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I discovered this site, which lists many photography galleries in New York, although it looks a year or two out of date.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.
Wow, this interface looks different! (Not the one you’re looking at as you read this, but the one I’m looking at while I type.) My husband upgraded wordpress for my blog last night for the first time since I launched it nearly two years ago now. And it’s totally different. This on the same day that my employer switched to Microsoft Outlook for its email platform. Oh well.
So I finished the Chelsea Hotel book and have tentatively booked a room there for our trip. Photographer Claudio Edinger lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the early 80s and published the book in honour of the hotel’s centennial in 1983. Did you know Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there? Or that William S. Burrows wrote Naked Lunch there? And Henri Cartier-Bresson stayed there too. I just found all that out yesterday, in this book. Anyways, in the introductory text, Edinger describes the problem of photographing one’s neighbours: “Then my problems began. A woman from the fifth floor, who saw me taking pictures, was convinced that I was with the FBI. She called me to let me know she knew. A notorious Lothario, once convicted of rape, menaced me with black magic, because I photographed him in the halls without his permission. For weeks afterward I checked around my door for little dolls bristling with steel pins.” He goes on to describe the parade of people who lived in the room next to his, saying “I probably could have done a book just on my next-door neighbors, but at what cost to my safety and sanity I’ll never know.”
In a great section on the history of the hotel and its more famous inhabitants, Pete Hamill says death is part of the romantic myth of the Chelsea, and cites the death of Dylan Thomas there, which is memorialized with a plaque, among others. “But there are no plaques for the people who still arrive, full of hope or despair, to make the Chelsea their home. Years ago, the Life magazine writer Marshall Smith described the Chelsea as ‘the world’s most tolerant, non-expendable third-rate hotel.’ That description remains true today, a hundred years after it rose over 23rd Street. There is a myth of the dead, but within Chelsea people live. When I walk by the hotel on a summer afternoon, I often think about the hundreds of people inside, writing and painting and sculpting and dreaming, and I want someone to celebrate the living. To hell with the waste of early death. Life is lived here.”
Edinger’s beautiful black and white portraits, which remind me of Cartier-Bresson’s portraits actually, do that. You can view many of the photographs in a gallery on his site that pairs photographs from Venice Beach and Chelsea Hotel.
Here is a story my son just told me.
One time, a long, long time ago, I was lonely in my carseat. And I saw a light come down to the ground and the car got hooked up to the light, and I called, “MOMMY! DADDY!” because I was SOOOO lonely. I never want that to happen again.
(Do I need to clarify that this has never happened to him? Once when he refused to let me undo his carseat straps and refused to get out of the car, I left him in it while I unloaded groceries, but that was it.)
Now here is a picture that has nothing to do with that.
I’ve been walking by that trailer every day for probably two months. The other day I noticed a pregnancy test laying on the ground next to it. I tried to see whether it was positive or negative, but that part had fallen out I guess. Whatever the result, I couldn’t help but wonder if they made the woman who peed on that stick happy or sad. And where it came; I couldn’t see any other spilled garbage nearby, and it seems too big to be blown from away. Oh well… just another of life’s great mysteries I guess.
Here are 3 new blogs I read that have nothing to do with photography:
1. Mouse-traps and the Moon – my dear friend Sue writes about children’s literature here, and I love her approach. It’s also a great way to get book recommendations for my son.
2. The Slow Food Experiment – Veronica Mitchell started a new blog when she and her husband began a daunting slow food experiment: they only buy single-ingredient foods. Before I started reading, I thought we were doing pretty well with cooking real food, but I’m realizing we have a whole lotta blind spots.
3. Ottawa from the down side up – Junkie-Monkey is an active drug user (although he’s just fallen in love and been clean for 6 days). I’ve seen lots of photographs of drug users, but I haven’t often heard directly from a user in a public forum like this.
Enjoy
Yesterday I received a list of the other artists being included in Mother/mother-. There’s only one other Canadian besides me. Her name is Lindsay Page, she’s also a photographer, and her work is amazing. So go check it out.
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In other news, after months of planning to start upgrading my BA in English to an Honours BA in Studio Art in January, I’ve done a total about-face. I had been hoping to do 2 courses a semester for the first few semesters, so I could get through the first year prerequisites and to the stuff I really want in the photography classes in about a year. But I discovered this week that the studio art classes have 6 hours of classes per week each, and another 6 hours of homework. Which means I could only do one class a semester, and then I’d probably have to choose between photography time and family time, since the homework probably wouldn’t involved photography. And that kind of choice just doesn’t seem tenable at this time, especially when what I really want to do is improve my photography. I also realized that the core photography classes are all film-based, and mostly 35 mm I think. Now, I do want to learn more about film and darkroom techniques, especially colour printing, but I’d rather have a course about film practice, a course about digital practice, and a bunch of courses about personal vision in which you could pick your poison – film, whatever format, or digital. Finally, I also discovered that the darkroom has very limited hours, which would make it even more difficult for me to balance my family life, work life, and student life. Add all those realities to concerns I’ve had about art school all along (mostly worries, probably unfounded, that all the theory will make my work suck [more] or give me analysis paralysis), and that’s how you get a total about-face. So now I will probably become obsessed with discovering other avenues. A certificate in Photography from Ryerson may be one, although I really don’t fancy driving into Toronto one night a week all winter.
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Look what arrived on Thursday morning, a day earlier than expected?!?
I’ve shot a roll on it but it’s not processed yet. I’m curious to see whether the meter is accurate at all, and whether any of the frames are in focus… Also to what shutter speed I can hand-hold it. With no mirror slap and no heavy lens out front, I’m hoping for at least 1/60 but 1/30 would be sweet.
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David duChemin posted the other day about being present when you’re shooting. And waiting beyond the boredom. It really spoke to me, as I’m becoming increasingly aware of my impatience when shooting. I can go out on the streets with the intention of finding a place and waiting for something to happen, and I just can’t bring myself to sit down and wait. I just keep walking around until I decide to go home, with virtually nothing shot. (As Anya said in the season 6 episode of Buffy I watched last night, “I tried being patient but it took too long!”) It’s either that, or as I think I’ve mentioned here before, I shoot continuously and compulsively, often shooting the same frame over and over again.
A couple of weeks ago, I went out with my neighbour Joan to visit her husband, Royce, who lives in a long-term care facility. I spent 2 to 2 1/2 hours with her all told, and I only shot 50 frames. I watched and I waited. These are my favourites:
Backing out of the driveway from the home she and her husband built…
Although he’s retained his sense of humour despite his stroke dementia, she told me he’s not the man she married.
I’m a bit worried these pictures make her look impatient, and she’s so good with him.
She said the house was really bright when they first built it, but since the trees they planted have all grown up, it’s really dark now.
She’s making Christmas ornaments to be sold at a craft sale for Royce’s home.
Royce’s bed.
The last time we went to South Africa in January 2007, we decided we would fer sher go back in the first half of 2010. Part of me even hoped we might be go back before 2010 too, but it hasn’t happened. And now 2010 is approaching fast, and I’m starting to think we might not go back for a while more. The trip is just so long and gruelling, and the thought of making it with a 4-year-old makes me want to stay home. It’s also expensive, and now that I’ve been entertaining thoughts of going back to school, and now that my sister and her family are moving to the Dominican Republic for three years, I’m starting to wonder when we might actually get back to SA. And that makes me very sad.
Last weekend we watched District 9. It was such a treat to hear all the authentic South African accents, and see the real landscape around Johannesburg. I read a review that talked about how the movie is an allegory for apartheid, or the holocaust or any other major oppression in history. But I think it’s more specific than that. It seems very much set in post-apartheid South Africa, although there are certainly A LOT of echoes from apartheid. (The title itself is a reference to District Six, which was once a thriving multi-cultural neighbourhood in Cape Town, until the Group Areas Act designated it as whites-only, and all the buildings that belonged to non-whites were razed, and all the non-whites were moved elsewhere. The area pretty much remained a wasteland, although the government is building new houses there.) Also, there were just so many South Africanisms and inside jokes – so my husband told me because a lot of them went over my head – that I think although the movie has wide appeal, it’s really directed at South Africans.
A few weeks ago at the uni library, I found some books on David Goldblatt’s photography, which I first saw in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. One of his colour shots was hanging, of a domestic worker sitting in her employer’s house, and I just loved it.
Anyways, one of the books, David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, features an interview with him, critical essays about his work, other essays about South African arts generally, and of course his photos. Lots and lots of his photos. This particular quote no doubt influenced my experience of District 9:
“After about 1968, I realized that the kind of work I was doing was so internal to South Africa, so steeped in our obsessions and perversions, that without involved explanations it meant very little to outsiders. My dialogue, to the extent that it went beyond myself, was with fellow South Africans. My dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgements. This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite.”
Here are some more quotes from the interview that are still rolling around in my head:
On living in apartheid:
“[...] over time it grew evident that the real conflict was [...] how to square one’s conscience with being a white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life. Was one to become an activist, a saboteur, a worker in the underground? I had neither the conviction nor the guts for that. [...] Once I became seriously engaged in it, photography became my way of being politically active. It was a political act. I must be careful to tell you, though, that I would not allow my photographs to be used for political purposes. [...] I came to learn that the messages that editors, propagandists, and political bodies wished to attach to my pictures rarely corresponded with my own concerns. I took these photographs because I was engaged in a dialogue – between the subject and me.”
On his approach to photography
“I came to realize that I was not cut out for news work. Editors wanted photographs of events, and I saw that as a photographer I wasn’t all that interested in events. I was and am far more engaged by the states of being that lead to events, by the conditions of society rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions.”
“My photography became a political inquiry, an interest in real things. My concern was not to make “interesting photographs” but to probe the immediate world I lived in.”
“Long ago I tried to make pictures like those that came from Europe, soft and beautifully modulated. It used to break my heart – I could never get my pictures to look like that. Then, in 1961, I realized that it had to do with light. We have a lot of it in South Africa, and it is often sharp and harsh. So instead of fighting our light, I began to enjoy it and to work with it. I photographed from within rather than as if I were visiting from somewhere else.
“At the same time, my work became more oblique. I sought out irony and tried to impregnate pictures with a sense of it, for it often revealed the nuances and complexities of our life in South Africa.”
More on apartheid and his sense of place
“It was impossible to live in this country and be separate from the system. You couldn’t do it. The system penetrated every aspect of life here. [...] You were complicit simply by being here. By breathing the air. In living ordinary decent lives, paying the rent, sending kids to school, taking jobs, catching trains, blacks were complicit in their own oppression, and whites, even if they opposed the system, by living within it were complicit in the subjection of blacks. Unless, that is, they were activists prepared to go to prison and die for their beliefs.”
And finally, he had some comments about his methods. He says this about working in Soweto during apartheid: “A white mane in those places at the time attracted a great deal of attention, from both the populace and the security police. I developed an approach that usually disarmed both. I unambiguously declared my presence and purpose, which was to photograph ordinary life. I adopted a slow and formal photography, no shooting from the hip, the camera invariably on a tripod, everything upfront and transparent. Ordinary onlookers soon got bored, while the police seemed not to know what to make of the sheer banality of what I was doing.”
Later on in the book are essays by JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, among others. Nadine Gordimer went out with Goldblatt on some of his shoots and she had this to say: “When one looks at some of the astonishing revelatory Goldblatt photographs it is in immediate response difficult to believe the fact that he never takes photographs of people surreptitiously, except in the anonymity of the crowd. Unthinkable for him to do a Walker Evans, hiding a camera between his coat buttons on a New York subway train. Sometimes when working with him, particularly in the Transkei among rural people, I found myself amazed and humbled by the way in which he would not seize his perceived wonderful moment because the subject whose image presented itself did not want to be photographed. Goldblatt always asked permission, and if he was refused, gave thanks – his respect for the decision – and walked on.
“I saw later, in the evidence of the photographs he did take how superficial as well as ethically doubtful my regret for “missed” images was. I think of the old woman in her mud home; her contemplated grace of ignoring the process of photography she had consented to. Susan Sotag quotes Brassai saying he didn’t want to catch subjects off guard in the hope that something special would be revealed of them. For Goldblatt, like Brassai, that something special in the subject doesn’t have to be caught off guard; if it is there, it is Goldblatt’s challenge to himself to find it even when the subject is “on guard”. He does not use the camera as a licence, freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people he photographs.”
Tony Fouhse in his post today talked about ways of shooting and editing, and how one influences the other. He concluded that he prefers to shoot a lot and give himself permission to make mistakes, bark up the wrong tree, and edit them out, than to restrict his shooting and show every single frame. I definitely have the same approach.
However, I shoot a bit compulsively; I take the same picture over and over again, almost as a kind of insurance. I do try to move around and explore the subject from many angles, but I suspect it’s all a bit excessive. I’d like to blame digital, but I remember shooting an entire roll of 36 frames in South Africa of exactly the same scene, and not one of them was remotely usable.
For example, I’m working on a series of photographs about John. I think I mentioned him here before? Anyways, back in July he invited me to photograph him while he got a tattoo. I was delighted. And I knew that because this was part of a larger series, I’d probably only end up with one shot in the final edit. So I went and I shot. I shot close to 500 frames, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was thinking. The thing is, I knew only one frame would end up making it, but I didn’t know which one that would be. Maybe it will come with more experience, but the Decisive Moment doesn’t present itself to me when I’m shooting with trumpets and stars. I’ve had way too many experiences where six months or a year down the road, I find a photo I’d initially labelled as a reject but now discover it’s actually really good. I’d just been too close to the experience of shooting and the expectations I developed in the moment. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 8 frames.
I’m not sure how I’ll proceed from here, but since I still have more shooting to do with John, I’ll let the project unfold before I get my knickers in too much of a twist.
Image Makers, Image Takers revealed some interesting takes on this issue.
William Eggleston had this to say: “It happens so fast. I compose very quickly and without thinking, but consciously. I take a picture instantly and never more than one. Sometimes I worry about the picture being out of focus, but I take that chance. 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.”
Whereas Tina Barney said, “My theory is, the more pictures you take, the better you get. It’s like a sport. I never wait to get a particular shot because wonderful accidents can happen when you shoot a lot.”
Also, I’ve recently seen some collections with different frames from the same scene or almost the same moment, that I find quite thought-provoking and compelling. The first was in David Goldblatt, Hasselblad Award 2006, which I got from the university library. The book contains several fold-out pages that show three different views of the same scene, and they don’t feel self-indulgent like someone just couldn’t decide at all. Each image adds to the other in a meaningful and important way. Laura Pannack’s series, “grams,”is another example of several shots from the same day and scene.
Nevertheless, I’d like to find a way to be a little more deliberate and sparing in my shooting without closing myself off to the unexpected.
I am awe. Joerg Colberg just published new work by Sally Mann, accompanied by an essay by Mann that just had me spellbound. Between the words and the images, I felt like I was reading a love poem.
Go look and read.
Here are some of the images I’ve been shooting while mooning about like a broody teenager:
(that’s my old dorm room in the bottom right corner)
copyright , 2008
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