peripheral vision

The last time we went to South Africa in January 2007, we decided we would fer sher go back in the first half of 2010. Part of me even hoped we might be go back before 2010 too, but it hasn’t happened. And now 2010 is approaching fast, and I’m starting to think we might not go back for a while more. The trip is just so long and gruelling, and the thought of making it with a 4-year-old makes me want to stay home. It’s also expensive, and now that I’ve been entertaining thoughts of going back to school, and now that my sister and her family are moving to the Dominican Republic for three years, I’m starting to wonder when we might actually get back to SA. And that makes me very sad.

Last weekend we watched District 9. It was such a treat to hear all the authentic South African accents, and see the real landscape around Johannesburg. I read a review that talked about how the movie is an allegory for apartheid, or the holocaust or any other major oppression in history. But I think it’s more specific than that. It seems very much set in post-apartheid South Africa, although there are certainly A LOT of echoes from apartheid. (The title itself is a reference to District Six, which was once a thriving multi-cultural neighbourhood in Cape Town, until the Group Areas Act designated it as whites-only, and all the buildings that belonged to non-whites were razed, and all the non-whites were moved elsewhere. The area pretty much remained a wasteland, although the government is building new houses there.) Also, there were just so many South Africanisms and inside jokes – so my husband told me because a lot of them went over my head – that I think although the movie has wide appeal, it’s really directed at South Africans.

A few weeks ago at the uni library, I found some books on David Goldblatt’s photography, which I first saw in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. One of his colour shots was hanging, of a domestic worker sitting in her employer’s house, and I just loved it.

Anyways, one of the books, David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, features an interview with him, critical essays about his work, other essays about South African arts generally, and of course his photos. Lots and lots of his photos. This particular quote no doubt influenced my experience of District 9:

“After about 1968, I realized that the kind of work I was doing was so internal to South Africa, so steeped in our obsessions and perversions, that without involved explanations it meant very little to outsiders. My dialogue, to the extent that it went beyond myself, was with fellow South Africans. My dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgements. This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite.”

Here are some more quotes from the interview that are still rolling around in my head:

On living in apartheid:

“[...] over time it grew evident that the real conflict was [...] how to square one’s conscience with being a white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life. Was one to become an activist, a saboteur, a worker in the underground? I had neither the conviction nor the guts for that. [...] Once I became seriously engaged in it, photography became my way of being politically active. It was a political act. I must be careful to tell you, though, that I would not allow my photographs to be used for political purposes. [...] I came to learn that the messages that editors, propagandists, and political bodies wished to attach to my pictures rarely corresponded with my own concerns. I took these photographs because I was engaged in a dialogue – between the subject and me.”

On his approach to photography

“I came to realize that I was not cut out for news work. Editors wanted photographs of events, and I saw that as a photographer I wasn’t all that interested in events. I was and am far more engaged by the states of being that lead to events, by the conditions of society rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions.”

“My photography became a political inquiry, an interest in real things. My concern was not to make “interesting photographs” but to probe the immediate world I lived in.”

“Long ago I tried to make pictures like those that came from Europe, soft and beautifully modulated. It used to break my heart – I could never get my pictures to look like that. Then, in 1961, I realized that it had to do with light. We have a lot of it in South Africa, and it is often sharp and harsh. So instead of fighting our light, I began to enjoy it and to work with it. I photographed from within rather than as if I were visiting from somewhere else.

“At the same time, my work became more oblique. I sought out irony and tried to impregnate pictures with a sense of it, for it often revealed the nuances and complexities of our life in South Africa.”

More on apartheid and his sense of place

“It was impossible to live in this country and be separate from the system. You couldn’t do it. The system penetrated every aspect of life here. [...] You were complicit simply by being here. By breathing the air. In living ordinary decent lives, paying the rent, sending kids to school, taking jobs, catching trains, blacks were complicit in their own oppression, and whites, even if they opposed the system, by living within it were complicit in the subjection of blacks. Unless, that is, they were activists prepared to go to prison and die for their beliefs.”

And finally, he had some comments about his methods. He says this about working in Soweto during apartheid: “A white mane in those places at the time attracted a great deal of attention, from both the populace and the security police. I developed an approach that usually disarmed both. I unambiguously declared my presence and purpose, which was to photograph ordinary life. I adopted a slow and formal photography, no shooting from the hip, the camera invariably on a tripod, everything upfront and transparent. Ordinary onlookers soon got bored, while the police seemed not to know what to make of the sheer banality of what I was doing.”

Later on in the book are essays by JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, among others. Nadine Gordimer went out with Goldblatt on some of his shoots and she had this to say: “When one looks at some of the astonishing revelatory Goldblatt photographs it is in immediate response difficult to believe the fact that he never takes photographs of people surreptitiously, except in the anonymity of the crowd. Unthinkable for him to do a Walker Evans, hiding a camera between his coat buttons on a New York subway train. Sometimes when working with him, particularly in the Transkei among rural people, I found myself amazed and humbled by the way in which he would not seize his perceived wonderful moment because the subject whose image presented itself did not want to be photographed. Goldblatt always asked permission, and if he was refused, gave thanks – his respect for the decision – and walked on.

“I saw later, in the evidence of the photographs he did take how superficial as well as ethically doubtful my regret for “missed” images was. I think of the old woman in her mud home; her contemplated grace of ignoring the process of photography she had consented to. Susan Sotag quotes Brassai saying he didn’t want to catch subjects off guard in the hope that something special would be revealed of them. For Goldblatt, like Brassai, that something special in the subject doesn’t have to be caught off guard; if it is there, it is Goldblatt’s challenge to himself to find it even when the subject is “on guard”. He does not use the camera as a licence, freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people he photographs.”

I’ve added a new gallery to my site. Long-time readers might remember my post about photography and homelessness and postpartum depression, which included a quote from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City:

“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.”

That quote has been rattling around my head ever since, and I’ve decided to use it as a statement for this latest collection of images. Together, they make a sort of meditation on the idea of home and the boundary between inside and outside.

* * *

I’ve been reading Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and he says something that I think is also relevant here:

“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”

* * *

Inside out

“I have no real argument against so-called set-up photography, at least as a process. [...] photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don’t speak to me of the document; I don’t really believe in it, particularly now. A picture’s not the world, but a new thing.

“That said—too briefly—my argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the IMAGINATION of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis.”

~ Tod Papageorge on Alec Soth’s old blog
“Literature especially has an interesting relationship [to] photography – to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging. That weird practice between staging and finding is very much like a Ray Carver (story). You think, “he’s seen this,” but he’s taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You’re riffing off of reality.”

~ Larry Sultan on AMERICAN SUBURB X

What’s the Jackanory has a fantastic studio tour-slash-interview with Phillip Toledano up. I think I’ve developed a bit of a crush on Mr. Toledano, truth be told. First, I had no idea he was British, and I’ve always had a soft spot for a nice accent. Somehow from his pictures I expected him to be brasher, like a stereotypical New Yorker or something, with darker hair and a wider middle. But apparently he’s actually cute and charmingly self-deprecating, and I was especially pleased to hear him say that he thinks most of his pictures are total shit for at least a 36-hour period. Anyways, go watch it. 

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!

This is probably not something I should admit here, but I didn’t really know who Annie Leibovitz is until that video of her shooting the Queen made the rounds on the web a while back (just google it if you’re interested). I’d heard her name of course, but when I heard it, my brain exchanged her name with Anne Geddes and made me cringe involuntarily. But I know very well who she is now, and I’ve seen enough of her pictures to know that it bears not even the slightest resemblance to the babies in pea suits pictures.

Last weekend I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s At Work, and I’m quite enjoying it. Halfway in, here are a few things that I’d like to share:

“I was in awe of Robert Frank. Here was the great master. I couldn’t believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, ‘You can’t get every picture.’ That was comforting advice. You do miss things. [...] Robert Frank didn’t seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.”

“I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, of course. I was just throwing up a light haphazardly and hoping the picture would come out.”

“It was a popular picture, and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. [...] There are different criteria for magazine covers. They’re simple. The addition of type doesn’t destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.”

“I’m always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone. A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.”

CBC Radio 2 just mentioned a conversation that supposedly took place between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Cohen reportedly asked Dylan how long it took him to write “Tambourine Man,” to which Dylan replied that he jotted it down in 10 minutes. When Dylan asked how long it took Cohen to write “Suzanne,” the answer was four years!

CBC is working on Obama’s Playlist, the 49 songs from north of the 49th parallel that best define our country to the incoming president. I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with the songs on Section A: “Bobcaygeon” and “Wheat Kings” by Tragically Hip – which although I made a big show of hating when I was in university just to be contrary and as a soapbox from which to rant about how underplayed the Rheostatics were, I’ve been enjoying the Hip with new ears in recent weeks; “Northern Wish” by my beloved Rheostatics, although I would have chosen “Record Body Count,” Northern Wish is still among their best; k.d. lang’s version of “Hallelujah,” which I still haven’t heard but which is reportedly amazing (and which, just in case you didn’t know, was written by our own Leonard Cohen); “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen; “Helpless” by Neil Young; and representation from Feist, k-os, and of course Stompin’ Tom Connors. All in all, a pretty cool little thing. So if you’re Canadian, get over there and vote! You have until this Friday.

* * *

I’m beginning to think something’s wrong with me. I’ve always had a habit of listening to certain songs or artists over and over again, until my husband stops letting me near itunes. But it’s different right now. Not only am I playing all our Chad VanGaalen songs over and over again, but they play themselves in my head over and over again, so that nothing else will do. I just have to listen to more and more. Which has nothing to do with anything really, except that his songs have been playing in my mind or ears while I shoot, edit and process my photos. So how about you listen to my current favourite song while you finish this post?

On Saturday, I collaborated with my friend and her mother to photograph the making of a lemon pie. Sadly, I had to go before the meringue got made, so I didn’t get to see the final product, but another time… here are some of my favourite shots:

I totally want to shoot her some more with the horse head with a more thought-out flash and no wire… She seemed a bit self-conscious at this point (I think I squeezed off more frames than she ever expected), and when I asked she admitted she was a bit embarrassed by the attention. So I said I’d shoot the horse instead, to which she replied, “No don’t shoot the horse!”

And now for what I think is my most favourite image of all, although I might want to process it a bit more:

“Sometimes you’re a fly on the wall, sometimes you’re a chameleon, sometimes you’re a – mud wrestler, you know, you can’t hide anything.”

Larry Towell, “The World from my Front Porch“

I am not a winter person. As far as I’m concerned, winter is something to be survived, not enjoyed. Where other people go out skiing or sledding or whatever, I’d much rather curl up inside with a good book or blog. So winter is a great opportunity for me to revisit the 12,000 or so shots I took in the last year and find images that I overlooked the first time around, or didn’t have time to process.

Here are a few shots from the inn I stayed at in Chester, Nova Scotia:

I also discovered a folder of images from downtown Guelph last January, and for whatever reason, I considered them all utter failures. Now, however, I like them, so I processed them:

I like how all the images from that gray day are preoccupied with geometry.

* * *

“They say my prints are bad. Darling, they should see my negatives.”*

A few days ago, I discovered that my local gallery has an exhibit of Lisette Model’s work up until Sunday. So I went. This image, “Paris, Sleeping by the Seine,” took my breath away.

* I’ve seen that attributed to Lisette Model but I’m not sure if it’s true. Sounds more like Dorothy Parker to me, if she had made photographs.

“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.