peripheral vision

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.

There’s a certain sameness about my walk to work. Sometimes I bring my camera, although I should really take it more often. Last Friday morning, the light was lovely. It was sunny, but a bit cloudy – the sun kept sneaking behind clouds and making the light all soft and glowy. I spent most of the walk wishing I had my camera, but also knowing that I was late, and if I had my camera, I’d be later. Anyways, there was a boy wearing a big leather glove and a shaking peregrine falcon on his hand. But I didn’t have my camera so I can’t show you.

I also walk by that pregnancy test and trailer every morning, wanting to photograph the spectacle with no cars around it. Although I did have my camera on Thursday morning, because my son has speech therapy, by the time I got to the trailer there were a bunch of cars around it. This was all I could do with it.

I have to say, for the last several months I haven’t been a big fan of photographing in full sun. The wet and cool summer may have had something to do with me getting in touch with my inner Englishman.

Anyways, the sameness of my walk. We’ve been in this house for more than a year now, which means I’ve been photographing some of the same scenes in different seasons. Here are a few examples.

(the top one was last week, the bottom in June I think)

(the top was in June I think, bottom in April vs. one I posted a few days ago)

(the top one was in May I think, the bottom last week)

And here are a few more from my local environs that I like (apologies if I’ve posted them before)…

Of course, I have no idea where any of these pictures will lead, but it’s fun to do.

another picture, this one post-bath

I almost forgot about nablopomo. I just remembered that I have to post now, and I feel like I’ve been going nonstop all day. I haven’t given any thought to what to post.

Tomorrow I’m going to photograph two people I met at the Drop In Centre. I’ve been meaning to blog about how this came about, but I haven’t yet. To be honest, I’m pretty preoccupied with planning the NYC trip. I’m hoping once we settle on accommodations, my blog posts will get better.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from my daily walk to work.

Oh wait! I’ve been kind of wanting to ask who’s reading here? I know some of you – the ones who comment occasionally. But if you haven’t commented yet, why not drop a note here? Sometimes this space feels kinda lonely…

On Remembrance Day, I forgot to take the car keys out of my pocket before walking to work. For the third time in a week. These are the keys my husband uses to start the car that takes him to work 45 minutes away. For the third time in a week. I have never before done such an absentminded thing, let alone three times in a week. That is usually the domain of my husband.

In related news, my kid has woken me up every night for a few hours each night for the last four nights. Three of them were due to peeing accidents, his first since he stopped wearing pull-ups to bed a few weeks ago. Tonight he is back in a pull-up, and I told him if he wakes up tonight he mustn’t wake me up. Somehow I doubt he will listen. Regardless, I am exhausted.

And speaking of my kid, here are some of scenes he’s created that I’ve recently come upon.

I was so struck by his sense of geometry that I took an aerial view too:

Too busy obsessing over the Chelsea Hotel (and reading Chelsea Hotel* with stunning photographs by Claudio Edinger and written contributions by Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, and other residents – it’s wonderful!) to write a proper blog post, so instead I give you another picture from Halloween that I didn’t post the first time around.

Soon, I hope, I will write real content.

*I popped over to the university library today and sure enough they had the book I’d seen mentioned several times in my research yesterday. Funnily enough, though, it was in the hotel and food administration section, not the photography section.

I’m definitely feeling a sense of completion about my series with John. I’ll probably still photograph him from time to time, but I’ve been ready for a week to start editing the pictures. I’ve been narrowing down my selections and my plan was to get work prints made of the top 60 or so and play around with sequencing and grouping them. But last night I decided to just see how far I could go working on my computer. I’m pretty happy with the sequence at the moment, although I may change my mind.

I can’t remember how much I’ve written about John here, so here’s a brief introduction. John has multiple schlerosis, which literally means “many scars.” It’s a degenerative disease that causes the nerves to harden with scar tissue. I first met on my first day at the Drop In Centre almost two years ago, and he was one of the first people I photographed outside in the smoking area. Most of his tattoos are in honour of his family. He was largely raised by his grandparents; I think his mother had some addiction problems and he never really had a relationship with his father. He has two kids and he’s been divorced by their mother for a very long time. He was diagnosed with MS around 20 or 25 years ago, and recently he’s been finding it increasingly hard to walk. At the drop-in centre, we’ve started carrying his meal to his table for him. This is all just off the top of the head, and I’ll make sure to verify this stuff before I publish the series in a gallery. John has a lovely deep voice and I’d really like to get an audio recorder and have him tell some of his own stories and make a real multimedia piece.

You can see the slideshow here.

So what do you think?

There’s a group on flickr called 100 strangers. When I first came upon it a while back, I was all “Oh I don’t need to do the challenge, because I already photograph strangers.” But I realized I’m not actually doing it. If I have my ipod, I just zone into my own little world, and when I see someone I’d like to photograph, I can’t be bothered to pull myself out of that space. It feels like just too much effort to bother.

So last week I decided I wanted to do the challenge after all. On Thursday I took my new Yashica Mat downtown, with the goal of photographing at least a few strangers. I really struggled with the slowing down and waiting (I think I’ve mentioned before that patience is not my strong point), but I stuck it out and ended up meeting some new people.

The first was Daryl. I saw him when he was laying two red towels on the sidewalk in front of a fire hydrant. I approached as he attached an orange balloon the hydrant, to ask what he was doing, and our conversation became quite drawn out.

He was laid off from Skyjack more than a year ago, and plays a pipe to help fill the time using the set-up of towels and balloons and other small items as a circle of protection. He said it’s been a struggle. While we spoke, someone chucked a lit cigarette butt at his balloon and it popped. He shrugged when I expressed sympathy over the loss of the balloon – he had more in his bag.

I actually shot four frames of him, and I left and came back in the middle of those frames. I just knew I hadn’t gotten the shot I wanted yet. He was pretty much constantly on the move every time I started looking through the Yashica’s viewfinder so it was really hard for me to focus. This was the shot I wanted (although it’s a bit underexposed – my next purchase will be a handheld lightmeter). I wanted to show his amazing blue eyes, and before this shot he wouldn’t look at the camera or make eye contact with me.

This should be a picture of Cara, but I screwed up loading the film, and didn’t wait for the arrow, so the single shot of her I made was actually made on the paper that pulls the film into place. Somehow I doubt that counts.

Despite that error, I love the way the Yashica Mat is changing my approach and process. There’s an irrevocable feeling that comes with the physical presence of film, good and bad, that I don’t get shooting digitally. I’m way more deliberate, and that deliberateness is really helped by the waist-level viewfinder. The ground glass already looks like a photograph, except that its relationship to reality is severed because the image is reversed left-to-right. Also, it takes me so long to focus that I can wait out discomfort, and if I miss a moment, I just wait for another one to come along.

This is Dirt. She started our conversation by asking about my camera. I told her about my 100 strangers project and she was very willing, but I could see she didn’t want to make eye contact with me or the camera.

This is Bruce. He followed Dirt here, because she used to live here, so they stopped for a stay. She and Bruce have been travelling around the country, and soon will be setting off back out west. They made such beautiful music that I didn’t want to leave; I wanted to just follow them around the country listening to their music.

Adam doesn’t go to school, but Megan and Amanda were both on spares from school. They sat patiently like that while I focused and focused and focused. Amanda, the blonde, joked about being discovered for America’s Next Top Model.

Well lookie there. It’s day one of Nablopomo and we forgot to fall back last night, so I really have an extra hour today to blog.

Last night we went trick or treating, and it was really nice. My son had a few people he wanted to see, and I wanted to make sure to see the people I’ve been photographing so I could introduce them to my son. Last year, my son wasn’t particularly interested in trick-or-treating, and it felt a bit awkward knocking on a whole bunch of doors that belonged to people I had no clue about. But since I’ve been photographing some of them, I’m really feeling more connected to people. I watch Bob’s tree, which is still holding onto most of its leaves, and worry that he’ll have to rake them himself. One night I walked by Joan’s house and saw a single light on in the basement where she watches tv and thought about the rest of the dark house surrounding her.

Leona, one of the neighbours I’ve been photographing, even dressed up (and yes, I brought my camera trick or treating, just in case):

(I’ll post some of the other pictures of Leona and her husband Ron another time.)

Last week I saw a whole bunch of cars at Bob and Gladys’s house, and I was suddenly worried that something bad had happened to one of them. I phoned the next day to make a time to photograph them again, but it was really just an excuse to make sure they were both ok. Bob ended up cancelling our session for a medical appointment, and when we trick-or-treated there last night, he limped to the door. He said his leg was all swollen, and he’d been for x-rays but they didn’t yet know what the problem was. He was camped out by the door, because otherwise it would be too hard for him to go back and forth from the family room in the back to the door. He was missing the ball game. He gave out apples, and when we got home with a full basket of candy, it was the apple that my son was most excited about. If I didn’t know Bob, I probably would have been worried about my son eating it, but since I do know Bob, I was just pleased that my kid was more excited about an apple than candy. I also know Bob has fruit trees in his backyard so the apples could even be homegrown, although I can’t remember if they’re actually apple trees or something else.

My son dressed up as a witch.

It was a good thing I took pictures last weekend when we first got his costume, because he pretty much refused all pictures on the actual day (well, days plural – Friday was the big day at daycare). This is him on Friday morning, running away from the camera and yelling No Pictures!

As usual, my husband carved the pumpkin.

My son got his own little pumpkin when his daycare took a field trip (literally) to a local pumpkin patch. My husband carved it.

So that’s it for Halloween. In totally unrelated news, I think I’m coming down with a cold. Tune in tomorrow to find out for sure.