peripheral vision

[updated below] I read a thought-provoking article this morning about child pornography laws and photography involving children. It’s a long one, but entirely worth reading.

I do think there is another, larger and probably more difficult question around artists using their children in their art, whether paintings, literature, or photography. Is it exploitation? I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. But I also think that if you want to express something about motherhood, parenthood, or childhood in our culture, at some point or other, your kid will come into the picture, literally or figuratively.

Photography seems particularly prone to exploitation. Last weekend, I watched Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, and he says a few times that he is in control. The photographer is always in control. The people he photographed sometimes felt his portraits were cruel and unforgivable, and he himself wondered – retrospectively – if perhaps photographing his dying father was an act of hostility.

Heather Morton Art Buyer linked to Barbara Crane the other day, who apparently paid her children 35 cents an hour to sit for her, with the agreement that they would not be identifiable in the photographs of human forms. I find this fascinating. The other day, I also read this blog post on a similar topic.

I don’t know what to think of Tierney Gearon’s work. I haven’t seen enough of it, and I haven’t yet watched The Mother Project (which, incidentally, TVO is showing on Thursday, May 7, at 10 pm as part of the Contact Festival). But my initial response to what I have seen is troubled.

I don’t think it’s right to assume or take it for granted that my child belongs all to me, as raw material for my artistic expression. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to feature your children in your art either. As I said in my comment at Elizabeth Fleming’s, I’m starting to think that as long as you’re aware of the potential for exploitation, as long as you’re a little bit troubled by that potential, it’s probably ok?

This seems like an appropriate time to give you a sneak peak at the work I’m putting together from the first two years of my son’s life (which I first mentioned here a while ago). I’m alternating between two working titles, “Two-powered” and “Motherhood and Apple Pie.” If you have a smart way to put those ideas together, please share.

Edited to add: Suzanne Revy blogged on the very same topic, only far more eloquently than I did. Which is interesting, because when I wrote my post yesterday, I had meant to include a link to the recent interview on nymphoto with Revy, but I forgot before I hit publish.

Last week, I discovered Elinor Carucci’s recent photographs of herself and her twins. I love them, and I love that she calls it “A limited glimpse into my most recent body of work — my children.” Once you see them, you’ll see the emphasis on body. (Go look at them, but they’re probably not safe for work.) I first discovered Elinor Carucci’s work last fall when her work was exhibited on Women in Photography. I was transfixed by her images then, and they stayed with me long after I stopped looking at them over and over. Her new work is no exception. For me, they present the sheer physicality of motherhood in a way you can’t ignore. And they’re challenging to look at; they really make you question our ideas about motherhood. I especially love the one where she’s standing naked, soon after giving birth with her c-section incision still covered with gauze and a linea nigra (or whatever it’s called – I can’t remember anymore) striping down her belly, her engorged breasts standing out above eye level like a porn star’s. Somehow that really speaks to me about how oversexualized breasts are in our culture.

A few days after seeing Carucci’s new work, I saw this blog post, which wonders why it seems that only thin, conventionally beautiful women do nude self-portraits, and they cited Carucci as one of those. I have noticed that trend too, although more in the context of flickrites’ work, where photographers seem to be capitalizing on their conventional beauty. But I see Carucci’s work differently. Her beauty isn’t the subject of her self-portraits, and in some of her pictures she even looks a bit freakish. For me, that’s part of the appeal of her images, that willingness to show herself in less than flattering ways.

I went to a portraiture workshop today that was all about making people look pretty in pictures. I thought it would be good for me to learn these techniques, so I can employ them when I want to, but after a day of learning rules and formulas, I’m just not that into it. I remember at the workshop with Ruth Kaplan I went to last summer, there was at least one professional portrait photographer attending. And Kaplan commented on how awkward it must be to photograph the person who is paying you.

That said, I’m really beginning to doubt myself. Tonight I saw a quote where a photographer remembered being asked by his teacher, whether his photographs were interesting enough to get him to leave his naked girlfriend in bed to go out and make them. The pictures I make at the drop-in centre would get me out of bed to make them. But I’m worried the images aren’t achieving my intention. I want to make portraits that make you wonder, about the person you’re looking at and their experiences, but also about the interaction that went on between me and the person, about what drew me to them (or them to me). That said, I can’t control how people see my pictures or the people in them, and as I realized from The True Meaning of Pictures, what you see in a photo is informed more by your own mind and preconceptions than by what’s in the photograph or the photographer’s mind.

Last week was a good week for me finding inspiring photographers. Nymphoto did an interview with KayLynn Deveney, whose work I hadn’t seen before. I can’t wait to buy her book, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings. She made pictures of her neighbour, then had him caption the photos in a notebook. So the book shows her selection of images, and his captions in his own beautiful handwriting.

I also found her other portfolio, Edith and Len, fascinating, as it combines her pictures of an elderly couple in their retirement home room with her own introspective journal entries about the process of documentary photography. I want to pick out my favourite bits from her journal entries, but I think it’s better just to go through the whole portfolio and experience it yourself. I will say that I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling some ambivalence about photographing people.

[insert thoughtful and insightful conclusion here]

Can I just say how much I love the Internet? 10 years ago, the only ways to learn about photography were through expensive courses or magazines and books, which added up to almost as expensive as courses. For a poor student like me, those weren’t really options, especially since I never wanted to be a commercial or professional photographer, at least not in the models that I saw available. Libraries had books too, but the collections weren’t exactly cutting edge, and I ran through them pretty quickly. And while I believe that looking at photographs is one of the best ways to improve your own, it’s not a great way to learn the technique or craft behind them.

This is something I’ve only learned with hindsight. I guess you can’t know what you don’t know. Back then, I had no idea of the possibilities. For example, I thought the only way to use artificial lights was in a studio, and I had no desire to work in a studio (it helps that I didn’t have access to one anyways). Until the past year, when I started reading Strobist and Joe McNally, I had no idea of just how much you can do with a small flash (or several). I also had no idea until recently that so many of the photographs I’ve seen whose beauty has made me gasp – portraits in particular – often used small off-camera flashes.

I also had no real concept of a “body of work” until the past year. I’ve pretty much always just shot for the single image, based on what interests me in any given moment or place. I was aware of photo essays, but I never really had much interest in them; in my mind, creating a photo story requires you to choose lesser images that move the narrative along over great images that don’t move it, and I’m just not that into compromise.

When I first started thinking in terms of a body of work, I thought it was something the photographer had to set out to do in advance, and that approach made me really uncomfortable. I have become more comfortable with exploring my intentions, and I’ve even enjoyed the exploration, but I’ve also discovered – through the Internet – that many photographers aren’t consciously aware of their intentions until they’ve shot most or all of their project. I’ve seen a number of interviews with photographers about a project or body or work, who said they started out on the project not really knowing what they were doing or why, but they trusted that they would figure it out eventually. This makes me feel much better.

* * *

I’ve spent the last week or so going through all the photos I’ve made since 2006. I was doing it for something else, but in the process I discovered all kinds of photos that at the time I thought were rejects but that now are quite interesting. When I collected them all together, I made my husband sit through a slideshow of them, and at the end we both concluded that they were pretty dark. They present a pretty bleak picture of where I live. Which is strange because we don’t live in a bleak place, and I’m actually pretty happy with my life. I wondered what was going on in them. I’ve been worrying at that question throughout the week too, already kind of knowing the answer, but unable to put it into words.

Remember how I wanted to find a way to represent motherhood through photography without using pictures of my kid? Well I think I figured out how. Not only that, but I think I’ve already done it. That’s what I was doing for the last two years.

All these pictures show undervalued and overlooked things and places: back doors and alleys, garbage cans, ripped old posters, graffiti, peeling paint, crumbling bricks, strange things abandoned in the river – you get the drift. I think I was drawn to make those images to express my experience of motherhood, how our culture both undervalues and overlooks the hard and important work of mothering. I think that could explain why I’m also so drawn to photographing people I meet at the drop-in centre.

Also with the benefit of hindsight, going over the last two and a half years of photos, I discovered a shift in my photography, a shift that really began early in 2008 – coincidentally enough, right around the time of my son’s second birthday. There are many reasons for that shift, I’m sure, but I’m equally certain that one of them has something to do with the shift from mothering an infant to mothering a toddler-slash-preschooler. It’s still intense, but I’m more confident and have more resilience, thanks to free evenings after about 8:30, more uninterrupted and consistent sleep, and more freedom physically. This weekend I went through my journal from the same period, and found the same shift in my words also right around my son’s second birthday.

I’m pretty excited to discover that I already have a body of work sitting right in front me, and that it’s reached a kind of closure (although I know that being a mother will always be integral to my photography). Now I just need to edit it.

I think I’m a little bit in love with South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky. I first discovered his work a few months ago, via JM Colberg. I was immediately drawn in by how he taught photography to the prisoners he photographed and got their work exhibited as well as his own. And of course, anyone who knows me knows I have a thing for South Africa and its people (my husband is South African too and almost all his family is still there). Subotzky reminds me of my husband’s cousins, who are smart and articulate and so much more engaged in the world around them than the young people I meet here in Canada. For all the country’s problems (and yes there are many and they are big), I think there’s something amazing going on there, culturally.

Anyways, Colberg published an interview with Subotzky the other day, and it made me fall a little bit in love. Every word of his responses made me think. In particular, I liked how he responded to Colberg’s question here:

“JC: I don’t know whether one would have the same impression living in South Africa, but looking from the outside – and from far away – it seems like South Africa had such a bright moment of hope when apartheid was dismantled and when Nelson Mandela was elected President, and so much has gone wrong since then, for whatever reason. Do you see it as your responsibility (if that’s a word you’d be comfortable with) to record what’s going on? To preserve this moment in time, maybe to foster some awareness and change?

MS: I am not sure if I believe that photographers can effectively take responsibility for such things. I do believe in the power of bearing witness, but I see it more as responsibility to ourselves – that we each have a responsibility to try and make ourselves as conscious as possible. Looking at the world around me through photography has become my way of doing that. While I am very happy that I can share images with others and try and show them things that they haven’t taken in, that isn’t the primary motivation for doing what I do.”

And later: “I think it is great to show people things they choose or are conditioned to ignore, and I admire those who can effectively do that. But I do have a real problem with the assumption that photographers can change the world by telling these “truths”. Some photographers have precipitated amazing change with their images. But it cannot be assumed – especially when the medium for this “preaching” is the traditional western media. As for me, I want to do many things with my work… sometimes I do want to try and show people things that they ignore, sometimes I do want to make a political point, but sometimes I also just want to express myself and try and qualify my experiences.”

* * *

My husband’s granny, my son’s only living great-grandparent, is in a hospital in Cape Town, and the prognosis isn’t good. I’ve had the good fortune to meet her twice, both times with the awareness that it could be the last time, and yet her voice is so strong and her eyes so clear, that part of me didn’t really believe it. I wish we could be there, especially since her recent hearing loss has made a phone conversation with her virtually impossible.

* * *

The other night, I discovered Katharina Bosse’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother” series (also through JM Colberg). I find her work really interesting, and as I’ve already written here, I’m particularly interested in explorations of motherhood. Apparently, a professor of photojournalism dismissed her work in a German publication as “irrelevant and a calculated provocation” (Colberg’s translation — I can’t speak or read German so I trust his representation). I find that statement pretty telling: motherhood is irrelevant – and yet highly prescribed – in the western world, and any attempt at making that experience central or subverting those presciptions is a calculated provocation.

Being a mother myself, Bosse’s images don’t really trouble me, but I can see how they might trouble people who aren’t mothers. Motherhood is such a physical experience, and I think our culture has a deep discomfort with and resistance to acknowledging that physicality. That is what her photos made me think about, that physicality, and this morning, when I went back to her site to link to it here, I noticed her artist statement, which I love (especially since it says pretty much the same thing but much more eloquently):

“After living in New York for six years, I moved to Germany and became pregnant. Nothing in my career as a photographer and artist had prepared me for this experience. Not only were the physical demands of carrying and caring for the babies demanding. It was a forced change from everything I had learned so far: individuality, ambition and workaholism. I felt like a teenager again, changing rapidly into a new person, not knowing the outcome. I started to look for articles, and images about this process and found lots of advice, but very few actual descriptions of the unsettling shift in identity I was experiencing. And so, over the course of four years, I brought to life two children and eight photographs. I felt compelled to undress (or dress up) and create images of motherhood I had not seen before. I gave up control of the shutter release, and got in front of the camera to extract a knowledge only my body could tell.”

* * *

Now here’s where I came to a dilemna. I discovered that another body of Bosse’s work is very similar to a project I’ve just begun (which I’m not ready to blog about yet). I only glanced at a few photos of that other series before I decided not to look any more. If I end up doing the same kind of project, at least I could say I hadn’t seen her work or been influenced by it. But I’ve always felt strongly that influence is good. I remember when I wrote poems in university, getting royally irritated on more than one occasion when people declared themselves poets (there goes that noun thing again), and in the same breath announced that they never read anyone else’s poetry, lest they be influenced. I still think that’s crap. The only way to be good at something is to be influenced by practitioners who are better than you. So I think I just have to see this as the opportunity it is and dive in.

Lately I’ve been investigating motherhood and photography; not representations of motherhood so much as photography by mothers where their motherhood is the subject. If you google “motherhood and photography,” you get a whole lot of portrait photographers marketing to mothers, not so many photographs from mothers. That tells me that there is something about photography that relates to motherhood, but it also tells me that there is a gap.

Along my recent web travels, one of my first stops was a post by Heather Morton on the subject saying that motherhood is the new black in photography, and giving three photographers’ work as evidence. (Edited to add this link to another photographer exploring motherhood.) Let’s hope so.

Indeed, there seems to be more evidence to support that notion. A couple of weeks ago, I discovered this film, which is yet to be released on dvd, so I haven’t actually seen it. But it looks very promising. Something about the words, “Who does she think she is?” grabbed me from the sidebar of one of the blogs I read, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get my eyes on it. On the surface, the problem of balancing motherhood with art seems analagous to balancing motherhood with a career. Except that I think art is viewed as optional at best and self-indulgent at worst, definitely something that should be sublimated beneath motherhood.

I’m also interested in checking out:

• The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power
• Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project
• In Their Mothers’ Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children, which seems to be out of print.

* * *

When I read Between Interruptions: 30 Mothers Tell the Truth about Motherhood last year, I started every new essay hoping find a story like mine. I see lots of stories of women who lose themselves in maternity, who have to redefine themselves in new terms that are compatible with motherhood, and not just in that book. And I don’t mean to deny their stories, not at all; there are as many experiences of motherhood as there are mothers, and we need to respect them all. But when that is pretty much the only experience I hear, I wonder. Am I selfish? Am I doing something wrong?

My experience of motherhood hasn’t been defined by sacrifice or losing myself; if anything I’ve rediscovered myself and my passion. Before I became a mother, I was a drone. I went to work and came home and watched tv or read escapist fiction. But being a mother made me want to live meaningfully, or at least pursue meaning. Or something like that.

* * *

Ever since I got back into photography after my son was born, I’ve viewed my pictures of my son, our home, our family, as a silly maternal exercise, a duty, less serious or important than my other photos. But now I’m looking at the photos from a political perspective. This is life. This is domesticity. Why shouldn’t it be a serious subject of photography?

(I can’t help but think, though, of the photographer who kept bringing his prints to a mentor, even the image that the mentor declared bad year after year. The one the photographer had to climb a mountain to make.

Maybe I’m not really in any position to judge the merit of my domestic photos. Maybe, when I look at pictures of my son, our family, I see the mountain I climbed, the mountain I’m still climbing.)

* * *

Our experience of motherhood doesn’t equal our children. And making photographs of our children isn’t the same as finding a way to photograph motherhood. I don’t know the answer, but I’m interested in looking for one. So here are some of my recent efforts:

No idea how this will turn out, but I’m thinking of calling it “Domessticity” or “Do-mess-stick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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