peripheral vision

I’m having so much fun with this project, I want to post more photos… I love these women.

Leighzzie Borden

Deadly Jenzyme

Teargas Tamara

Dodge Swinger

Today I experienced something I haven’t felt in — well, I don’t even know how long: boredom. I’m not always excited by everything I do, but I usually have a big To Do list that I only make dents on, so I’m constantly thinking of the next thing to get done. But this afternoon, I had nothing To Do. It was weird. And nice. I definitely think it’s a sign of some kind of progress.

I’ve been working on a new project involving derby girls. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but I’m pretty excited. I still have lots of work to do, and I don’t know how it will end up, but I have a solid method and I think a good idea. Here are a few early images of #66, Em Pale. I fell in love with her and her family while I was at her house, and I’m gonna have a really hard time choosing which image to use, but here are the current frontrunners:

I’ve also found it fascinating that in all five of the women’s houses I’ve gone so far, in every single one of them, there is some kind of reference to gender. The proof:

I’ll be interested to see if that continues with the other women I photograph. By the way, if you’re a derby girl or if you know one in my area, I am looking for more participants. Please email me at kate (at) peripheralvision (dot) ca.

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

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

Spring cleaning at my parents’ house has a slightly different angle from other houses. Every spring the windows of their house get covered with ladybugs, so they have to vaccuum up the carcasses every day for a couple of weeks in the spring. I made this picture on Easter weekend this year.

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

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

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.

So yesterday I photographed the Tri-City Roller Girls. I was nervous as hell, because I’ve never had to pose and direct such large groups in such short time before, but it was a lot of fun. Of all the ways I envisioned the day, the one scenario I never envisioned was standing behind three strange men in front of urinals. But I did.

Unfortunately, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hold the camera steady and it’s a bit unsharp. What can you do?

There are three teams in the league, and I photographed all three.

Tri-City Thunder is the travel team, made up of players from the other two teams.

Vicious Dishes

Venus Fly Tramps

All in all, a great day.

I’ve whittled my work from Woodstock down to a number that I can at least show you in a slideshow — albeit a long one. I still need to edit it further down, but I think I’ll leave that for a few months to gain some distance. In the meantime, here it is, with a working title of Where will I spend my happy days?

Woodstock has a reputation for being dangerous. One person I spoke to said his wife was held up at gunpoint there, and another one told me he’d been mugged there. Someone else told me it was seriously dangerous, like murder dangerous due to all the gang activity there. Another (coloured) person told me that he feels much safer in historically Black areas than in historically Coloured areas like Woodstock. The Manager of the Woodstock Improvement District, who provided me with a security guard to help me in my project, told me he’s sick of this idea that Woodstock is dangerous. But when I asked if that meant that I could wander the streets by myself with my camera, he said no way. When he saw my camera he guffawed, “Shue! You’re crazy if you think can you walk around by yourself with THAT!”

It strikes me that the South African idea of safety is… well, skewed to say the least.

Being a mother, I had no interest in putting my life or mental health at risk, certainly not for photography, but I didn’t really feel like I was doing that in Woodstock. The problem was that I didn’t feel like I could trust my own judgment because there were probably all kinds of cultural cues I was missing. My safety meter wasn’t calibrated to Cape Town. So I began with a question, but my explorations quickly turned into an obsession with personal security and how people carry out their daily lives under the constant threat of being mugged or carjacked or killed.

My original goal with this project was to make enough good work to apply for grants to return and finish it over a longer term. But I think my love affair with South Africa has moved from the honeymoon phase to the morning after, and I’m not so interested in returning right now. As I’ve been attempting to edit this work, I keep feeling like it’s just unfinished. There are gaps and missing threads that if I’d had more time I could have figured out how to fill but I just didn’t have time to work through all that. Sadly, it might just remain unfinished forever, which feels like a terrible disservice to the people who helped me and invited me into their homes: Sam and her family at the Woodstock Torchbearer, the Woodstock Improvement District, the manager and residents of the Haven Old Age Home for the Destitute, Dennis, Jeffrey, Carol and Nathanial, Elizabeth and Lindsay, and Vanessa, among others.

Where will I spend my happy days?

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…

Happy New Year! My brain has finally slowed down over the last few days and I’m finally feeling rested. Before Christmas I was in a fury of editing photos and submitting them to a few competitions, knowing that we would be leaving town for a week on Christmas Day. Then my obsessive thinking stayed in overdrive and I spent most of the week obsessing about whether we should move, and what kind of house we might want to move to, even though we can’t actually do anything about that until we come back from South Africa (which is only six weeks away btw!), and what kind of car we should buy for our second car. My camel’s back finally broke before Christmas, and I realized that with the pace and volume of work at my day job, being able to drive would help make me just a little bit less stressed. Hopefully it will buy me half an hour a day, to either slow down, work out a the gym, run an errand or two, and maybe even get the grocery shopping done during the week so our weekends can be a little bit less administrative. We have now chosen a car to buy, an inexpensive used car that should be reasonably reliable, at least for another 50,000 kms, and I didn’t spend that much time obsessing about it. Yay!

On the photography side, I posted two new galleries to my site. I finally settled on an edit of 18 images for Many Scars, and I wrote the statement. I used a quote from something I wrote when I first met John, and it made me a little sad that I don’t spend any time really writing anymore. I think I’d like to write more while I’m in the midst of a project.

The other gallery I posted is called Bricolage. I’ve been working on those images over the last year. It started with a desire to create work that expressed something about my experience of motherhood, but when I (re)discovered and put together Two-Powered, that need went away a little bit. Still, the intention turned my eye into my domestic realm, and I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before, like the order and symmetry of my son’s play, the physical record of his need to understand and articulate rules of the world, and how the messiness of our home could be seen as a metaphor for the messiness of family relationships. I also felt the need to make photographs that show a truly messy home rather than small digestible portions of the mess arranged in a formally pleasing way or carefully staged representations of family chaos. I’m a little embarrassed by the mess we live in – I would never invite anyone over except my very best friend to this mess – but my first response to embarrassment is to internally declare that the embarrassment is unnecessary and I should sing it from the rooftops because surely at least one other person in the world must also experience this?

I love critique, so any criticism and commentary on the work is welcome.

And now I’m going to make banana bread with my son.