peripheral vision

Wow. It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’ve just had a baby. I blinked and almost more than three months have passed (I’ve now been trying to write this post for more than two four weeks). Time has a different character with a new baby – it passes both quickly and slowly. Several hours can disappear when you meant to go out somewhere but somehow it just hasn’t happened between the feedings and sleeps and diaper changes. You can glance at your baby’s sleeping face and suddenly half an hour’s gone and you realize you completely lost track of whatever anyone in the room said or what happened on the tv. The days take on a sameness, so you can’t really remember whether a particular detail took place today or yesterday or last week. But that’s not what I wanted to blog about.

In the last couple of several weeks I’ve watched two three great documentaries on TVOntario, completely by accident. The first was about Lucian Freud. I wasn’t familiar with his work before, but I loved what I saw in the film. So much emotion in his portraits. The film was almost entirely interviews with his subjects, mostly ex-lovers and family, with some famous people thrown in. And they pretty much all talked about how long and physically grueling sitting for him was. One woman said she sat for three to four hours at a time, four to six nights a week for three months. That’s a lot of time to share quiet space with someone. His daughters talked about how it was pretty much their only chance to spend time with their father, which was why they kept doing it. I don’t know much about painting, but I bet that’s how he gets so much emotion in his paintings — because with so many hours of watching the sitter, it’s all there, and then some. Although you can’t put that amount of time into a single photograph, his process made me think of the process for long-term photography projects. When you make some images (or brush strokes) then check in with your subject and see whether the pictures fit then adjust with more pictures and so on until eventually you have a body of work that fits your subject.

I think it’s that checking in process that’s been missing from my projects until my derby girls project. Granted, the project isn’t really about derby at all, but I’ve been at it long enough now to see that the work I’ve produced so far still has holes. If you look at the work I’ve made so far, there are women or types or women missing from the project that are part of derby. But I’ve gone off on a tangent now.

The next was a documentary about Disfarmer. I have to confess I’ve never had much fascination with old studio portraits. No idea why, but it’s definitely a failing I should try to address. What I liked about the documentary was the differing views on his work. One collector said Disfarmer’s portraits “are like psychological bullets” that cut right through to the real person. Or something like that. Another man, who lives in the town Disfarmer lived and worked in, said he doesn’t see that at all, all he sees are people who are trying to follow what would surely have been Disfarmer’s instructions (due to the slow shutter speed) to hold very still and not to blink. Another commenter talked about how every single child in his photographs looks scared. I find myself leaning towards the latter reading, and I like photographs of people who look uncomfortable being photographed. I also don’t understand how someone can say a portrait pierces to the essence of a person, unless they know the essence of that person quite intimately. I’ve heard versions of that idea about other photographers, and I never quite understand it.

My favourite part of the documentary, though, was the speculation around the black lines that appear in his portraits made with a white background (most have a black background). Was it deliberate or accidentally? Was it just because there wasn’t enough light to use the black background and the white background needed tape to hold it together? Had he seen some of Mondrian’s work and liked it? Nobody knows. I like to think there was some practical reason for the lines being there, and he chose to work around them.

Yesterday I watched My kid could paint that. It’s about a four-year-old who took the art world by storm with her abstract expressionist paintings around 2005 and the controversy of whether she actually painted the paintings. As the parent of a five-year-old, I have a hard time believing that her father didn’t help at all – we often suggest different techniques for handling the paint or paper or whatever. Sometimes I give him ideas and he decides whether he wants to do it. And someone had to suggest she roll a background colour on and let it dry before applying more colours. A child might come up with that idea him/herself but I doubt they’d apply it so thoroughly. That said, I found myself less interested in whether she actually painted them herself and more disturbed by the way her father and his friend, a gallerist, pushed her paintings with very little thought as to the impact on her then and in the future. Especially the gallerist, who said outright that he hadn’t been able to be part of that art world until he started promoting Marla’s paintings. I also enjoyed the film’s meta-ness, with a number of people questioning the filmmaker directly as to his intentions and footage of him questioning himself.

I guess all this is to say that if you live in Ontario, you should keep your eye on TVO, especially on Thursday nights around 9 or 10. If you don’t live in Ontario, TVO does also have a lot of its documentaries online the Disfarmer one is there, although I can’t find the others).

This just in:
If you’ve been reading my reports of the TVO photography documentaries with envy, guess what?!? You can watch some of them online. So what should you watch first? The Mother Project fer sher. And I’m also happy about this because I missed Girl in the Mirror… woot! Now go forth and watch movies that are VERY hard to find from rental stores.
But first, here are some recent pictures of mine…

Thanks to TVO, I’ve now seen Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project and What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann.

In my explorations of motherhood and photography, I’ve mentioned Tierney Gearon here and there, but not in much detail. I was troubled by her work, but also felt that I hadn’t seen enough of it to comment on it. Today I discovered that you can actually see her pictures on her website. I don’t find it intuitive, but if you go to Exhibitions, you can select which exhibition you want to look at, then scroll through the pictures through arrow buttons on the images.

I watched The Mother Project halfway through, then stopped because I wanted to discuss it with my husband. So I got him to watch it all the way through with me. (Although, funnily enough we haven’t actually discussed it yet. Whatever. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.) Going into it, my vague feeling was that it’s kind of wrong to use your kids for your own expression, especially if you’re using them as a metaphor or archetype (as I touched on here). I’ve also always bristled at language around one’s children being one’s great work of art or one’s great project. Children are individuals too, not just products of their parents. Not only that, but I suspect that publishing pictures of your children naked makes them vulnerable, although to what I don’t really know.

Before watching the two documentaries, I probably would have put both Tierney Gearon’s and Sally Mann’s work into the category of using their kids as metaphors. Indeed, just before I stopped The Mother Project halfway through, Gearon was speaking to the camera about how her photography is her way or processing things and that sometimes she feels bad about it but that she doesn’t think it’s really hurting her children. The first time around, I thought “Yeah, right.” But once I finished watching the whole documentary, I’ve changed my mind.

I mean, mothers are people too.

I guess what I realized is that Gearon wasn’t really using her kids as metaphors. She was using photography as a way to express and process her own experiences, and given that her own mother is mentally ill, chances are her experiences and expressions are going to be strange. And there’s no doubt that her pictures are weird and disturbing. But they’re also fascinating and original, and I don’t really think she is damaging her kids by making them. (And from a practical standpoint, clothing can really interfere with universality, since it situates them in a specific time and place. And I suspect that great photographs need an element of universality to be great.)

Well, maybe she is, but that’s kind of what parents do, isn’t it? Parents wound and embarrass their kids, and often in ways they have no awareness of. And kids are pretty resilient.

I think the reason that Gearon’s and Mann’s work has been controversial is not because the children are naked or semi-naked. I think it’s because the work challenges our idealizations of childhood and family.

* * *

Around the same time, I checked out some videos on youtube of Jeff Mermelstein, a New York City street photographer that Donald Weber mentioned. (The video is in three parts.) In the first part, he says:

“I’m a voyeur. I’m not asking people if I can take their picture. Even if they’re on a public stage, I’m in a sense stealing something from them without asking them. [...] You couldn’t do the kind of photography I do if you spoke to the people before taking their picture. I myself feel no guilt about that. [...] I’m totally comfortable and cosy because I know I’m not trying to hurt anyone with the camera. It’s what I do, it’s how I respond to… people.”

Which got me to thinking.

All this time I’ve felt guilty for making pictures of other people, pictures that people might not like of themselves. Pictures that they might not want published. It’s kind of been my standard: would the subject be ok with this picture being published? My response to that guilt has been to be totally transparent with my subjects and turn it into a collaboration. But maybe that guilt is just a product of our culture’s obsession with image. Why should people have control over their image? What harm can really come out of having a less than flattering image of you published? I’ve already said that I’m not interested in making pretty pictures of people. And many, many photographers have talked about the tension between the photographer’s agenda and the subject’s, the challenge of getting behind the subject’s facade to capture something real.

So what do you think of all this?

* * *

PS TVO is showing The True Meaning of Pictures, which I blogged about last October I think, tonight at 10 p.m. Be sure to check it out if you can.

Also, So You Think You Can Dance (US) starts tonight. And finally, Fox renewed Dollhouse AND Castle, two of my new favourite shows. Yay!

Duuuude! Not only is the CONTACT festival website now live with 2009 details, but apparently TVO is running a concurrent month of photography documentaries! Yeehaw! I am so deleting the first season of So You Think You Can Dance Canada from my PVR for this. (And yes, I really am this pathetic.) They’re showing some great-looking films, including Tierney Gearon’s The Mother Project, which just yesterday (seriously!) I was thinking I might have to break down and buy, since it’s proving hard to rent.

If there are any long-time readers, you may recall that last year I had a decadent Mother’s Day all by myself in the Big Smoke, and went to a lecture with David Hurn AND an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s classical work. This year, I’m going to spend two Saturdays in a documentary photography workshop with Donald Weber, and I’m trying to find a way to spend one of those Sundays wandering around.

If I fall behind in blogging, then everything gets so jumbled up in my head that I can’t seem to compose a coherent post. So you’re going to get an extremely long, rambling, incoherent post.

On Saturday, I went the local youth drop-in centre, which has a gallery afternoon on weekends, before I started my volunteer shift at the (adult?) drop-in centre. The youth centre is run by Edward Pickersgill, whose name keeps popping up everywhere. He was the NDP candidate in (I think) the last provincial election (or maybe the one before that – at any rate I voted for him). He runs a housing resource centre as well as the youth centre, and he’s been advocating strongly for a youth shelter ever since June 2007 when the youth shelter closed suddenly and under strange circumstances. I’ve known his name for a long time, but I’ve never taken the time to match his name with his face – until a few months ago.

Rewind to October 2007: Outside the housing resource centre, which also had a drop-in program for youths, I saw some kids sitting on the sidewalk. I talked with them for a bit about the need for a youth shelter, and asked if I could take their picture.

I turned around and saw this:

Sometimes when I get excited by what I’m seeing, I yell inside my head, “Seriously?!?” like an intern in Grey’s Anatomy. Sometimes I just can’t believe I get to come upon scenes like this.

As I shot, I heard one of the kids call him Ed, but I didn’t think too much of it. After a couple frames, the man saw me and one of my shots shows this, me watching him watch me. I probably lowered my camera, and smiled and shrugged sheepishly, then turned and walked away, which is what I usually do when people bust me taking their picture.

Anyways, since then details have started to niggle on my mind to make me wonder if perhaps this was Ed Pickersgill. A few months ago, I googled him and found some photos that confirmed it was. I shot Ed Pickersgill without knowing it. I started to feel guilty, that I had this picture of a recognizable local figure, and he didn’t know I had it.

In December, I wanted to submit some photos to a newish gallery in town, along the theme of Guelph architecture. That picture of Ed immediately spang to mind, as he’s sitting in front of the grand old post office building, which is now used by the county I think. But what if it got accepted, and he saw it?

So I tracked him down on facebook and sent him a message, confessing that I’d taken his picture and did he want to see it? He did, and I think he loved it. He called it iconic and took me up on my offer of a print, which is why I went to the gallery afternoon last Saturday – to give him a print.

Which is a very long preamble to get to the point, a point that’s suddenly much more difficult to articulate than I expected. I’ve struggled with the ethics of photographing people on the street and publishing them online, mostly because I imagine people who aren’t involved in online communities being horrified at the thought of having their picture On The Internet. But I keep doing it, because I can’t not. It’s like a compulsion.

So hearing such praise from someone who didn’t choose in advance to collaborate with me in making a photograph… well, it just felt REALLY good.

Of course, since I shot that picture, my photography and my approach have evolved. I’m less interested in just shooting people, and more interested in interacting with them. In the beginning, I knew that I didn’t have the skills yet to make the photography a part of an interaction. Any attempt would have destroyed the image before it was even made. My self-consciousness would have translated to the person, and added to whatever self-consciousness the person brought all on their own. I had no idea how to make them comfortable.

* * *

Last weekend, Tony Fouhse touched on the subject of exploitation, and give a few nuggets of his process, how he works with the people he shoots: “I believe the art of what I do is in my encounter with the subject. The photograph is merely a document of that encounter.”

* * *

I remember at the portrait workshop I went to in July, standing with the camera up to my face, and being able to see the discomfort of my subject, but I was absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I froze up. I flailed about fruitlessly, saying stupid things like, “Pretend I’m not here.” or “Relax.” (Is there anything more stress-inducing than someone commanding you to relax?!?)

* * *

Going into the lemon pie shoot a couple weeks ago, I was nervous. How would I make my friend and her mother feel comfortable in front of the camera? What if I froze up again? I decided I just had to fake it. I had to pretend that I knew exactly what I was doing, and then just wing it and hope for the best. In the end, it wasn’t an issue anyways. There was only a moment of discomfort, and we all got past it.

* * *

I’m reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. I noticed it for its fantastic title, but it was the description that made me buy it. Nick Flynn was working in a homeless shelter when his father, who he’d never really known in person, showed up there, homeless. And I’m loving it. The writing is brilliant, and the themes of family, home and homelessness are right up my alley these days.

He keeps bringing up the notions of inside and outside. If you have no inside, no home, then outside IS your inside. It reminds me something Ruth Kaplan brought up in that July portrait workshop, when she said photographing people on the street, in public spaces, is fine. But it gets problematic when the person is homeless, because the street is their home, the public space is their private space.

A few quotes from the book:

“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.”

“Last night Mackie had a la-z-boy set up in Rat Alley, watching a television hotwired into a light pole. My father stepped into Mackie’s living room, checked out a couple minutes of play – can these still be called the glory days of the Bird? Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner – are you inside now or out? Position your chair before your television, take your walk, find your coffee, by morning it all will be gone – no inside no outside, no cardboard box no mansion, no birth no death, no container no contained, a Zen koan, a frikkin riddle. A garbage truck hauled the tv away, another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight. But a la-z-boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.”

“I drive slowly past a blanket shaped like a man – here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to mis. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal. Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again?”

“I see that I really don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m adrift, as the Buddhists say, on a river of forgetfulness. A hungry ghost.”

(Which brings me to another book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, which is accruing library fines big enough to buy it three times over while I try to write some kind of review about it. But I just don’t think it’s going to happen. So can I just tell you to read it? It’s that good and that important. A review quoted on the cover said that it should be required reading for anyone struggling with addiction or who loves someone struggling with addiction, but I think it should be required reading for anyone who can read.)

* * *

On Sunday night, I watched a documentary called Pardon my Postpartum.

Someone talked about how inappropriate psych wards are for treating mothers with severe postpartum depression, because they have to be separated from their babies. In the UK, apparently they’ve had maternal wards in hospitals for 40 years, where women and their babies are checked in as a pair, regardless of which one is actually receiving medical treatment.

One woman lost custody of her children when she checked into a hospital for treatment of her postpartum depression. I think her going to hospital coincided with the end of her marriage. When she came out of hospital, all her visits to her children had to be supervised. She said that felt way worse than the postpartum depression had ever felt.

Another woman prepared for the birth of her second or third child, after severe postpartum depression with her last baby, by developing a postpartum plan rather than the birth plan every other pregnant woman develops. In the plan, she identified friends she would feel comfortable calling on at the last minute for a meal, or a break. She decided in advance not to breastfeed so she could take whatever medication she needed to without worrying, and also so that anybody else could feed her baby.

Sometimes I wonder if I had mild postpartum depression, breastfeeding every two hours around the clock for months and months and months.

* * *

That night I dreamed I went to Malawi for five days (how crazy is a five-day trip to a place that takes 35 hours each way just to get there?!?) with my entire family: my son, my husband, my mother, my father, my sister and her husband and their daughter, even. The flight was fine, and we arrived in a very busy international airport. We had to be driven in a big bus to a resort, which the travel agency hadn’t told us about. I carried my son, while someone else had my passport, my wallet, phone numbers, everything. We got separated in the busyness, so that I was all alone with my son in a totally foreign place.

My best friend appeared out of nowhere (she’s currently IN Malawi, coincidentally), and told me she’d take me where I needed to go. My son was amazingly still in my arms, almost like a big baby. We rode escalators and got on subways and buses and all kinds of transportation, all amidst a crazy crowd. A man suddenly took a knife to my throat, and I prayed he wouldn’t notice my son, that my son would stay still and quiet. I didn’t care so much about my throat, only my son. The man left, and we carried on in our journey back to my family. Then another man held a gun to my head, and again, I prayed for my son to remain still and unnoticed. The man left because I had no money. And I just felt terrified by all the hazards I had to protect my son from with no resources and no community.

Later the next day, I realized with a jolt that my dream was quite the metaphor for postpartum depression and my fear of having another child.

Last night I mentioned to my husband that we only have a few weeks to go until our friends come home. “Our only friends,” he said.

“I started by painting and drawing and for me photography was a means of drawing and that’s all. Immediate sketch done with intuition, and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s your next picture. But life is very fluid. Well sometimes the pictures disappeared and there is nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, oh, please smile again, do that gesture again. Life is once, forever.”
~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

The lovely and generous Trina Koster lent me some photography resources, including The Decisive Moment: Photographs and Words by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It’s a short film made in 1973 with Cartier-Bresson’s still images and his voice over them. I loved it.

I had no idea about C-B’s roots in surrealism, although it makes sense now that I do. I also hadn’t seen his portrait of Ezra Pound (in the asylum, I imagine, although I don’t know) before, and I loved it. It really caught some of the mystery and madness I associate with Pound.

A few more gems from the film*:

“You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not a very easy thing. And the attitudes of people are so different in front of a camera. Some are embarrassed, some are ashamed, some hate to be photographed and others are showing off. You feel people very quickly. You see people naked through the viewfinder, you see them stripped naked, and it’s sometimes very embarrassing.”

“[With Pound,] I stood in front of him for maybe an hour and a half in utter silence. We were looking at each other in the eyes and I took maybe altogether one good photograph for possible and two which were not interesting. It’s about six pictures in an hour and a half, and no embarrassment whatsoever.”

“Ideas are very dangerous. You must think all the time but when you’re photographing you’re not trying to push a point to explain something, to prove something. You don’t prove anything. It comes by itself.”

“Life changes every minute. The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute. Death is present everywhere, as soon as we are born. It is a very beautiful thing the tragic, le tragique de la vie – what is tragic in life – because there is always two poles and one cannot exist without the other one. It is these tensions I am always moved by.”

“A camera is a weapon. You can’t prove anything but at the same time it is a weapon. [...] It’s a way of shouting the way you feel. I love life, I love human beings, I hate people also. You see, the camera, it can be a machine gun. It can be a psychoanalytical couch. It can be a warm kiss. It can be a sketch book, the camera. And even for me, that’s strictly my way of feeling, I enjoy shooting a picture, being present and it’s a way of saying yes, yes, yes. [...] There is no maybe. All the maybes should go to the trash because it’s very instant, it’s the presence, it’s a moment, its there. [...] Even if it’s something you hate…yes! It’s an affirmation…Yes!”

Speaking of affirmations, here is my son, from last week:

* Any inaccuracies are mine. I started with this source for a transcript, then cleaned up the grammar a bit.

I finally got my hands on Shelby Lee Adams: The True Meaning of Pictures, thanks to a very kind coworker with a zip (or something like that) membership. I watched it twice, I found it so thought-provoking. This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. But, as I’ve discovered, it’s a hard one to lay your hands on. None of the video rental stores in my town had it. If I didn’t have a friend with a zip membership, I would have had to buy it from amazon. So because it’s so hard to get and because it was so good, I’m going to attempt a real review of sorts here.

The central questions in the documentary seem to be: Does the work of Shelby Lee Adams perpetuate stereotypes of Appalachian people or challenge them? Are the subjects being exploited? To pursue answers to these questions, the film uses footage of photo shoots and interviews with Adams himself, academics, other photographers, and the people he’s spent 30 years photographing.

There are three main parts to the film. In the first part, we meet the Napier family, a family who lives very remotely and whose way of life is very similar to that of 100 years ago; the second part moves onto the religion of serpent handlers and preacher Wayne Riddle; and the third part introduces us to the Childers family, a family with three adult children who are developmentally challenged, and three other adult children who continued to live in the family home with their spouses.

Towards the end of the first part on the Napiers, Adams says, “People say I photograph the worst. I don’t photograph the worst. And with the Napiers… I don’t photograph them anymore.” When Adams started photographing the Napiers, there were 16 children in the family; since then, 12 of them have died.

The photography critics and academics in the film all seem very concerned with how the photographs are presented or labelled, whether they’re presented as documentary or fine art. They say some of his work would be acceptable in a fine art context but as documentary it’s far too troublesome. In particular, they were concerned that Adams bought the pig that the Napiers slaughtered in “The Hog Killing” and built the entire scene around his personal vision. The Napiers were far too poor to buy a pig.

The critics said that the picture essentially looks like a document but because Adams constructed the scene it isn’t. Personally I don’t see any problem with that; I thought the myth of the photo as document was debunked a long time ago. Even images that the critics might accept as “documentary” are not objective records — I thought that was common knowledge. Besides, the Napiers got to eat a pig they couldn’t afford on their own.

I have to say, the critics come off looking rather like assholes. Most of what A.D. Coleman had to say sounded reasonable right up until he said that ultimately, these are people he would not want to meet in a dark alley at night. He also said that Adams’s subjects are not educated enough, visually, to read what was really happening in the photos they helped create. His implication that Adams is exploiting his subjects reminded me of Pieter Hugo’s comment that there’s always an element of condescension in the view that people are being exploited.

Another critic, a sociologist I think, ends his part of the film saying, “This is deploying so many stereotypes that simply reaffirm that the poverty of the Appalachian is that person’s own fault; after all it’s got to do with centuries of violence, inbreeding, moon-shining, laziness and bad genes and bad socialization. I don’t have to worry about it. They’re doing it to themselves.”

By the end of the movie, two things are clear to me; even more so on the second viewing. One, Adams truly loves the people he photographs. He celebrates and mourns and feasts with them. The photos are a collaboration. And, two, what others see in the photos is more the result of what’s behind their eyes than what’s in front of them.

The best example of this is a woman who reports that she was once poor, but she’s pulled herself up, she’s gone to school and she’s not poor anymore. She says she’s just grateful that nobody took a picture of her when she was poor and showed it all over America. She goes on to say that Adams photographed her sister, in this picture. She says Adams disgraced her family with that picture, and she wonders why he couldn’t just take a pretty picture?

When I look at that picture? I see a beautiful image of a beautiful girl in beautiful light. For me, it’s pretty much the least troubling picture in the movie. But when the older sister looks at it, she sees a dirty, underfed girl with uncombed hair standing in the broken-down doorway of a house that must surely be a mess inside. I can only believe that for that woman, her background is something to be ashamed of, so all of what she sees in that picture is shameful. But I believe that Adams doesn’t see anything shameful. I believe he sees, and shows – as much as he’s able – dignity and mutual respect.

The first time I watched the film, I found Adams’s work troubling. I didn’t know what to make of it. Who were these people? What caused their scars? What are they saying (their accents were definitely a barrier for me)? But the second time around, I understood more of what they were saying, and instead of noticing their differences from me, I noticed their similarities. We’re all just living: having babies and eating and laughing and grieving and all the rest of it.

This seems the essence of Adams’s last word in the film: “I’m not trying to objectively stand back and say look at this. I’m subjectively engaging and involved. I’m pushing you, the viewer, and challenging you. That’s why I’m in there with the camera six inches away from Selena’s face. I think you need to he confronted with that. By getting in there with the camera, by creating some distortions, I’m hoping to make everyone think. What is our job here as a human being? Stop making judgments and experience life. I’m experiencing this environment. I’m trying to share with you, in an intimate way, that experience.” For me, he’s succeeded.

* * *

Just as I was finishing this post, and trying to find verification that I’d gotten Adams’s last quote right, I found this article, which is a far better discussion. And this one, which draws very different conclusions from mine.