peripheral vision

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

So I might as well just get into it.

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

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

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

For example.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Jodi Bieber

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

KayLynn Deveney

Laura Pannack

Jen Davis

Araminta deClermont

Juliana Beasley – especially Rockaways

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

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

Ever since we moved to this house, just a week and a half short of two years ago, I have wanted to do a photography project on the family housing residence on campus. Until January, I walked by it every day, and I speculated about the families behind each window, thought about the clues that gave them away: the mother’s day cards between the pink curtains and the window, the chalk letters on the cinder blocks, another window with ripped curtains that I could almost peek through, the laundry hanging across the small balcony, the other balcony with the prayer flags, the tropical plants filling another window… I once tried to pretend that I wasn’t a voyeur, but I totally am. I suspect that all photographers are, except perhaps for wilderness photographers?

Anyways, today I walked to work/daycare and I walked by there again, and was once again overwhelmed with a desire to meet and photograph some of the people who live here. I haven’t been walking much lately, and I’ve also been coming close to depression, I think. Apart from the opportunities to work on my derby girls project, I haven’t really been making any pictures. This morning makes me think that I need to walk, that that’s what inspires me and keeps me curious about the world around me and the people in it.

I need to set up my life so I can walk more. A resolution, perhaps?

And in the meantime, I will keep wondering about the man who was eating a bowl of cereal in the door of his balcony, mostly hidden by the hanging laundry.

I got my hair cut today. And it was kind of a big deal. I ended up with three braids, each about a foot long or more, which I will donate. I was going to leave them at the salon for them to donate, but when I saw them, I realized I really, really wanted to photograph them.

I don’t know, it felt kind of significant… I’d gone into the appointment feeling like my hair was a burden I needed to rid myself of. I felt like I’d been hiding behind it for too long. But once it was cut I was all nostalgic, thinking about how long those strands had been attached to me, and what had gone into growing them. But whatever. My head is lighter and my neck is cooler. Yay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

Pretty soon I’m going to have to rename this place the Alec Soth Fan Club. But give me one more post at least.

Carlos Loret de Mola was another participant in my workshop, and I think he’d be willing to co-chair the fan club with me. He recently posted about his experiences there, although I can’t seem to make a permanent link to that post. But it’s second from the top post on his blog right now. He took some pictures of me with Alec Soth.

Here is me trying to look blasé, like I sit next to Alec Soth every day.

Here I am again, still trying to look blasé.

Here I am a little bit drunk, trying to look like I go out every night for beer with Alec Soth and other awesome people after a couple of nice exhibition receptions. (This picture was taken by Reza, not Carlos.)

I’m still thinking about all the conversations I had. After I got home, American Suburb X posted an interview with Alec Soth from November 2009. And then another interview appeared, more recent I’m pretty sure. Both of them have nuggets that he mentioned during the workshop or during his lecture, so they’re definitely worth a read.

* * *

I was going to blog about all the synchronicity I experienced during the week I was in Toronto, and all the soul searching I’m doing, but it was boring me to try to write it, so I’m thinking it would be boring to read. Maybe another time…

Today was my first time back at the Drop-In Centre in pretty much a month. It was good to be back. At one point, a man farted really loudly when he walked by. “Oops,” he said. I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed anything, but the man continued. “I can hear that asshole talkin’ shit behind my back again.”

* * *

Completely unrelated, this week I went through a bunch of photos from a shot about a year ago. And I found this picture, which didn’t make the final edit, but did make a shortlist. Suddenly I love it.

Clearly I am dumb. Or a really bad editor. Probably both.

On Friday morning, I met a woman named Maria. Here is the result:

(Fingers crossed it doesn’t break my blog.) It’s my first time editing audio and sequencing with images, so apologies for all the roughness. I used Audacity for the audio, and iMovie for putting it all together, and if you have any suggestions for how to do it better, I’m all ears (and eyes). And ultimately, I think I just had more audio than visual material, but I didn’t feel I could cut a major portion out. Maybe in time I will feel differently…

Before I went to this five-day workshop with Alec Soth, I thought the only reason someone would cry from a critique would be if the comments were completely unconstructive or if the person being critiqued had ego-based expectations of being told they’re wonderful. Even when I cried on Tuesday, I tried to blame other life-related stuff for the tears and emotion. But I was wrong. I don’t think I can put it into words, but it’s something about the fact that who we are feeds into our photography.

Anyways, this week was a breakthrough for me on many fronts, not just photographically. It’s the first time I’ve left my family for more than a day and been completely by myself. I did go to Nova Scotia without them in 2008 but I travelled with a friend to get there, and stayed with friends I already knew while I was there. This was also the first time I felt truly comfortable in Toronto. In the past I’ve felt anxious or overstimulated or just out of place there, but a lot of what I experienced of the city this week just felt really good. It was such a treat to spend time without a big To Do list, just going wherever the day took me. I don’t think I’ve had a day without a To Do list in possibly years.

And I haven’t even mentioned the photographic breakthroughs. I think I’ve been feeling a bit blocked and dissatisfied with my work lately, and I’ve barely shot anything since we got home from South Africa. Now I have a new approach… it was an approach I’d thought of doing before but it was never the right time to try it. And let’s face it: learning new tools can feel pretty destabilizing and decidedly unfun. Anyways, Alec forced me to try out two new tools, and I’m pretty excited. I’m hoping to put together a little multimedia thing to post here, but first I need to learn how to edit audio.

Alec Soth is a really great teacher. It seemed to me that he very quickly understood something of what each of us is trying for, and he helped us each along our own path. And he’s also just so charming and open and generous and seriously funny. A few of us hung out with him all Tuesday afternoon, having lunch and then going out to Ward Island, which I’d never been to before.

Here he is having a moment on the island. I didn’t want to disturb him.

On Friday afternoon, a few of us also tagged along with Alec to check out The Mechanical Bride at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, which had some of Alec’s work. It was the first time I’d seen his prints on the wall, and they are SO beautiful. Bonnie Rubinstein, Director and Editor of the Contact Festival, took us through the whole exhibition, and it was great to hear how she pulled it together. I learned so much in that tour. Soth is having a huge show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in September, and I’m seriously considering making a pilgrimage to see it. He’ll also be back in Toronto in October to give a lecture called “The Democratic Jungle,” which I won’t dare miss.

As human and down-to-earth as Alec Soth is, I really wish he’d smacked his lips or breathed through his mouth while eating or something; anything to temper my hero worship with some kind of irritation. But there was nothing. Even when we were all a little drunk on Friday night he was just lovely. Well — and funny, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy on all that.

He even signed my book with a sweet message.

This has been a once in a lifetime experience, maybe even life-changing. For me, it will certainly be photography-changing. If you’d asked me early Friday morning how the workshop was, I’d have said it was good but hard. I was still feeling ragged and confused, about photography and life, and I was a little disappointed to still feel such confusion. By 5 pm, everything had come together, and my answer had changed to the week being amazing. So what changed? It kinda feels like divine intervention. But I’ll leave the rest of that story for the multimedia piece… stay tuned.