peripheral vision

With South Africa’s World Cup fast approach, there’s been a lot of talk of Africa in the media and on blogs. Just yesterday, I came upon two discussions worth passing on. AFRICA IS A COUNTRY reposted a piece by a London Lara Pawson writer about how Western media talks about Africa. She says, “I have almost reached the stage where I believe that any interest in that huge and complicated continent can only be false and without meaning. Africa has become perhaps a parody of Africa.” I recommend you read the whole thing.

Conscientious then pointed me to this post calling for new visual stories of Africa.

I think the CONTACT exhibition at Gallery 44 showed contemporary African photography working along similar lines. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the show… life kept distracting me, but I hope there will be other opportunities down the road.

I used my lunch break today to drop by the Drop-In Centre. I’ve decided to stop my Saturday shifts, at least until the fall, and I wanted to tell Alberta in person. I just feel like I’m not fulfilling any of my commitments very well, so something has to give. As much as it’s the right decision for me right now, I still feel very sad. I’ve been going for two and a half years now, and I really enjoy the people there. Rick is usually the first person I see when I walk in; he always sits in the same seat at the same table, right next to the back door. He was the first person I saw today, and I felt a lurch when I thought about not seeing him for a while. While I waited for a moment to talk to Alberta, Mike called hello and then Paul and I talked for a bit. I had rehearsed a little speech for Alberta, and I gave it to her then. She said they’ll struggle along without me and they’ll never forget me. I was still choked up when I got back to work.

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Timothy Archibald has finished his book of Echolilia and it’s now for sale. He’s got some of the contents posted and it looks absolutely beautiful. Time to start saving my pennies because I really, really want one. Philip Toledano’s Days with my father was also just published as a book, and I also want to get my hands on that too. I love seeing work in print that I’ve already enjoyed online.

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On a lighter note, we went to my parents’ cottage last weekend to hang out with my sister and her husband and two kids who are visiting from the Dominican Republic. I was a very, very bad auntie and didn’t take any pictures of the kids. But I did photograph my mom’s band-aid solution to a broken screen. Literally.

And the very old lawnmower that my dad used to mow the sparse whisps of green that sprouted in a patch in front of the cottage. As far as I know he gave up on that when I was a teenger.

And Wing’s, which has been in the nearest town for as long as I can remember. Sadly, the General Store across the street from it burned down in my early teens.

Pretty soon I’m going to have to rename this place the Alec Soth Fan Club. But give me one more post at least.

Carlos Loret de Mola was another participant in my workshop, and I think he’d be willing to co-chair the fan club with me. He recently posted about his experiences there, although I can’t seem to make a permanent link to that post. But it’s second from the top post on his blog right now. He took some pictures of me with Alec Soth.

Here is me trying to look blasé, like I sit next to Alec Soth every day.

Here I am again, still trying to look blasé.

Here I am a little bit drunk, trying to look like I go out every night for beer with Alec Soth and other awesome people after a couple of nice exhibition receptions. (This picture was taken by Reza, not Carlos.)

I’m still thinking about all the conversations I had. After I got home, American Suburb X posted an interview with Alec Soth from November 2009. And then another interview appeared, more recent I’m pretty sure. Both of them have nuggets that he mentioned during the workshop or during his lecture, so they’re definitely worth a read.

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I was going to blog about all the synchronicity I experienced during the week I was in Toronto, and all the soul searching I’m doing, but it was boring me to try to write it, so I’m thinking it would be boring to read. Maybe another time…

Before I went to this five-day workshop with Alec Soth, I thought the only reason someone would cry from a critique would be if the comments were completely unconstructive or if the person being critiqued had ego-based expectations of being told they’re wonderful. Even when I cried on Tuesday, I tried to blame other life-related stuff for the tears and emotion. But I was wrong. I don’t think I can put it into words, but it’s something about the fact that who we are feeds into our photography.

Anyways, this week was a breakthrough for me on many fronts, not just photographically. It’s the first time I’ve left my family for more than a day and been completely by myself. I did go to Nova Scotia without them in 2008 but I travelled with a friend to get there, and stayed with friends I already knew while I was there. This was also the first time I felt truly comfortable in Toronto. In the past I’ve felt anxious or overstimulated or just out of place there, but a lot of what I experienced of the city this week just felt really good. It was such a treat to spend time without a big To Do list, just going wherever the day took me. I don’t think I’ve had a day without a To Do list in possibly years.

And I haven’t even mentioned the photographic breakthroughs. I think I’ve been feeling a bit blocked and dissatisfied with my work lately, and I’ve barely shot anything since we got home from South Africa. Now I have a new approach… it was an approach I’d thought of doing before but it was never the right time to try it. And let’s face it: learning new tools can feel pretty destabilizing and decidedly unfun. Anyways, Alec forced me to try out two new tools, and I’m pretty excited. I’m hoping to put together a little multimedia thing to post here, but first I need to learn how to edit audio.

Alec Soth is a really great teacher. It seemed to me that he very quickly understood something of what each of us is trying for, and he helped us each along our own path. And he’s also just so charming and open and generous and seriously funny. A few of us hung out with him all Tuesday afternoon, having lunch and then going out to Ward Island, which I’d never been to before.

Here he is having a moment on the island. I didn’t want to disturb him.

On Friday afternoon, a few of us also tagged along with Alec to check out The Mechanical Bride at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, which had some of Alec’s work. It was the first time I’d seen his prints on the wall, and they are SO beautiful. Bonnie Rubinstein, Director and Editor of the Contact Festival, took us through the whole exhibition, and it was great to hear how she pulled it together. I learned so much in that tour. Soth is having a huge show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in September, and I’m seriously considering making a pilgrimage to see it. He’ll also be back in Toronto in October to give a lecture called “The Democratic Jungle,” which I won’t dare miss.

As human and down-to-earth as Alec Soth is, I really wish he’d smacked his lips or breathed through his mouth while eating or something; anything to temper my hero worship with some kind of irritation. But there was nothing. Even when we were all a little drunk on Friday night he was just lovely. Well — and funny, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy on all that.

He even signed my book with a sweet message.

This has been a once in a lifetime experience, maybe even life-changing. For me, it will certainly be photography-changing. If you’d asked me early Friday morning how the workshop was, I’d have said it was good but hard. I was still feeling ragged and confused, about photography and life, and I was a little disappointed to still feel such confusion. By 5 pm, everything had come together, and my answer had changed to the week being amazing. So what changed? It kinda feels like divine intervention. But I’ll leave the rest of that story for the multimedia piece… stay tuned.

I finally had a chance to explore the CONTACT Festival website, and I’ve got a list of exhibitions I want to see. I have no idea whether I’ll actually have any time and/or energy outside of the workshop activities next week to see them, but I figure it’s good to try. One of the first exhibitions I want to see is at Gallery 44 with contemporary African photography.  (Huh. It appears Gallery 44 has a Flash-based site, so I can’t link directly to their description of the exhibition. So instead I’m linking to the page on CONTACT’s website.)

Right around the corner from Gallery 44, Jodi Bieber’s new work, Real Beauty, is being exhibited alongside Lauren Greenfield and Zed Nelson at the CONTACT Gallery. I think Jodi Bieber was one of the first South African photographers I discovered online, shortly after starting this space.

I’m also looking forward to Meera Margaret Singh’s show at the Gladstone. I think the Gladstone has a whole bunch of exhibitions on several floors, so it’s definitely worth a trip.

If I can, I’d also like to check out Finbarr O’Reilly’s work, and group shows, Subjective, In Her Presence, and REWind if I can.

So that’s pretty much it. I have to work today, then tomorrow I go off to the Big Smoke, sans family. I’m alternating between fantasies of luxurious evenings of solitude in my hotel room and fears of total loneliness without my fam. Wish me luck!

I just discovered this great dialogue between Doug Dubois and Richard Hines. I especially like their discussion around the tensions of photographing people, especially family members.

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.

The Kids in the Hall was my favourite show in high school. Whenever I start to think about humanity and the meaning of life, this skit often comes to mind. If I had to make a list of my top 10 favourite Kids in the Hall skits, which I do not, but if I did (and I might yet), this one would definitely make the list. (And that was a little reference to a certain skit involving Gavin and a butcher, which would also make the list.)

Did you know it’s the 25th anniversary of house music? That makes me feel old. Although, it had been around for a long time before I finally caught on about 10 years ago. Anyways, I’ve been enjoying this nice house mix created in honour of the anniversary.

It seems I’ve moved on from my NYC accommodation obsession to NYC photography galleries! Sadly, Sally Mann’s Proud Flesh is over, but I did discover that Doug DuBois’s All the Days and Nights is showing very near our Midtown hotel. It comes down 3 days after we arrive, so we’re just in time! Although I’m disappointed to miss Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood exhibition, which is happening in February. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all I guess.

I discovered this site, which lists many photography galleries in New York, although it looks a year or two out of date.

I’m nursing a bit of a headache so I’ll sign off now. Once again, a short post. Sorry. Thanks to those of you who said hello a couple posts back. Most of you I knew but there were a couple newcomers, which is always nice.