peripheral vision

I didn’t end up making it out to many galleries in Cape Town, but we did go to the SA National Gallery, where I fell in love with Araminta de Clermont’s Matric Queens (the complete body of work was exhibited at another Joao Ferreira Gallery in October 2009 with the name Before Life).

I’m sad that she doesn’t appear to have her own website, but I did find a couple of great audio slideshows of her work. This one features Before Life, the pictures of Matric Queens, and this one features her earlier work about former prisoners and their tattoes, Life After. Go check both of them out. You won’t be sorry.

So it’s our last day here. Our flight leaves just after midnight tonight. I am NOT looking forward to getting on an airplane with an overtired, overheated, overexcited little kid. But what can you do? We have to go home, and we’re definitely ready to go, I think. This morning was cool and cloudy, but the sun is coming out now. Yesterday we withered in 45-degree heat. Well, it was only 35 degrees Celsius inside. It made me realize how divorced we are in Canada from the outside world with all our central heating and air conditioning and screened windows.

Overall, I’m glad we made the trip and it was the right thing to do, but I have to say that it was definitely harder than I expected. It’s a long time for our little guy to be away from home and the familiar, and I don’t know if I’ll be keen to do it again any time soon. I didn’t realize when we left, but I think my expectations were just way too high after our last two trips here. This trip was much more real, and real life is boring and itchy and annoying in addition to the warmth and sunshine and honey.

It strikes me now that I’ve done a lousy job of documenting the trip for my son’s memory. But everywhere we went we’d already been to with him when he was one, and it felt like I would just be taking the same pictures over again, only with him bigger and longer. Perhaps I should take a minute this morning to write down the experiences I want to remember, for myself or for my son, before the delirium of the long flight home erases them.

First, the car guards. They’re men who don flourescent-coloured vests and they wave you into your parking spot and then keep an eye on your car while you go about your business. Then you give them a few rands when you come back. I’ve always wondered what they would actually do if someone tried to break into your car, and I hope it’s nothing. But I suppose just the eyes can be a bit of a deterrent. Mostly, I think it’s an opportunity to help someone out in a country with an unemployment rate estimated somewhere around 40 percent (though the government’s official number is 22 percent – I think they count the streetside vendors and car guards as employed).

When we went to the museum in Company Gardens, we parked on a back street. There weren’t many people around at all, but there was a car guard there, with a bucket of murky water for washing the cars I guess. He had a couple friends hanging out with him, and when we returned, they were all clearly drunk and pouring more vodka from the bottle. The car guard was quite taken with our son: “I can see that he is a Man of God. You are a Man of God. Praise Jesus Christ. He is a Man of God, a good man….” He went on like that for some time, until eventually I’d strapped our son into the car seat and we were in the car. I’m glad they were happy drunk, but since it was only about 2 in the afternoon, I’m not sure the cheerfulness would endure the whole night.

The other night we ate at an Indian restaurant in Upper Woodstock, called Chandani. They have a fountain in their front stoep and our son pulled us out there throughout the meal. A car guard stood at the gate, and immediately he called to my son: “I have something for you, my brother. What’s your name?” And the car guard pulled out a necklace he made to sell, and he put it around my son’s neck. It was a leather string with a few beads and a leather cross on it. My son loved it. The car guard told him he sells the necklace to buy milk for his children, allying my son to his cause. He wanted 50 rands for it, but I didn’t have that and I wasn’t about to pay that for it anyways. When I made to take it off my son’s neck, he said we mustn’t do that, so we negotiated. In the end, I gave him the change in my pocket, which totalled 10 rands.

Later, during another trip to the fountain, he told me his name was Robert and he’s from Sudan. He has a wife and two little kids aged 1 and 3, who are waiting for him to earn enough money to stay at the Loaves and Fishes shelter in nearby Observatory. It costs 38 rands. If he doesn’t make that amount by 11 pm, they will have to sleep rough. Having a foreign accent generally brings out everyone’s sad stories, and they might not always be true, but even if this story is not true for him, I’m sure it’s true for someone.

The amount we spent on dinner for 7 of us that night would have paid the monthy rent for two of the independent-living residents in the Haven Old Age Home I photographed in Woodstock, and would have paid for Robert and his family to be sheltered for 24 nights. The disparity in resources here is shocking and shaming. And the currently strong Canadian dollar can’t explain it all, because many South Africans spend similar amounts on dinners out.

As someone said in one of the books I read here (I can’t remember which one), you have to have a thick skin to live in Cape Town.

I think my son might most want to remember the helicopters that put out fires on the mountain. One day I returned home from a morning of photographing in Woodstock to see several helicopters with their red water buckets dangling. They fly down to the ocean to fill up the bucket with water, then they fly back to the fire and dump the water on it. Apparently while I was away, there was a fire right behind our house on Lion’s Head. My husband and son could even see big flames. So they watched all the activity, and when I came home, my son said sadly, “There’s no more helicopters. There’s no more fire for them to put out.” His lower lip stuck out. I don’t think he really gets the problem with fire.

So now we will pack, and maybe pick up a few mementoes from the trip, and I’m hoping to get some small prints for the people who were kind enough to let me in to photograph them in Woodstock and give them back. And then, I suppose, waiting. Waiting for the airplanes to take off, waiting for them to land, waiting to open our front door and – fingers crossed – say we survived.

Only two days left in Cape Town, and then back to Canada. From facebook, it looks like people at home enjoyed a lovely spring weekend, while we melted here. It’s been seriously, oppressively hot. I try not to complain, coming from the land of snow and ice and all, but even long-time Capetonians are complaining. (Which reminds me, one of the servers at a restaurant we ate at a week or so ago was shocked to hear that parts of Canada also get oppressively hot and humid in the summer. He seriously thought it was cold and icy all yea-round.)

So I’ve been working on my project, which is about Woodstock, an area of light industry and modest homes quite close to the central business district. I suppose the project isn’t so much about Woodstock, as it is situated in Woodstock, and perhaps about the things that draw me in in Woodstock. Many people have told me that Woodstock is seriously dangerous, and others, who live and work in Woodstock have told me it’s completely safe. But they all agree that it would be crazy for me to walk around with my camera by myself. So I don’t. I’ve had wonderful help from people. I find the South African idea of safety fascinating. I suspect that Woodstock IS safe by South African standards, and the people who say it’s not just haven’t been in a while. There’s a lot of work been happening there to clean up the place and get rid of the drug dealers in the last several years, and there’s lots of new and cool development happening there.

But of course, I’ve found I’m just not that into the new development. I’m more interested in encountering regular people and their daily lives, and the bits of graffiti, both good and bad. I came with an idea of what I wanted to photograph, but as usual, that’s not necessarily what I end up photographing. I’m not too sure yet how the project will end up. I think I’ll need time and distance from which to reflect and figure it out. This morning I’m heading back for my last time.

We leave late tomorrow night.

Here are some pictures from our 2008 trip to Cuba that I never uploaded. Not sure why I didn’t upload them, because I’ve always like them, but I don’t think they offered enough of the spectacle at the time. I was also really into heavy post-processing, and these pictures just didn’t work for that. I’m hoping that sometime during nablopomo I will write about how my eye has changed over time, but not tonight. I’m tired, and besides, poor, cancelled Dollhouse is on tonight (I hope). So here you go:

Those are all from Varadero.

This one, which I did upload to flickr, but didn’t put in any galleries here, is from Havana. It remains a favourite of mine, even though the cafe ripped us off for breakfast.

Here are some pictures of Ron and Leona.

Considering that I make my living from words, I find it a little surprising just how antagonistic I feel towards them in the realm of photography. Antagonistic is perhaps too strong a word, but you get the gist. When placed next to pictures, words often carry more cognitive weight, per unit of visual space, than the images. For example, when I go to a gallery or read a book of photography, if captions are presented next to the images, I find myself glancing at the picture, reading the caption and moving on. I only stop if the caption reveals something I didn’t see in the first look. Sometimes I don’t even look at the picture to begin with, I just go straight to the caption, then glance at the picture to check whether the caption makes sense.

If a book or gallery doesn’t provide any verbal information at all near the picture, I spend a lot more time looking at the picture, formulating my own sort of caption. I may never actually form the words, but I figure out what’s happening in the picture all on my own. I much prefer these enforced brakes on my experience. Good examples of this kind of book are Doug DuBois’s …all the days and nights and Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi. They both open with essays written by other people, a sort of open-ended musing on the collection of images, and both books end with more personal accounts from the photographers about making the images. They also both have a list of the images with caption information at the end, so you gather the book’s meaning in layers of questions. In both cases, I went relatively quickly through the images once, then back to read the text, then through the images again, and finally the plate lists with captions. For all my impatient nature, I loved the way I experienced these books as a slow unfolding.

* * *

In all the photography I’ve been looking at over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that artists’ statements fall into one of two camps. The first is the academic camp. These statements are characterized by elevated language and jargon. Now, jargon has a bad reputation, but there’s really nothing inherently wrong with jargon. It acts as a kind of short-hand for very complex abstractions. It also serves to identify people who are within the circle of specialized knowledge the jargon is describing — and people who are not. The problem only comes if jargon is used to communicate with people outside that circle. These statements often go along with highly conceptual work, although not always. For me, these kinds of statements often feel like a long, narrow hallway with only a small door at the end. A one-way hallway. They restrict my experience of the images to such a degree that I don’t even really need to see them. All I need to do to understand what the artist has to say is to understand the statement. If you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of these kinds of statements. By using jargon, they become inaccessible to people without that highly specialized knowledge of art history, theory, and contemporary practice. And I really don’t think access to art should be restricted.

The second kind of statement uses simpler, everyday (or should I say quotidian?) language. They feel more like a beginning to me, like an open door, inviting you into a warm, well-lit room that you can’t see the corners of until you get inside it. These statements are accessible to anyone with a reasonable level of literacy, and chances are the photographs are also accessible to people with low literacy (which, you may be shocked to hear, is just under 50% of the Canadian population). I really admire Phil Toledano’s statements for their elegance and brevity. They give you just enough information to begin your own encounter with the images, and this, to me, is what an artist’s statement should do.

Just before I started writing down this post – I’d been mentally composing snippets of it all day – I saw on conscientious a quote on this very subject that seems pretty apt now: “Artists doesn’t own the meaning of their artworks.”

I guess I still subscribe to the belief that a good photograph should be able to stand on its own without verbal description. The experience may be enhanced by a caption or statement, but it shouldn’t depend on one. (This is why I sequenced the images and text of Two-Powered independently — to avoid subjugating the images to illustrations of the text or subjugating the words to captions of the images. I wanted to create a tension between the words and images. I’m not sure I was successful: I think the words carry more power than the pictures, but what can I say? I did my best.)

I’m thinking about this now, because I’m trying to figure out a statement for my many scars series. Part of me wants to say almost nothing, to let the pictures stand on their own, and the other part wants to tell everything he’s ever told me because he’s such an interesting person and because all the things he told me informed the images that resulted. Perhaps I just have to figure out a way to enforce a sort of afterword online?

Anyways, enough going on about this. So You Think You Can Dance is on!

Yesterday morning I walked to work by myself, and it was stunning. Everything was dark and shiny with sun and recent rain. I watched raindrops all lit up by the sunlight like diamonds or something fall from trees. I saw sunrays streaking through a slight mistiness in the air. I wanted to take pictures at every step, but I was late, and my camera was packed under a bunch of other gear.

I cried a good part of the way, from the beauty, and exhaustion, and this week’s reminders that life is just way too short to take anything for granted. I feel weird that things that really have nothing to do with me – or at least that affect other people far more profoundly than I could presume to imagine – would affect me so deeply (and I’m not talking about swine flu). I found out on Wednesday that a local flickrite – one of my first contacts on flickr I’m sure – died on Monday. I only found out on Saturday that he was sick, and it really upset me.

The thing is, I never actually met him. I kept thinking that our paths would just cross naturally. I thought it was just a matter of time. We both have young families, we live within several blocks of one another, we have overlapping interests. Indeed, my husband met him once or twice in job interviews. Surely one Saturday we’d see one another with our families and cameras in the park or something. But it never happened.

I keep thinking about the word hospice, how the report I saw said a crew of loved ones were making his living room into a hospice. I keep thinking about how it must feel to know you are dying when your kids are still so young, or how it must feel to know your partner and the father of your kids is dying. But it’s truly unimaginable. I wondered how to reach out to them now, or if that would even be appropriate. Could I leave a lasagne on their stoop? Or send a flickr message to him? Would he even be online? Probably not… A message to his wife? To say what? I thought I had at least a week to figure something out, but on Wednesday I was forwarded a message from one of my work friends. He had already passed on.

Sometimes procrastination doesn’t pay.

I wasn’t sure whether to blog about this. It seems presumptuous to feel so sad about someone I didn’t really know, like an insult to his friends and family. But he did touch my life in a small virtual way, and I am thinking about him and his family a lot, and maybe that’s not an insult at all.

[updated below] I read a thought-provoking article this morning about child pornography laws and photography involving children. It’s a long one, but entirely worth reading.

I do think there is another, larger and probably more difficult question around artists using their children in their art, whether paintings, literature, or photography. Is it exploitation? I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. But I also think that if you want to express something about motherhood, parenthood, or childhood in our culture, at some point or other, your kid will come into the picture, literally or figuratively.

Photography seems particularly prone to exploitation. Last weekend, I watched Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, and he says a few times that he is in control. The photographer is always in control. The people he photographed sometimes felt his portraits were cruel and unforgivable, and he himself wondered – retrospectively – if perhaps photographing his dying father was an act of hostility.

Heather Morton Art Buyer linked to Barbara Crane the other day, who apparently paid her children 35 cents an hour to sit for her, with the agreement that they would not be identifiable in the photographs of human forms. I find this fascinating. The other day, I also read this blog post on a similar topic.

I don’t know what to think of Tierney Gearon’s work. I haven’t seen enough of it, and I haven’t yet watched The Mother Project (which, incidentally, TVO is showing on Thursday, May 7, at 10 pm as part of the Contact Festival). But my initial response to what I have seen is troubled.

I don’t think it’s right to assume or take it for granted that my child belongs all to me, as raw material for my artistic expression. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to feature your children in your art either. As I said in my comment at Elizabeth Fleming’s, I’m starting to think that as long as you’re aware of the potential for exploitation, as long as you’re a little bit troubled by that potential, it’s probably ok?

This seems like an appropriate time to give you a sneak peak at the work I’m putting together from the first two years of my son’s life (which I first mentioned here a while ago). I’m alternating between two working titles, “Two-powered” and “Motherhood and Apple Pie.” If you have a smart way to put those ideas together, please share.

Edited to add: Suzanne Revy blogged on the very same topic, only far more eloquently than I did. Which is interesting, because when I wrote my post yesterday, I had meant to include a link to the recent interview on nymphoto with Revy, but I forgot before I hit publish.

This is not a photo of two young guys in matching, bright green t-shirts and matching peeing poses, their backs to me, feet wide apart, beer bottles in the back pockets of their jeans. It was 6 p.m., and my husband, son and I were walking to the pizza shop to pick up some dinner. We met up with them again at the pizza joint, where they were a bit sheepish and on best behaviour, despite their obvious inebriation.

(with apologies to unphotographable)

(And this time it did come from my lips.)

Trying to learn the meaning and usage of the new (to old-fogey me) slang term, emo: “Is it a reference to Brian Emo’s music?”