and we’ve barely done anything or seen anyone!” and “Oh wouldn’t it be nice to feel at home and safe again? That said, I think we’re finally getting our land legs here in Cape Town. We’ve been here for more than a week now, and it’s largely been spent dealing with rental car, cell phone and electricity issues. This is the downside of renting a private home instead of staying in a B&B or a hotel, I guess. The upside is having a whole lot of privacy.

Actually today and yesterday were quite nice. Yesterday we went to the waterfront, and went out on a short harbour cruise, because my son was superkeen to go on a boat ride, and then the aquarium, which he also enjoyed. Today we had lunch in Company Gardens and wandered through the South African Museum. The last couple of nights we’ve made dinner at home, and they were decidedly more successful than the fish biltong my husband barbecued in our first attempt at a home-cooked meal.

I also finally began my photo project today… no photos, but meeting contacts and getting oriented in the area I want to photograph. I’m nervous that it’s bigger than I can reasonably do in the short time left, but I might as well try to do as much as I can before we leave.

I’m reminded of an old boyfriend, who advised me one night when we were walking home from the local swimming hole and a thunderstorm hit. I was kind of freaking out, convinced we’d be struck by lightning, and my legs kind of didn’t work. When I told him I thought we were going to die, he replied that that may well be, but he wanted to get as close to home as possible before it happened. So we ran. And we made it home. It’s a principle that I’ve applied in many situations, and I may as well apply it here too.

I’d forgotten just how uncomfortable travelling is, especially with a young child. Though I think it would be A LOT more uncomfortable for me to attempt travelling this far without my son. I  like keeping my family near me. And we’ve never been big night life people anyways. I wonder what memories, if any, my son will retain from this trip?

I’ve posted a few pics to flickr, although we pay for the internet by the MB so not many. Plus, I haven’t actually been taking many photos yet. Here are a few:

There’s a few more on flickr, if you’re interested.

Yesterday morning, I was woken first by the call of a hawdidaw, then by a rooster (who’s got a rooster in suburban Cape Town???), then I just laid there and enjoyed the rest of the morning’s sounds coming in an open window. This is always what I enjoy most about the first days of summer in Canada too: hearing the daily sounds of life. A dog bark, some traffic, and the wind in the leaves. Always the wind. I don’t know why they call Chicago The Windy City when there is Cape Town. Yesterday and last night it was windy; when my jet lag woke me in the middle of the night, I even heard things banging around – in our yard or the neighbour’s I’m not sure.

Sometime after I fell back to sleep, though, the wind must have died down because this morning it is still and already warm. Today we get our rental car. I’m nervous about driving in the city on the other side of the road, but I think it will be good for us to explore the area more independently than we have in the past. Last night as I laid awake, I couldn’t help but ask myself: why am I continually pushing myself outside my comfort zone??? Why can’t I just stay at home and chill out in my safe little world? Sometimes it almost feels like a moral imperative to me, like discomfort (not physical but emotional discomfort – the byproduct of intimacy and new experiences) is next to godliness or something.

My father-in-law has lent me some of his books by Stephen Watson, a Cape Town poet and professor at UCT. I’m reading a writer’s diary, which is just as it says. I chuckled at this entry, from 21 December 1995, written while he was in New York City:

“There are certain environments, particularly these post-industrial cities, which are clotted with words in the same way that certain landscapes are polluted by filth. Words proliferate here like layers in a landfill: all psychic space is overpopulated with them. At the same time they float free of all signification, losing their substances as a result.

[...]

Words, no less than human beings, need a certain amount of space in order to mean, to be. Failing that, the very feel of the language starts changing, losing its reality. One gets the emergence of phenomena like postmodernism which at times strike one as simply a way of shifting the word-garbage around when it’s grown too deep to be disposed of.”

And later, on 27 December 1995:

“[R]eliance on cliché is not only a reflection of a kind of collective crassness; it is also an index to a certain form of brutality. Clichés being the dead wood of language, they provide the verbal clubs with which people commonly beat others about the head.”

Now, I think it’s about time I woke my husband and son and we got on with our day.

Alright, we’re packed. All the zippers are zipped. Tickets and passports are in my purse. And we have almost two hours until we get picked up to go to the airport. So what now? Figured I may as well take a moment to blog.

I’m pretty excited about some of the contacts I’ve made. I’ve got a bit of a plan for a personal photography project while I’m there, which I won’t go into detail about here yet, since it might be a total flop and I might end up taking a completely different direction. I’ve also been in touch with Iliso Labantu, a collective of township photographers in Cape Town. I’m bringing my old D70s to donate to them, and it happens that they’re having one of their flash photo weekends while we’re there. So I’m planning to go to that, both to shoot a little bit and to help some of the photographers improve their shooting and editing. I’m so stoked. I’ve always believed that it’s better to enable marginalized people to photograph their communities and lives themselves than to photograph it yourself — not that it’s wrong to photograph marginalized people, of course, but it is problematic — so I’m just delighted to get this opportunity to see that kind of work in action.

I’ve also been in touch with a tribal fusion belly dance troupe, so I’m hoping to catch a performance and maybe a rehearsal.

And of course, we have some wonderful family to visit. And the summer. We’re so deep in winter that it’s really an act of imagination to consider what summer will actually feel like. I know intellectually that during the summer you can walk outside in barefeet but I can’t really remember what that feels like beyond really, really nice.

I’m really looking forward to staying in one city for our whole stay. In the past we’ve travelled around to visit other family, and while I’m sad we won’t see them, I’m relieved to be staying put.

See you on the flip side!

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

[insert segue here]

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time I composed blog posts in my head as I went about my day. At the first opportunity, I sat down at the computer and the words just ran out of my fingertips. It was easy to blog.

These days it isn’t so easy. I always considered myself an ethical semi-anonymous blogger but blogging under my real name seems to have muzzled me a bit. Also, I just don’t have that constant blog post composer running in my head all day. Instead, I have songs on repeat, endless To Do lists, and topics I want to learn more about. If I do occasionally find myself mentally stringing a few sentences together, they disappear before I find myself with wordpress in front of me. I suppose this is a very long, drawn-out apology for my silence. I’d like to promise better performance but I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my blogging peak is just behind me.

Anyways, we’re going to Cape Town in less than two weeks (Ack!!!!). My goal is to undertake a more intentional photography project while I’m there than I have before, but to do it in a way that doesn’t compromise the family visit and holiday aspect. I’m not sure if it’s possible but I’m going to try.

I’ve been reading Transforming Cape Town, published in 2008 by an American anthropologist, and it’s truly absorbing me. It’s making me realize just how naive I was about Apartheid. I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad. And I knew its legacies would take generations to overcome but I didn’t realize just how insidious and numerous those legacies are. A few facts that are sticking in my mind:

- the 2001 census indicates that 39 percent of Cape Town’s households earn incomes below R19,200 per year (at today’s exchange rate that’s about $2700 CDN. In other words less than we’re spending on airfare to get there.
- a 2002 report quoted in the book says that a quarter of blacks are unemployed (although in some townships the figures reach 70 percent) but only 3 percent of whites are unemployed. I’ve always heard that it’s very difficult to get accurate unemployment figures in the townships because of all the informal settlements in South Africa – nobody knows exactly how many people live in them, and people are always moving in.
- One person quoted in the book said that the most shocking thing about the end of Apartheid was seeing pornography for the first time. This speaks to me of just how effectively the government censored absolutely everything.
- Before Apartheid, Cape Town was the least segregated city in South Africa. Post-Apartheid, it is the most segregated city in the country.
- The racially segregated neighbourhoods created by the Group Areas Act remain largely unchanged. Under this legislation, thousands of families were evicted from their homes and removed to townships that were and are far from the city centre and jobs without decent public transit.

The book contains a good mix of introspection and personal stories of people the author met while in Cape Town between 1999 and 2004. In university my friends and I had a habit of dismissing all other fields of study besides ours (English). I always considered anthropology deeply flawed because of its emphasis on the people being observed to exclusion of the people doing the observation. This book is changing my mind, in large part due to the author’s introspection and initial disillusionment with the field of anthropology. In many cases, I think I could easily apply these thoughts to the act of photography – or at least the kind I aspire to do. For example:

“Intensive fieldwork is a gloss that covers a vast array of promiscuous techniques and messy encounters.”

“anthropology’s use of the phrase participant-observation to describe our research technique doesn’t clarify what we really do, which is watching. Watching people interact and situations unfold is actually a much more threatening undertaking than the neutral-sounding observing, a fact often well understood by those we watch.”

I think I still need to come to terms with my watching.

Here are a few more quotes that stopped me in my tracks:

“We as a world need South Africa to succeed and pioneer a model for meeting the challenges of poverty and racism.”

“The glamorized representation of poor people’s homes in the book [Shack Chic] suggest a new aesthetic – poverty fashion? – that celebrates the innovative creativity of the poor while saying nothing about the injustice of poverty.”

Um, yeah, so I went to New York, eh? And I still haven’t blogged about it. We’ve been back for nearly a full week.

I guess I’m not sure what to say about it all, really. We did lots, got overstimulated at least twice a day, and ate wonderful meals. I was really ready to leave, but I think that was more because I was missing my son so much than because I was tired of the city. There was still so much we didn’t do and see, but what can you do? We’re human. Not only that, we’re small-town boring humans who seem to get tired awfully easily. Anyways, I made a fun little slideshow with some of my pics. Be warned, it’s a very loose edit – I think I’ve already taken a second pass and cut nearly half the pictures. But it gives you a bit of a sense of the things we saw.

I didn’t take many pictures – well, not as many as I expected to anyways. I was very aware of the century-long tradition of brilliant street photography in New York, by people who spent most of their lives in the city. I also kind of think that people can’t come to a place and make photographs that are even remotely accurate or relevant or not-cliche commentaries about the place in a short time. I kind of think you have to live there, or at least visit there a lot. That said, I kept making pictures in New York even though I knew they wouldn’t turn into anything more. And I think I’ve had a bit of a revelation.

I’ve been posting pics to flickr, and one person commented on all the geometry in the pictures, all the squares and circles and rectangles. He asked wherther that was New York or what I was drawn to photograph there. And I suspect it was a bit of both. Knowing that the pictures wouldn’t turn into a bigger body of work freed to make just the pictures I wanted to, without thinking of how they would fit in. And there are a few pictures that I really, really like (I’m embedding them through this post).

I realize that you CAN make interesting, compelling photographs in a place you have no insight into. But the photographs won’t be about the Place; they’ll be about your encounter with the place, or perhaps just an extension of your own personal vision of the world. And those are both valid approaches to photographing a new place. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that before; it seems so obvious now. But there you have it. I also have a lot of pictures from my own town that I shot sort of believing they wouldn’t fit into a body of work either, but I wanted to shoot them anyways. And now I’m wondering if maybe those are the most authentic pictures in my work? Donald Weber kept telling us in May not to make the pictures we think we should, but to make the pictures we want to. I’ve been haunted by that ever since, trying to figure out whether what I’m doing is what I think I should do or what I truly want to do. It’s a bit of a mindfuck really.

So yesterday I spent a lot of time reviewing all the pictures I took over the past year, and sorting them. I had to anyways as part of my Christmas gift to family members. Every year I make a calendar of pictures of my son for us to enjoy over the coming year. I figured while I was sorting through those, I might as well also think about my other pictures. I’m realizing that one subject that draws me in again and again are the signs of life we leave behind us in our daily trails, the imperfections on the landscape (like the plastic bag in the image below), and the expressions of ourselves we hang from our homes. I love how some people put things in their window, facing out. It’s like a little sign to passerby: I live here. Not just anyone, but ME. And it’s why I love photographing people in their homes, because of all the little physical bits that tell you something about the person who eats and sleeps and gets bored and excited there.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t be back to the Drop-In Centre until the New Year, and that was a bit of a shock to me. But Alberta just laughed every time I said it, since it’s only two weekends I’ll be missing. Next Saturday I’m going to a grant-writing workshop with Donald Weber at Pikto, and the following Saturday is my birthday (Boxing Day!) and I’ll be with my family at my parents’ farm. This year has totally gotten away from me, and this month in particular.

Last year I set some goals for myself for 2009. I wanted to do project-oriented work, and I wanted to learn to balance my flash with ambient light. I did almost nothing on the flash front, but I definitely put quite a bit of effort into projects and made some good progress. I think one of my goals for 2010 will need to be to FINISH a project. And I think I need to start narrowing my focus into one project at a time. Over the last year I thought that working on multiple projects would build on each other, and I think they have, but it also dilutes my effort so I end up with lots of work that I’m nowhere near ready to publish and shop around. This goal will be very hard for me, because I have a lot of ideas for projects that I really want to do, and limited time to work on them. I’m quite certain I could work full-time hours on my personal projects for the next year and not run out of things to do. The problem is that I don’t have full-time hours.

I had another goal for 2009 that I didn’t publish here, because it depended on other people, and I try to avoid having my sense of achievement depend on other people’s behavior. But the goal was to exhibit at least one piece of work in a gallery. I’m happy to have met and exceeded that goal. I think for 2010 I’d like to continue pursuing exhibition opportunities, but I’d like to focus my submissions on work I want shown more than work that I think fits the theme of calls for entry. I’d also like to start thinking about the logistics of hanging a solo show. I don’t think I’m really ready for one yet, but I’d like to start thinking about the possibilities.

The exhibitions I saw in New York really expanded my conception of what a photography exhibition can be. My favourite exhibition was probably Transparent City by Michael Wolf at the Aperture Gallery. I wasn’t planning to go out of my way to see it – I didn’t think it would interest me particularly – but we were in the neighbourhood and I really wanted to see Aperture’s bookstore. So we went and I was blown away by the exhibition. The images online do NOT do justice to the prints AT ALL. Anyways, they had a video playing of the artist talking about his experience making the work and his anxieties. Incidentally, he pointed out in the video that the series was called Transparent City not Transparent Chicago, even though all the work was shot there. He said it really isn’t about Chicago, so much as about city life. The video really enhanced the experience of the exhibit. It never occurred to me to have video or audio to augment the prints. They also included some of his earlier work to provide a context for the Transparent City work, and I really liked seeing that too.

Anyways, I’ve gone on long enough and my family is bugging me to get off the computer and get a Christmas tree so I’ll sign off here. You can check out the slideshow of my trip to NYC here.

Yeah, I quit nablopomo. It just wasn’t doing for me what I’d hoped it would, and I couldn’t stand doing another half-assed post. I kept thinking that the next day I’d do a better post, but I never did, and that was my whole reason for signing up. So I quit

I know they say quitters never win, but that’s not always true. For example, I trotted that out when people suggested I quit smoking, right up until I actually quit. I thought about continuing since I only had like five days to go, but what would be the point? It wasn’t achieving anything. That said, if you liked my half-assed posts, feel free to tell me why and I’ll try to do more of that.

Lots has been going on as well. We found out a week or two ago that my father-in-law was hospitalized again, so we’ve reversed our earlier decision about South Africa, and booked flights yesterday to Cape Town. I have to say I’m pretty excited, despite the not-great reason for going. I adore my husband’s family there, so I’m really looking forward to seeing them. If I’m honest, I’m also looking forward to seeing what kind of pictures I make there. I think my photography has developed a lot in the three years since we last went, both conceptually and aesthetically. I think my pictures have developed a subtlety that I like.

So that’s all for now. Here are some pictures from yesterday.

Our weekends are feeling way too administrative. Saturdays are full of regularly scheduled stuff: Farmer’s Market in the morning, I go to the Drop-In in the afternoon, then the grocery store, then cooking dinner with some of those fresh groceries, then bath and bed for the little one. Sundays are less scheduled but often involve cleaning the house and visiting with the in-law. So this weekend we didn’t really do anything fun or fresh-air-ish.

My son did play around the house a lot though and in the backyard. Here are some of the scenes he left behind.