peripheral vision

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.

Not sure if I’ll get the time or energy to post over the holidays, so here are some holiday inspired pictures for you…

Um, yeah, so I went to New York, eh? And I still haven’t blogged about it. We’ve been back for nearly a full week.

I guess I’m not sure what to say about it all, really. We did lots, got overstimulated at least twice a day, and ate wonderful meals. I was really ready to leave, but I think that was more because I was missing my son so much than because I was tired of the city. There was still so much we didn’t do and see, but what can you do? We’re human. Not only that, we’re small-town boring humans who seem to get tired awfully easily. Anyways, I made a fun little slideshow with some of my pics. Be warned, it’s a very loose edit – I think I’ve already taken a second pass and cut nearly half the pictures. But it gives you a bit of a sense of the things we saw.

I didn’t take many pictures – well, not as many as I expected to anyways. I was very aware of the century-long tradition of brilliant street photography in New York, by people who spent most of their lives in the city. I also kind of think that people can’t come to a place and make photographs that are even remotely accurate or relevant or not-cliche commentaries about the place in a short time. I kind of think you have to live there, or at least visit there a lot. That said, I kept making pictures in New York even though I knew they wouldn’t turn into anything more. And I think I’ve had a bit of a revelation.

I’ve been posting pics to flickr, and one person commented on all the geometry in the pictures, all the squares and circles and rectangles. He asked wherther that was New York or what I was drawn to photograph there. And I suspect it was a bit of both. Knowing that the pictures wouldn’t turn into a bigger body of work freed to make just the pictures I wanted to, without thinking of how they would fit in. And there are a few pictures that I really, really like (I’m embedding them through this post).

I realize that you CAN make interesting, compelling photographs in a place you have no insight into. But the photographs won’t be about the Place; they’ll be about your encounter with the place, or perhaps just an extension of your own personal vision of the world. And those are both valid approaches to photographing a new place. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that before; it seems so obvious now. But there you have it. I also have a lot of pictures from my own town that I shot sort of believing they wouldn’t fit into a body of work either, but I wanted to shoot them anyways. And now I’m wondering if maybe those are the most authentic pictures in my work? Donald Weber kept telling us in May not to make the pictures we think we should, but to make the pictures we want to. I’ve been haunted by that ever since, trying to figure out whether what I’m doing is what I think I should do or what I truly want to do. It’s a bit of a mindfuck really.

So yesterday I spent a lot of time reviewing all the pictures I took over the past year, and sorting them. I had to anyways as part of my Christmas gift to family members. Every year I make a calendar of pictures of my son for us to enjoy over the coming year. I figured while I was sorting through those, I might as well also think about my other pictures. I’m realizing that one subject that draws me in again and again are the signs of life we leave behind us in our daily trails, the imperfections on the landscape (like the plastic bag in the image below), and the expressions of ourselves we hang from our homes. I love how some people put things in their window, facing out. It’s like a little sign to passerby: I live here. Not just anyone, but ME. And it’s why I love photographing people in their homes, because of all the little physical bits that tell you something about the person who eats and sleeps and gets bored and excited there.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t be back to the Drop-In Centre until the New Year, and that was a bit of a shock to me. But Alberta just laughed every time I said it, since it’s only two weekends I’ll be missing. Next Saturday I’m going to a grant-writing workshop with Donald Weber at Pikto, and the following Saturday is my birthday (Boxing Day!) and I’ll be with my family at my parents’ farm. This year has totally gotten away from me, and this month in particular.

Last year I set some goals for myself for 2009. I wanted to do project-oriented work, and I wanted to learn to balance my flash with ambient light. I did almost nothing on the flash front, but I definitely put quite a bit of effort into projects and made some good progress. I think one of my goals for 2010 will need to be to FINISH a project. And I think I need to start narrowing my focus into one project at a time. Over the last year I thought that working on multiple projects would build on each other, and I think they have, but it also dilutes my effort so I end up with lots of work that I’m nowhere near ready to publish and shop around. This goal will be very hard for me, because I have a lot of ideas for projects that I really want to do, and limited time to work on them. I’m quite certain I could work full-time hours on my personal projects for the next year and not run out of things to do. The problem is that I don’t have full-time hours.

I had another goal for 2009 that I didn’t publish here, because it depended on other people, and I try to avoid having my sense of achievement depend on other people’s behavior. But the goal was to exhibit at least one piece of work in a gallery. I’m happy to have met and exceeded that goal. I think for 2010 I’d like to continue pursuing exhibition opportunities, but I’d like to focus my submissions on work I want shown more than work that I think fits the theme of calls for entry. I’d also like to start thinking about the logistics of hanging a solo show. I don’t think I’m really ready for one yet, but I’d like to start thinking about the possibilities.

The exhibitions I saw in New York really expanded my conception of what a photography exhibition can be. My favourite exhibition was probably Transparent City by Michael Wolf at the Aperture Gallery. I wasn’t planning to go out of my way to see it – I didn’t think it would interest me particularly – but we were in the neighbourhood and I really wanted to see Aperture’s bookstore. So we went and I was blown away by the exhibition. The images online do NOT do justice to the prints AT ALL. Anyways, they had a video playing of the artist talking about his experience making the work and his anxieties. Incidentally, he pointed out in the video that the series was called Transparent City not Transparent Chicago, even though all the work was shot there. He said it really isn’t about Chicago, so much as about city life. The video really enhanced the experience of the exhibit. It never occurred to me to have video or audio to augment the prints. They also included some of his earlier work to provide a context for the Transparent City work, and I really liked seeing that too.

Anyways, I’ve gone on long enough and my family is bugging me to get off the computer and get a Christmas tree so I’ll sign off here. You can check out the slideshow of my trip to NYC here.

Yeah, I quit nablopomo. It just wasn’t doing for me what I’d hoped it would, and I couldn’t stand doing another half-assed post. I kept thinking that the next day I’d do a better post, but I never did, and that was my whole reason for signing up. So I quit

I know they say quitters never win, but that’s not always true. For example, I trotted that out when people suggested I quit smoking, right up until I actually quit. I thought about continuing since I only had like five days to go, but what would be the point? It wasn’t achieving anything. That said, if you liked my half-assed posts, feel free to tell me why and I’ll try to do more of that.

Lots has been going on as well. We found out a week or two ago that my father-in-law was hospitalized again, so we’ve reversed our earlier decision about South Africa, and booked flights yesterday to Cape Town. I have to say I’m pretty excited, despite the not-great reason for going. I adore my husband’s family there, so I’m really looking forward to seeing them. If I’m honest, I’m also looking forward to seeing what kind of pictures I make there. I think my photography has developed a lot in the three years since we last went, both conceptually and aesthetically. I think my pictures have developed a subtlety that I like.

So that’s all for now. Here are some pictures from yesterday.

I love these pictures of Paul and Alberta. They’ve just given me permission to post them here…

Our weekends are feeling way too administrative. Saturdays are full of regularly scheduled stuff: Farmer’s Market in the morning, I go to the Drop-In in the afternoon, then the grocery store, then cooking dinner with some of those fresh groceries, then bath and bed for the little one. Sundays are less scheduled but often involve cleaning the house and visiting with the in-law. So this weekend we didn’t really do anything fun or fresh-air-ish.

My son did play around the house a lot though and in the backyard. Here are some of the scenes he left behind.