peripheral vision

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.

I finally had a chance to explore the CONTACT Festival website, and I’ve got a list of exhibitions I want to see. I have no idea whether I’ll actually have any time and/or energy outside of the workshop activities next week to see them, but I figure it’s good to try. One of the first exhibitions I want to see is at Gallery 44 with contemporary African photography.  (Huh. It appears Gallery 44 has a Flash-based site, so I can’t link directly to their description of the exhibition. So instead I’m linking to the page on CONTACT’s website.)

Right around the corner from Gallery 44, Jodi Bieber’s new work, Real Beauty, is being exhibited alongside Lauren Greenfield and Zed Nelson at the CONTACT Gallery. I think Jodi Bieber was one of the first South African photographers I discovered online, shortly after starting this space.

I’m also looking forward to Meera Margaret Singh’s show at the Gladstone. I think the Gladstone has a whole bunch of exhibitions on several floors, so it’s definitely worth a trip.

If I can, I’d also like to check out Finbarr O’Reilly’s work, and group shows, Subjective, In Her Presence, and REWind if I can.

So that’s pretty much it. I have to work today, then tomorrow I go off to the Big Smoke, sans family. I’m alternating between fantasies of luxurious evenings of solitude in my hotel room and fears of total loneliness without my fam. Wish me luck!

Well, I think I’ve finally settled on what could well by the final edit of Where will I spend my happy days?

So here it is:

Please excuse the little demo label that popped up on the first image… I decided to try out a free demo of Soundslides to make it, and I must say I’m impressed. The interface is simple and intuitive, and it did exactly what I wanted. Embedding it here turned out to be more complex than I’d expected, but everything else was so simple, I’m not sure I can complain.

In other news, Deep Sleep magazine has just published Issue 4 Memory, and my work (Many Scars) is in it.

You know that scene in the movie Annie when they get her back from the orphanage and everyone starts dancing around Daddy Warbuck’s huge mansion, singing, “We got Annie! We got Annie!” Well, I’m doing that inside my head. Only my words are, “I got in! I got in!”

I got into the Magnum Workshop in Toronto with Alec Soth!

How much do I admire Alec Soth? A lot, a lot.

When I was 20 or so, I loved Al Purdy’s poems. In fact, I loved his poems from the first time I read them when I was around 16. When I was 20, he was still my favourite living (then) poet. He had a reading here at The Albion Hotel, my local watering hole, and I just couldn’t believe my luck in getting to hear him read. Then I got an opportunity to go to the Harbourfront Tribute to him (I think it was 1996? 1997?), and I didn’t think it would get better than that. And then I got to go interview him at his home in Sidney, BC.

This is just like that.

Only this time, I won’t fuck it up.

Eek! Not only am I going to hear Alec Soth talk (presumably about his approach and experiences), but I’m going to meet him. I’ll probably even get to carry on an actual conversation with him. I wonder if he’ll sign my book?

So we’re home now, waking up at 4 in the morning and falling asleep before a half-assed dinner. I’m working on my edit of work from Woodstock, and I think what I’ve learned is that I can’t do the kind of work I want to do in a week or two. This is a good thing to learn. Unfortunately, it means that my work form Woodstock feels unfinished and disparate. If I was able to work on it over months, I think I would have figured out the right thread. I may still figure it out from home. In the meantime, here are a few random shots.

And a few family/bricolage shots…

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!