peripheral vision

For some reason I have developed an aversion to black and white photography. I’m kind of prejudiced against it, even though it’s not fair or rational. I think I’ve just seen it employed too much as a way to signal This Is A Very Important Photograph, when it may not be an important photograph at all. I’m sorry, but just shooting with Tri-X film or converting your files to grayscale does not make Very Important Photographs.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered some black and white work on the Critical Mass cd that I’m really taken with.

Kirsten Hoving uses ice and 19th century objects and photographs to represent various constellations in the night sky. I adore the square, and the use of circles echoes the curvature of the earth. I love just contemplating the imperfections of the ice in the photographs. I can’t really imagine the patience (not to mention cold fingers!) required to create this kind of work. I also love Hoving’s colour work (shocking I know) — you can find it on her website in the Obstacles and Roots and Wings portfolios.

Virgo

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor

Pisces

I don’t really know how to talk about Jennifer Hudson’s series, Medic. At first view I thought they were showing weird experiments. But somehow I couldn’t be sure. So I went to her artist statement:

“Medic is a sensitive, intricate glimpse into human relationships during times of need and recovery and a complex, heartfelt exploration of sacrificial love. The work began wholly on one sentence whispered by my husband while we were enduring deeply frightening times together. He held my hand, lay close to me and said softly “I just wish I could take the pain from your body, and put it into mine.” I have been fortunate to know incredible love all my life, but at that moment I became suddenly and intensely aware of the magnificent power that exists between people who care for one another. When I was anxious and fighting to fall asleep each night, I began to invent miracle machines; contraptions that heal, deliver hope, legacy, remedy, and redemption. Each image from Medic is a thoughtful invention, strange and tender, revealing facets of the delicate human heart.”

Even with the information from the statement, I find these difficult to read. In this one, I imagine the man is contemplating his mortality, perhaps not entirely peacefully.

And this one just breaks me.

Rachel Phillips submitted a series called A Thousand Words. Each image is inspired by words from a 20th century letter. I find them absolutely stunning to look at, and the phrases she chose are quietly evocative. I want to know what was in the whole letter, but then again maybe I don’t. Taking the phrases out of context may be what creates the magic I find in the images. I couldn’t stick to just three images.

S.S. Song

Still waiting for the perfume

this fast going old World

I slept in the afternoon

Her series called Fieldnotes, of transfers onto vintage envelopes, is also seriously intriguing. If you like it, be sure to watch the video of how she makes the transfers.

Did you notice that all the above photographs are of scenes or objects crafted by the artist? I’m noticing a definite fondness on my part for this kind of work. I’m not sure why this is, but I think I’m becoming disillusioned with traditional documentary photography and photojournalism. So contiuing the theme of work along this line, I’ll move onto some colour practitioners.

Nicole Dextras submitted her series of Weedrobes – garments she created out of plants. Again, I can’t believe the patience and craftsmanship, not to mention urgency (I mean, a dress made out of lilac flowers???), that went into the garments. They are tremendous. On her website, she’s created a sort of comic strip-like presentation for some of the garments, sort of documenting performance pieces. The photography itself isn’t super fantastic, but I can’t resist what’s IN the photographs.

But the work I was most spellbound by is her installation, “Icicle shift.”

You should check out her website but I will tell you [SPOILER ALERT] that the dress blew away before the winter was over.

I couldn’t help but notice a whole lotta photographs of abandoned spaces on the Critical Mass cd. I feel the pull of these kinds of spaces and the signs of life left behind too, but when you see the same kind of image over and over again, it loses its appeal real fast let me tell you. But Alejandra Laviada has a refreshing approach to this subject matter. I’m just going to post most of the statement she submitted, because it’s a fine example of an artist statement: clear, concise, down-to-earth, it provides an entrance to the work without telling me so much that I no longer need to look at it.

“Over the past few years, I have been photographing different spaces that are in the process of being demolished or redeveloped. I use the sites as a temporary studio and photograph my interventions in each space.

For Re-Constructions, I gathered discarded material from the Hotel Bamer and used it to create a series of ephemeral sculptures off-site. The Hotel Bamer was a landmark in Mexico City in the 1950’s and a site I had previously photographed in 2006. It was left abandoned for several years and is now being redeveloped. Throughout this period of time, I have revisited the site several times to photograph various aspects of its decay and transformation.”

I just love to look at them. And study the texture of the wall, the floor, the materials, the shapes they make. Delicious.

David Welch creates totems to make comments about our consumer culture. I like that they make me think about all the stuff in the world, but I also just enjoy their form.

When I showed this work to my husband, he expressed surprise that it was submitted to a photography competition, since it’s really more like sculpture. I see where he’s coming from, and I had the same response myself when I saw Kevin Van Aelst’s work in last year’s Top 50. But if had found these objects as is, that would unquestionably be photography. And it’s unquestionably photography when someone sets up a shot in a studio. To me, this is just a small step further, and it’s still photography, since photography is necessary for sharing such physically local and temporary art.

I think it’s high time I continued with my favourite 20 photographers from Critical Mass. First up, let’s talk about Susan Worsham. I’ve loved her work for a couple of years now, since she won an award in Blurb’s Photography Book Now competition. She submitted new work to CM, By the Grace of God, which looks promising, but I think she still has some work to do (editing at least for sure – she has 73 images on her site alone in that body of work.). Some Fox Trails in Virginia, her other body of work is just so beautiful… the colours, the light, and all that fruit. (These are images from By the Grace of God.)

I love her work so much that I even made homage to her image, “Fruit.” I was really hoping she would win the CM book award so I would get a book of her work, but sadly the finalists were just announced and she’s not one of them. I’ll say it again: sometimes democracy really sucks. Go look at all her beautiful beautiful pictures. And then you can read this lovely interview with her from last week.

I love the way Beth Lilly plays with our ideas of mental illness, memory, veracity and dreams. She opens with this image.

(You probably can’t read the text at this size, but it says, “My earliest memory is finding my cousin’s birthday presents hidden in a closet. Later, I asked my mom why she’d wrapped them in black paper. She said it had never happened – that it must have been a dream. Maybe, but she has schizophrenia so I’m not sure I can believe her.”

To me, this opens up a whole can of worms about truth and whether we can ever know it or whether photographs can ever show it. The fact that she’s photographed the very thing that may or may not have ever existed tells us we can’t trust anything about her or this project. And I love that. The rest of the series recreates dreams and memories in a super compelling way.

See? It kind of gives me chills. Her Oracle series is equally compelling. She takes phone calls from strangers asking important questions. When the phone rings, she takes three photos very quickly, then finds out the question she just answered. (I hope I have that right.) Check it out.

While I’m on the memory theme, I should probably mention Yelena Zhavoronkova. It was this orange in the blue mesh bag that first caught my eye. It was like a puzzle and I couldn’t stop looking at it, trying to figure out what it was about, what was going on. There is a clear reverence for the objects, with the careful lighting, that I know something important is happening. But what?

Memories in Red is a series of still lifes incorporating Zhavoronkova’s red school tie from growing up in Russia and other objects from her family. When I went to her website, the photos are accompanied by text, sometimes lots of biographical information about her family and the significance of the objects and photographs. I have to say, I think the images are stronger on their own or with just a sentence to give an opening. When they have all kinds of information, the image is reduced to an illustration. Plus, if I already know everything about the stuff in the photograph, then I’m not going to look at it for long. I mean, if I made the photographs and it was about my parents who were gone, I would want to savour and share every detail about them. But still… I guess I’m just glad my first experience of this work was without the captions.

Last week I got my Critical Mass All Entrants CD. Last week was also the week they announced the Top 50. I didn’t make it. I was actually way more bummed than I expected. When I entered, Top 50 seemed way too far for me. I was just hoping to be one of the 200 finalists (which I was). But between being named a finalist and the announcement of the Top 50, somehow it didn’t seem so far away. I started thinking why not me? After all, 50 people need to be named, why couldn’t I be one of them? So I was pretty disappointed when I didn’t make it. But I was only bummed for a few days.

When I realized how many great photographers didn’t make the Top 50 or sometimes even the top 200, I felt a lot better. From this juror’s post, it sounds like each juror chooses their favourite 20 photographers. To be chosen among 20 seems a lot harder to me than being chosen among 50, which was what I first thought.

I went through every single one of the 700 or so photographers on the cd. I didn’t click on all or even most of the individual images, but I looked at all the thumbnails. I had a bit of an ulterior motive: this post had mentioned roller derby people as one of the subgroups entrants were exploring. So I wanted to see how other people were photographing derby girls. (Side note: it seems she was talking about me! Because I didn’t see any other derby girls on the cd. Another side note: I kind of love how uncomfortable people are with using the word girls to describe grown women. I had the same discomfort when I started the project, but it really does seem to be an acceptable term.)

Having gone through the entire cd, I’ve decided to choose my own favourite 20 photographers. Ultimately, this is a pretty arbitrary list. I had moments when I got exhausted and probably didn’t give the photographers I was looking at a fair view. Or if there were several slightly similar photographers in a row, I probably didn’t give them a fair view. I suspect that if I went through them all again, I’d pick a different 20 photographers. If I were a real juror, I’d probably spend more time trying to choose the 20 best photographers but instead I chose 20 whose work I most connected with somehow. I was going to just post a list of the 20 with links, but instead I think I’ll take my time over a series of posts and challenge myself to write about why I like this work.

I actually found I was drawn to work that is quite different from mine or work that I’ve enjoyed in the past. Well, except maybe for Alix Smith’s States of Union and Meg Birnbaum’s person/persona. Not that it matters, but neither of them made the Top 50. Sometimes democracy really sucks.

I’d actually seen and loved Alix Smith’s States of Unions before. In fact, I recently went hunting for it a couple of times but I couldn’t remember the photographer’s name so I had no luck finding it. (YOU try googling ‘State of the Union’ photography and see what YOU come up with. Apparently I also had the title wrong.) States of the Union shows queer couples and families in their homes or outdoor settings. These images are meticulously lit, directed and photographed. They play with historical images of The Family and also with stereotypes of queerness. Some of the subjects in the photographs may conform to stereotypes while others subvert them. In short, they are beautiful. They make me keep looking and thinking.

The CM cd was my first time seeing Meg Birnbaum’s person/persona. It is a series of diptychs portraying people who have developed costumed personas or alter egos. I love this work. What I like is that, to me, the diptychs are often not a simple duality: ‘real’ person vs their alter ego. The ‘person’ side seems as much a performance or construction as the persona side. (Apologies for the small image size. I can’t seem to get them to a size that is more visible without cutting off the image. Anyways, you can click on an image to see them correctly on her website.)

I’ll cover my other 18 favourite photographers from Critical Mass another day.

*Edited to add: sorry… just realized the images aren’t working as links. I can’t seem to make that work. Instead, check out Alix Smith and Meg Birnbaum from here.

Jessica Todd Harper

Doug DuBois

Tony Fouhse

Philip Lorca diCorcia

Tierney Gearon

Philip Lorca diCorcia

My family celebrates Christmas, but for years now we don’t buy gifts for the adults. Instead, we donate to charities and give presents to the children. So far I love it. But over the last year or two I’ve become quite a collector of photobooks. Where once I was content to look at work online, now I want to study it in print; I want to own it and look at it while I sit on a comfortable chair in the sun and be able to show it to others. So I’ve developed quite a wish list of titles. So if anyone wants to get me a very special gift (my birthday is on Boxing Day!), feel free to choose from the following list, in no particular order:

Timothy Archibald, Echolilia.

Katharina Bosse, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother, which you can order directly from the artist it looks like.

Philip Lorca diCorcia, A Storybook Life.

Ian van Coller, Interior Relations.

Viviane Sassen, Flamboya. (I did get a notification from the publisher that they were reprinting it, but for the life of me I cannot find a buy button on the book’s page. What’s up with that?)

Rodarte, Catherine Opie and Alec Soth.

Alec Soth has a new flickr challenge, in honour of his From Here to There exhibition now in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse is considerably closer to me than Minnesota, but when you add a screaming baby into the car, suddenly the car ride is an eternity. (This weekend we discovered the baby has not outgrown his misery in cars after all, and our hearts and ears are still recovering from two-hour drive.) Anyways, the new flickr challenge: recreating an iconic photograph. He launched the challenge shortly after this story in the New York Times and also this blog post. This is a perfect time for me to do this kind of a challenge. I’m not quite able to dig into a full project, but I’m keen to make pictures.

So early Friday morning I decided to try to recreate William Eggleston’s tricycle picture. My neighbourhood is the exact same vintage as the one in the photo, and there are still lots of houses with carports. What could be easier, right? I just have to plunk a tricycle in front of a house with a carport and Bob’s yer uncle. As it happens, not so much.

On the way to take my older son to school, we passed a house whose driveway might work well. And there was even a blue trike tucked into a box or something. But I had only just met the owner of the house and I was shy about just knocking on her door. I had thought I knew the houses I wanted to use, but this one could be another option.

Then I started to wonder about what the right time of day might be. So I came home to study the light in the photograph. There isn’t much in the way of shadows and the sky is so white, I was a bit confused. It seems too bright to be an overcast day, don’t you think?  Today was mostly sunny here, but there were light clouds in the sky that sometimes passed over the sun that took away the shadows and made the light more diffuse. I had tried last night as the sun went down but it was too dark I’m pretty sure. So here’s today’s effort.

I’m not very happy with it but that’s partly because of the proportions of my trike and the solidity of its tires and partly the huge leafy trees. I see now, though, that I was too far from the houses. I probably needed to stand right in the middle of the street instead of the less busy spot I chose. But still… not bad.

This exercise has given me SO much more respect for Eggleston’s photo. For one thing, I’m quite certain he had to have the camera on the ground. I did, and the pavement killed my knees. I even cheated and used my live view mode (which I KNOW Eggleston didn’t have) so I didn’t have to put my chin on the ground. With my five-year-old on the corner holding the baby’s stroller and calling out every time a car came towards me, that would have been just too much. So how the hell did he compose the image so carefully? Before I went out and shot I tried to mark in my mind the geometric details of the composition. The roofline does not go along the third line, as you might expect – it’s somewhere between a third and a half. There are two windows to the right of the trike and two windows to the left. The car in the carport sits neatly in the space underneath the trike, and there’s just a hint of a bumper on the right edge of the frame. Just now I notice that the angle of the carport’s roof echoes the angle of the seat bar. There’s a wee patch of dried grass between the sidewalk the trike is on and the road, and the trees way behind the houses have no leaves.

Having tried to remake the photo, I find the original more beautiful than I ever did before. I mean, did he put his chin on the ground to look through the viewfinder or did he shoot it blindly? Of course, I expect he shot from the grass on the other side of the sidewalk, so perhaps his experience wasn’t so painful as mine. My appreciation for the photo grew especially knowing that Eggleston only takes one shot of each scene that strikes him. In Image Makers Image Takers he said, “A long time ago, I would have taken several shots of the same thing, but I realized that I could never decide which one was the best. I thought I was wasting a lot of time looking at these damn near identical pictures. I wanted to discipline myself to take only one picture of something, and if it didn’t work out, that’s just too bad. But it’s pretty much always worked.”

I’ll say. When I looked up the quote in the book before I started writing, I was pretty chuffed to read this as well: “If anything I would probably like the viewer to study the entire picture and everything that’s in it, where it’s placed, the composition. I would also hope that the image would register in the viewer’s mind after seeing it in print. It’s not even so much about remembering the image but seeing it.”

I may try again with this picture, but I’ll probably wait until after the leaves have fallen.

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).

“Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order’s tall”
from “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver

Two weeks ago, I discovered Bon Iver’s album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Immediately I had it on nearly constant repeat, much to my husband’s delight. “Skinny Love” played in my mind while I slept the first few nights after hearing it.

Why don’t you just have a listen to it while you read this post?

Isn’t it absolutely beautiful?

I actually bought the album off itunes, so I could listen to it during my labour. Luckily for my husband and attendants, my labour went so quickly that it only repeated about eight or ten times. I’ll try not to go into details, since this isn’t that kind of blog, but I will say that labour and birth were a transcendent and healing experience for me. I actually kind of enjoyed it. There were definitely parts I didn’t enjoy, and there were moments when I felt overwhelmed and I just wanted to stop the whole production. But my support team was awesome, and whatever they said or did, those overwhelming moments stayed just moments and I was able to get past them. But I felt really powerful and like I was really coping well and that is a good feeling. I felt like a rock star for about two solid days after.

My first son was born by emergency c-section after 12 hours of fear-filled and difficult labour. So birthing my second son meant venturing into the unknown. One of my biggest fears going into this birth was that the baby would go into distress and I would have to push him out under duress. I didn’t think I could handle the pressure. I told my midwife, “If the baby goes into distress, just cut me. Don’t fuck around. I don’t want to labour with that kind of fear again.” What do you know, but the fear was realized. His heart started to slow down too much, but I was fully dilated so the midwife told me I just had to push the baby out. The funny thing was I wasn’t scared at all. The midwife was so calm that I figured if she thought *I* was this baby’s best chance, who was I to challenge her? So I just did it. Turned out it was just because the cord was around his neck and he was absolutely fine once he was born.

For decades I had a recurring nightmare/anxiety dream where a tornado was bearing down on whatever building I was in. In the dream I was helpless to do anything but watch, terrified, and wait to see if it was going to hit me or my neighbour. I knew I had turned a corner with my anxiety and panic when I stopped feeling afraid in the dream. In my most recent tornado dream (which I think I had sometime during my pregnancy), the tornado came when I was standing in an open field with nothing but a falling-down shack nearby for shelter, and I chose to stay out in the open rather than risk the flying debris of the shack. This birth felt kind of like that.

Right after he was born, I said, “That wasn’t that bad!” And everyone looked at me like I was crazy, because I’d been quite loud throughout the labour and I’d had some really hard parts. I really meant the actual birth part, which I kept thinking was going to get worse and suddenly he popped out and it hadn’t gotten worse.

It’s like the sun was shining out my ass.

I need to give a shout out to my doula, Jody Cummins-Lambert. I felt like she’d earned her fee before I even went into labour, and she offered perfect support throughout labour. I know a lot of people thought it was a bit redundant having a doula along with midwives, but it wasn’t at all. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re planning a hospital birth. She stayed in the background so my husband could be my primary support, and she helped him figure out what I needed. She also helped enormously on day 2 postpartum, bringing me witch hazel and epsom salts and throwing in a load of laundry.

I have one more thing to say. Having now experienced a highly medicalized, necessarily surgical birth and a natural birth where I was allowed to find my own rhythm and ways of coping, I feel like the attitude of “as long as you have a healthy baby, it doesn’t matter how the baby enters the outside world” does a real disservice to women. Of course, no mother would choose a better experience for themselves at the expense of their baby’s health. But the experience matters. Having a lousy birth experience is a big deal, and I think we need to do a better job of helping women have better birth experiences, supporting women during the postpartum period generally, but especially after a traumatic birth. For me, it wasn’t until I was pregnant with my second son that I acknowledged all the emotional stuff related to my first son’s birth. And the most helpful people I spoke to about it told me the best thing was to simply acknowledge the fears. I expected to feel fear during labour or have flashbacks to my first son’s birth, but it never happened, probably because it felt so different.

13 days postpartum, I may not be in the most objective position, but I think birthing a baby may be just about the most powerful thing a woman can do. I don’t want to be exclusive and deny pain medication to anyone or anything like that, but there’s a lot more we can do to make birth better for women. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something I explore in my photography down the road.

During this weekend of waiting, I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, about the story of her and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s quite beautiful, and I was surprised to find myself crying at the end. I mean, I knew what was coming. Of course, it could just be late pregnancy hormones, and the fact that Patti was pregnant when Robert first got ill. At one point, he was photographing her for her next album, and she writes, “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”

The book is dizzying with all the encounters the two young artists had with famous artists, poets and rock stars in NYC, often in the Chelsea Hotel. What a crazy amazing time that must have been. But I think what most intrigued me about the story was how long it took both Smith and Mapplethorpe to find their voices. Or maybe it’s not about the amount of time, but about the fact that they didn’t embark on a clear plan of action. And seemingly chance encounters with individuals had huge impact on their journeys. It’s fascinating.

Smith has great insight into Mapplethorpe’s work and photography too. About the portrait Mapplethorpe shot for her first album, Horses, she writes, “When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.” 10 years later, her husband remarked on the same thing: “I don’t know how he does it, but all his photographs of you look like him.”

For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking that all photographers are voyeurs. But Smith has me thinking twice about that now:

“Robert was not a voyeur. He always said that he had to be authentically involved with the work that came out of his S&M pursuits, that he wasn’t taking pictures for the sake of sensationalism or making it his mission to help the S&M scene become more socially acceptable. He didn’t think it should be accepted, and he never felt that his underground world was for everybody. [...]

“And yet when I look at Robert’s work, his subjects are not saying, Sorry, I have my cock hanging out. He’s not sorry and doesn’t want anybody else to be. He wanted his subjects to be pleased with his photographs, whether it was an S&M guy shoving nails in his dick or a glamorous socialite. He wanted all his subjects to feel confident about their exchange.

“He didn’t think the work was for everybody. When he first exhibited his most hard-core photographs, they were in a portfolio marked X, in a glass case, for people over eighteen. He didn’t feel that it was important to shove those pictures in people’s faces, except mine, if he was teasing me.”

For the last few years, Mother’s Day for me has become pretty much synonymous with the Contact Festival. Even though I’m hugely pregnant and, in theory, could go into labour at any moment, this year was no exception. I was originally planning to see Somewhere to Disappear, the film that followed Alec Soth while he worked on Broken Manual, on Saturday afternoon, but I didn’t buy advance tickets soon enough. We were even going to wait in line for the possibility of rush tickets, but on Thursday I had a bad fall, so I was feeling a little too broken and rundown to stand in line for an hour plus in the hopes of getting a seat.

(Look: I even got a black eye. Luckily it’s not so visible when my eyes are open and with my glasses on, or I’m sure my husband would have gotten some dirty looks.)

Anyways, we just went to a few exhibitions. I’d pored over the contact site to decide which exhibitions I most wanted to see: Viviane Sassen’s work in the primary exhibition at MOCCA and Guy Tillim’s Avenue Patrice Lumumba.

First, Viviane Sassen’s work. LOVED it. L-O-V-E-D it. I don’t quite understand it, but I love looking at it, and I think that’s part of its appeal, that these images are enigmas. I love work that goes beyond the colonialist cliches of Africa. The work is shown as part of a group show, and I liked some of the other work but not all. Sassen’s work was by far the standout for me.

I will say, however, that I was kind of distracted by the presentation. The images were mounted but not framed, and they were in different sizes AND hung at different heights. I’m sure there was a reason for that, but I just didn’t understand it, and I found myself wondering about that instead of wondering about the images. It looks like her book, Flamboya, uses an analogous technique with little images tucked into half pages, as you can see in this video of flipping the book. I’m beginning to think I’m developing a special taste for out of print photobooks. I would love to buy Flamboya, but it’s no longer available. The work at Contact is newer work than the book but it appears to be along the same vein.

And now, South African photographer Guy Tillim. I have to say, this solo exhibition showed a lot more pieces than I expected. There must have been 40 pieces in the show, maybe even more. And they’re pretty big pieces. Most importantly, they are beautiful.

The only downside of the show is that admission cost $10. If I’d known that in advance, I probably wouldn’t have gone but since we only discovered it when we were already there, we paid. It seems very odd to me to charge admission for an art show. Anyways, I’m glad I went, even if my bank account is smaller as a result. These were my two favourite images from the show:

The show is put on by Wedge Curatorial Projects, which focuses on African and diasporic artists. On May 17, Kenneth Montague, the curator, will be leading a tour of the exhibition and they will be screening a film about Lumumba’s rise to power. If you’re around, you should totally check it out. The show is on until June 14.