peripheral vision

in the last 24 hours.

“I don’t know what it is about that Y chromosome that just has to be around wheels!”

“I met a boy last week, about three, who had the most beautiful dark eyes and blonde hair and the most finely sculpted face. His sister isn’t at all like that and I thought, ‘Genetics are cruel.’”

“Well it’s a good thing you didn’t have to come to work on the days after the hard, sleepless nights. THAT would be HARD.” (Yes of course being alone at home with little, demanding, emotionally needy people is SO much easier than going to work with grown-ups.)

“My pants are falling down and that’s a good thing.”

“You have two boys? Well, that’s… fine. It’s fine. I had three boys and a girl and the boys were much better behaved than the girl.”

I find myself reacting a bit when people describe my derby series as being about a subgroup. To me, it’s not so much about roller derby as it is about gender and identity as performance, and how real women construct and reveal their identities. The roller derby part is because the sport toys with sexuality, aggression, our expectations of femininity and performance within the context of a physically demanding sport. Then again, my statement starts with a description of roller derby, so maybe I need to change that.

* * *
I wonder if the silence around early pregnancy – maintained by the fear of miscarriage – is really a vestige (or continued evidence?) of the belief that woman’s only value is in childbearing. If a woman’s only value is in bearing children, then losing a baby becomes a source of shame. As much as I support any woman’s right to privacy, I don’t believe that this silence does any favours for real, grieving women and the people who love her and who (would if they knew) love her baby.

* * *

I wonder if institutions seek to cover up stories of their male staff or volunteers molesting boys rather than calling the police because of the homosexual aspect to it. That rape is something that’s supposed to happen only to girls. Men and boys should be impenetrable. That the idea of a boy being raped is so abhorrent, people prefer to stuff it under the rug than to call the police. If a coach were raping a young girl in a shower room, would a witness be more likely to call the police?

* * *
I’ve been thinking a lot about how many messages we send to young girls (and women of all ages, really) that the most important thing about them is their appearance and being pretty. I mentioned this to my mom this weekend and she asked me if I thought that receiving comments on my appearance had affected me. I was about to answer no, somewhat disappointedly since it seemed to be contradicting my belief. But then I remembered the times I wept to my mother that I was ugly. She remembered one time I was mad at my boyfriend when I was 17 because I’d asked him if he would still like me if I was fat and he’d said he didn’t know. (Or at least that was the story I told my mom. The real story was that I was thinking of going on The Pill, and the potential side effect I was most worried about was gaining five pounds. So I asked my boyfriend if he would still be attracted to me if I gained five pounds from The Pill and he said he didn’t know. THAT’s why I was mad. Also, how messed up is that???) But that wasn’t the time I was remembering. I remember crying in the bathroom about my supposed ugliness when I was somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. I also remember being surprised by an episode of Three’s Company, when Jack was excited at the prospect of dating a redhead. I was younger than eight, and I didn’t think it was possible for a redhead to be pretty. I wonder where I got those ideas from?

* * *
Now that the leaves are mostly gone, I keep noticing all the birds’ nests that were hidden all summer, and I want to steal them. I was all disappointed with how high up they all are but today I noticed two nests in the shrubs in front of our house. Is it bad to steal birds’ nests in the winter? Will they come back in the spring and expect them to be intact?

Sorry for the silence here. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks or so completely horizontal, laid low by the extreme exhaustion and nausea of early pregnancy. I was barely capable of forming whole thoughts for a while there, and I had to use that at my day job, leaving nothing for this space. I even put my derby project on hold, because I needed all my spare time for napping or figuring out some kind of food that I might be able to swallow. I’m now 12 weeks and although I still feel fairly crappy I know I must be nearing the end. The evidence:

• I’ve eaten — and even mildly enjoyed — a couple of meals that bear a trace of FLAVOUR.
• I’m sitting on the computer typing this instead of lying on the couch, even though I’ve been mostly upright all day today.
• I went grocery shopping by myself this morning. And I actually bought food. That I can imagine eating.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll be back in the derby saddle and moving forward on the project. The other night I experienced my first real night of crazy pregnancy dreams, and in one of them I discovered that all my best derby pictures were behind me. None of the set-ups I was trying really worked and I didn’t know what to do. I woke feeling determined not to let that come true.

I’ve actually gotten some pretty positive feedback from the industry on the series.

The Center for Fine Art Photography just opened New Normal on Friday, and my portrait of Leigh-zzie Border is in it! New Normal addresses the evolving ideals of social relationships, ecological engagement, media and culture in our ever changing world.

“Seen in the photographic work selected here are the changes of our pursuits and social relationships, the dynamics of international expansion and interconnectivity, the technological complications of our evolving environment and experience of the world. Photography plays no small role in pursuing such ambitious questions… welcome to New Normal.”- Juror Edward Robinson

There’s some really great and intriguing work included, and Edward Robinson is the Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art so it’s pretty huge to me.

I also submitted work to RMG Exposed, a juried competition to raise funds for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, and my image of Inna’ Goddess Da-Vida at the piano is a finalist.

The finalist pieces are donated to the gallery’s silent auction on November 13. You can see the finalist images online, and my image was even posted on the Photo Life blog. Oshawa’s very close to where I grew up — in fact I often went out in Oshawa when I was a teenager and home from university on holidays — so I’m planning to go the auction. Having my work hang in a public gallery is pretty cool — even if it’s just for a few nights.

So. Now you have all the news.

Just the other day, the Globe and Mail covered a recent study that showed that “On average, men were 4.5 per cent more likely to receive promotions at any level than white females, 7.9 per cent more likely to get promoted than minority males and 16.1 per cent more likely than minority women. These results remained true, even when controlled for age, education, years at the company and performance evaluation.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in the literary world recently, started by the critical acclaim for Franzen’s Freedom. This article from Slate is the best I’ve read on that topic. Here is an excerpt that really speaks to what was on my mind in my first post:

“All this is speculative, you might find yourself thinking. I agree. All we can do here is speculate. But one example comes to mind, concerning a New York Times review of Schooling, a poised, ambitious debut novel by Heather McGowan, which made use of stream-of-consciousness and other experimental fiction techniques to tell the story of a precocious girl who has an intense relationship with a male teacher at her boarding school. The reviewer—a man—concluded that such difficult, “fissuring” techniques were justifiable in Ulysses, when Joyce was writing about Leopold and Molly Bloom and a post-war world, but not in Schooling because, “By comparison, the small, private story of Catrine Evans and Mr. Gilbert at the Monstead School has no greater reach. Where is the experiment in this experimental fiction?” To this reader, the reviewer’s outright dismissal of crucial issues in female experience—the way male desire shapes female ambition and sense of selfhood; the way authority is always located in male attention—betrayed a telling assumption about the smallness, the unimportance of women’s experience. Ironically, his very dismissal only underscored the significance of the issues Schooling was exploring.”

I saw a letter responding to a white man (not being in the tech industry I don’t know his name at all, but he’s probably important) who claimed that the tech industry was “more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.” The response to his claim pointed out that it does in fact matter how old you are and what sex you are. She went on to call the guy out for sitting on the sidelines of discussions about how to get women more involved in the industry.

And here is an excerpt from the letter that I thought particularly compelling:
“You are a successful, young, white male who has the ear and eye of many powerful men in the tech industry, and you – like too many of them – have sat on the sidelines over the years scratching your heads or scratching your balls. Not many of you have taken positive actions to make positive changes in the system to create more opportunity for ANYONE who is not white and male.

“I’m not talking tokenism. I’m not talking special “Minority-only” or “Women-only” forums – but tearing down and rebuilding a foundation that truly addresses the inherent and deeply-entrenched barriers that keep women back and to a lesser extent – but no less important – keeps minorities back as well.

“I’m not looking for a handout, however, as long as the foundation under us all favors men – and in the case of tech startups young men – we’ll never get to parity or even a reasonable representation of women helming tech startups. ”

And just in case you’re at all skeptical about the existence of gender bias, I offer this video about the Bechdel test for movies. I saw it first a few months ago and it kind of shattered me.

Getting back to photography, I did find a few competitions that offer hope. Critical Mass is a contest in which photographers pay an initial fee to submit 10 photos. They’re reviewed by an initial small jury, and the best 175 are moved onto the next round, which gets judged by a whole lot of influential and renowned jurors. They announced the top 175 finalists recently and I counted the men and women. There were three I couldn’t figure out from their names or googling whether they were men or women, so I just didn’t count them. But of the other 172 finalists there was a precisely 50/50 split between men and women. I thought this must be the result of a blind judging process, because it’s the highest ratio I’ve counted yet, but they don’t judge blindly. The photographers’ names and biographies and statements are part of the judging process. Kudos to Critical Mass!

*I started this post more than a week ago, so the numbers are at least a week out of date and I’m too tired to update them… He was at 125 I think when I last counted.

I’ve been thinking about the subject I’m about to write about for a long time. But there’s a real risk in writing about it… Ever since a wee run-in with a certain very well-known photography blogger shortly after I started this blog, I’ve shied away from saying anything potentially contentious here. Sometimes I feel handicapped because I don’t have any formal education in art, so the words don’t come easily to talk about photography. Or I worry I’ll say something that’s just plain wrong, and I don’t know it yet. But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I think the time has come.

So I might as well just get into it.

Have you noticed that feminism seems to have become the new F word? When you utter it in polite circles, people – both men and women – often respond as though they’ve been slapped. Well, maybe more like you just started talking about the time you had a pilonidal cyst. Some horror, some revulsion and a generous helping of fear for what’s about to come out of your mouth. When I was in university in the 90s, feminism, in those circles at least, was almost always referred to in the plural, because there were as many feminisms as feminists. But a decade later, it seems like in more mainstream circles there is only one kind of feminist, and she hates men and she’s frothing at the mouth she’s so enraged. That is not the kind of feminism I subscribe to.

I don’t blame individual men for the changes that still need to be made to achieve gender equality. Men are subject to the same cultural messages we women are. To me, feminism is about equality for all and about challenging our beliefs about gender; not about disempowering men to empower women. And membership is open to men as well as women. My husband considers himself a feminist. I consider him a feminist too, in case you’re wondering.

It seems like the singular, currently popular definition of a feminist only serves to hinder discussion on issues that we really need to talk about.

For example.

500 Photographers, which I’ve been really enjoying following, as far as I can tell, has only covered 17 women out of the 94 photographers it’s so far covered. That’s 18 percent. Now, I’m not blaming the author of the blog. I think it’s a great undertaking, and as I’ve said, I’m really enjoying it, for one. The fact is photography is dominated by men. Although women have been using cameras ever since their invention, they just don’t seem to stick around in the canon in the same numbers as men. Just look at Magnum’s group photo from its annual general meeting in June. There are 3 women. Out of 38 full members, that’s 8 percent. Not even 10 percent. And that’s rounding up!

I really think the problem is that the standards by which photography is judged are male standards. There are women who can meet the standards, obviously, but what about the women who can’t or don’t want to?

I couldn’t help but notice that work from my Two-Powered series was very well-received in art circles outside of photography. My work was included in Mother/mother-*, an exhibition about motherhood (duh) that included works in ALL media. My work was seen there, and is being included in an academic book now about mothers in contemporary art. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to notice that my work has seen zero interest in photography circles. Maybe it’s just because the pictures suck, and I’m ok with that possibility. But there are photographers, and women photographers too, whose work is renowned in photography circles that also suck in formal terms. That are more about what’s in the photo than how beautiful it is.

* * *

There’s a group on flickr I’ve been a member of for a couple of years now, called La Familia Abrazada. It’s an interesting pool of work, inspired by such photographers as Nan Golden and Tina Barney among others, and it was even featured on Burn magazine last fall I think. Last summer, someone posed the question, why are there only women and children in the group’s pictures? Where are the men? Well, there certainly are more male contributors to the pool. It’s a moderated pool, so contributors first add their image(s) to be considered, and the moderator(s) decide whether to admit it into the pool. At the time of the discussion, there were no women moderators of the pool. I don’t know if that’s since changed.

But the discussion stayed pretty rooted in the question of subject matter, and how to get the male photographers out in front of the lens. Because the important thing, I guess, is to SEE men. I did try to broach what *I* think should have been the focus: who’s behind the camera of the images. I mean, if your pool is lacking women photographers, there’s a reason, and it’s not simply that only men are drawn to photograph their families. I’ll stick my neck out and say that in fact, I would guess MORE women are drawn to photograph their families than men, since it’s still a fact that women are more often primary caregivers than men. So the pool should at least have even representation.

Anyways, after the discussion, I gamely submitted a few images of my husband. But the pictures were rejected by the moderators. When I privately messaged one of them to ask why, he said they did not strike him, that they weren’t bad, they just didn’t have enough ooomph for him. The thing is, he’s right. They do lack oomph. But that was kinda the point of them. Domestic life is kinda like that, mostly lacking oomph. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family life, but it’s not really given to grand moments. I like my family/domestic pictures if they have ambiguity, if they’re open-ended. I like it when they’re a bit surreal, when you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, or when they suggest something that had absolutely no bearing in the original situation.

Just in case you’re wondering, these are the pictures I submitted then.

Maybe they are lousy pictures, I don’t know. But I do know that throughout my participation in the group, I’ve experimented with submitting photos to see which ones get in. And honestly? I have to say the ones that get in are the ones that I generally find to be a bit cheesy, overly sentimental, or plainly humourous. Which is odd since the pool itself is not cheesy or overly sentimental.

Now this isn’t a complaint about my pictures not getting in, and certainly not a complaint against the moderators, it just seems like this is yet another example of male domination in photography, and kind of a huge blind spot when discussions come up. I don’t think the discussion should be about subject matter all. Well, it’s part of the issue, but it’s more of a symptom, I think. And I hate essentialist ideas of gender, so I need to be careful here. And of course, I really don’t want to come off as a Rabid Manhating Bitter Old Feminist. Or sour grapes.

Gah. This is the part where I can’t find the words.

…

Ok, so I’m stuck. I decided to check out the ratio of men to women in some of my books. Image Makers Image Takers has interviews with 20 photographers. Five of them are women. (Incidentally, it was edited by a woman.) That’s 25 percent.

The photograph as contemporary art, by Charlotte Cotton, which I highly recommend btw,  discusses 219 photographers, give or take a few. Ninety-one of them are women, which is 42 percent. I went from the index, and I may have double counted one or two, so take the absolute numbers with a grain of salt. But still, that’s a vast difference from 8 or 18 percent.

I currently have Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies from the library. It has a foreword by Anne Tucker, in which she sites a source that says that by 1910, women made up 20 percent of the photographic work force in America. She goes on to say: “Women actively participated in every significant photographic movement and school of the twentieth century. [...] As a young historian I discovered that a little digging in any period yielded important women who had been exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally. Women’s representation and the acknowledgment of their contributions declined or disappeared only when later historians evaluated a movement. The more general the compendium, the less likely women were to be well represented.” Tucker goes onto to recount her experience in 1973 of writing The Woman’s Eye, which featured 10 women photographers. She notes, “Those knowledgeable about photography tended to dismiss it; general book reviewers and women’s publications praised it highly.” (I actually saw it at the library before I picked out Reframings, but I thought from the title it would annoy me, since woman and eye were singular. I didn’t notice the author’s name or I probably would have gotten it. Next time.)

Anyways, Reframings. I’m disappointed to tell you that I have only heard of four of the 45 women photographers in the book. I was planning to write that I’d heard of none of the photographers in the book, but I figured I’d better make sure that was true and finish looking through the images. That was when I discovered Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie in the final chapters. I’d like to believe it’s just a coincidence that three of those four photographers were in the chapter entitled, “Sex and Anxiety,” but I’m not buying it. The fourth, Opie, is a lesbian, and much of her work is concerned with queer identity.

And the photographers I hadn’t heard of? A lot of the work is really good. I’ve seen other books of feminist art, and to be honest a good chunk of it left me flat. But that wasn’t the case with Reframings. So why I haven’t I heard of them?

I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this. It’s complicated, I know. Tucker said it too, when she noticed that Beaumont Newhall only mentioned 13 women photographers in The History of Photography – out of about 500 photographers in total! (I got tired of counting all the photographers by the L’s in the index, so I just estimated.) A footnote explains, “Evaluating Newhall’s support of women is complicated. In over 400 articles written on art between 1925 and 1971, he wrote about only six women: Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, Nell Dorr, and Barbara Morgan. Whatever his basis for excluding women from his publications, Newhall proudly supported his wife’s career and never discriminated among his students. He generously responded to men and women equally with shared research, advice, and recommendations.”

* * *

I started this post with 500 photographers, so I may as well end with it. Here are some ideas for women photographers he might want to consider sharing, in no particular order:

Rineke Dijkstra – This series brought me to tears when I saw it in a book the other day. She photographed three women with their newborns, one was one hour after birth, another one day after birth, and another one week after birth. It was the one with the c-section incision that especially got to me.

Kate Hutchison – I’m particularly fond of her model husband series and also why am I marrying him, but all her work is great

Jodi Bieber

Katharina Bosse – especially Portrait of the artist as a young mother

KayLynn Deveney

Laura Pannack

Jen Davis

Araminta deClermont

Juliana Beasley – especially Rockaways

And that’s just off the top of my head. And being fair, I’d also have to recommend Don Weber. Because I haven’t counted, but there probably aren’t enough Canadians either. But that’s another post.

*Updated: Ugh. This damn post took me all morning, and now I see 500 photographers is up to 95. And it’s Canadian Joey L.

I got my hair cut today. And it was kind of a big deal. I ended up with three braids, each about a foot long or more, which I will donate. I was going to leave them at the salon for them to donate, but when I saw them, I realized I really, really wanted to photograph them.

I don’t know, it felt kind of significant… I’d gone into the appointment feeling like my hair was a burden I needed to rid myself of. I felt like I’d been hiding behind it for too long. But once it was cut I was all nostalgic, thinking about how long those strands had been attached to me, and what had gone into growing them. But whatever. My head is lighter and my neck is cooler. Yay!

This was once a stand of trees. A few years ago they were all razed to the ground. I have a hard time believing they destroyed the trees to create a small agricultural field in a suburban complex of houses and big box stores. More and more I am noticing the plague of plastic bags on the landscape…

Just before we left for South Africa, Die Antwoord started going around the Interwebs. I got a kick out of it but not in a really serious way. But yesterday I found this video (through the Photography Post – which is a great new resource, although I can’t seem to make the RSS feed work in my bloglines account).

You must watch this collaboration between Die Antwoord and Roger Ballen. I love it. (Incidentally, the video I linked to is better quality than the one embedded at TPP. I just can’t figure out how to embed it. Oh well – click over).

The CONTACT festival has launched its website for the 2010 festival. I think I’m most excited about getting to see Tony Fouhse’s USER in print (besides my workshop with Alec Soth of course). His show is at Pikto Gallery if you’re in the area, and I plan to go to the opening on May 7 (unless I collapse from information overload during my workshop).

I noticed the other day that Pikto is also offering two workshops with Donald Weber in May, both of which I’ve taken and highly recommend for anyone interested in deepening their photographic practice. Documentary Photography is a two-day workshop with a week for shooting an assignment in between, and Grant Writing is one day. I didn’t take it to learn how to apply for grants; I took it because I’ve been struggling to write about my photography. He broke down an approach to writing about your work, a structure. But more importantly, he gave me confidence to trust myself – to BE myself when writing about my work. For so long, I’ve been wishing someone smart would come and tell me what’s going on in my pictures on a deeper level. (Don didn’t do that.) I thought that to be successful in the art photography world you have use academic language and concepts, but Don emphasized straight honesty to the point of rawness. And he’s won a number of lucrative grants so the proof is in the pudding.

Anyways, back to CONTACT. I have to say, I’m more than a little disappointed with TVO’s programming. Most of the films were also played last year, with only a few exceptions. But the talks for the festival look great. The Magnum workshop instructors will all be speaking in the evenings during the first week of May. I’m also pretty keen to check out the panel discussion about contemporary African photography.

I think I’m getting close to a final edit of my Woodstock work. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this image, which didn’t make it into my first edit, but which is becoming a favourite.

Sometimes I love my neighbourhood.

You think it’s all boring all the time, then you come across these treasures of whimsy. Again and again, I ask myself: Who lives here??? Who DOES this??? People are weird and wonderful.