This week I will be in Los Angeles for Review LA, an annual photography event put on by Center. I was invited as the editor of F-Stop Magazine to be a reviewer. Photo LA will also be going on while I’m there. I am looking forward to seeing lots of great photography and meeting
If your interested, more information is here: www.visitcenter.org/programs.cfm?p=ReviewLA

I will have two images the Project Basho “Onward ‘10″ exhibition juried by one of my favorite photographers Debbie Fleming Caffery. It will be at Project Basho in Philadelphia beginning February 1, 2010.

I was in Evanston yesterday for the Evanston Art Center faculty exhibition (I have a photograph in the show). As I was leaving I saw a family I recognized from a preschool I photographed at last January. I recognized the boy’s face and then thought, “But he is so little!”. This reminded me of how often I see the subject of one of my pictures again later (a person or a space) and they seem much smaller than I remember. It is like when you go back to a place you haven’t been to since you were a kid and it seems like all the buildings have shrunk or like you have grown (which I guess in fact you have).

I find it really funny when this happens with my pictures. I spend so much time looking at the images I feel like I know the “reality” of what I captured, but then one day I find myself back in front of the subject again and it feels like I’m a giant! There is this weird moment of disorientation that I really love. Here are 3 pictures that has happened with:

The most fascinating to me has been with the preschool pictures. I would spend the morning hanging out with the kids, talking, playing and taking pictures, then go home and edit the images. The next day when I would be back to photograph again and I would be amazed when I saw the kids, they looked so tiny! and then I would remember, “oh yeah, he is only 3!”

I think this may come about partly because of the way I photograph them, making them dominant in the frame, and then spending all that time seeing them that way while editing the images. But, I’m wondering too if it isn’t just my imagination. While I was making the pictures I was in their world, engaging them on their terms, their reality…. the oldest ones seemed like the BIG kids (being 4 and 5) but then like the boy I saw yesterday from the 4-5s class, he was so small!  There was a boy in the 2-3’s who really liked posing for the camera (first guy in pictures below), kinda seemed to be a tough, super hero sort of thing to his poses. So I would go with it, taking his picture and talking, experiencing him as he was presenting himself to me. Then later I’d spend that time choosing the best images and editing them, come back the next day and there he was, this little guy, three years old! He is still so much bigger in my memory of him…. In my mind and in the frame of the camera, he is this full sized person with a BIG personality. All of them are. I love that I can have that experience of a shift in my reality through engaging with kids and taking their pictures.

I’m in MPLS for a few days visiting. It is so beautiful in the summer I almost forget how cold and snowy winter is. I’m not sure what it is about MPLS or maybe it is my brother’s house, but I always seem to find way more pictures here than anywhere else. This morning I spent some time in the yard with “pig of a jig of a” or “Piggie” for short (the cat). I had fun photographing the plants.

I went to a dance recital over the weekend for a five year old friend. There were kids of all ages in the show, but the 2-3 year olds were really something to see. Not only were they just ridiculously cute in their fancy dresses, but also their performance was great – mostly they just stood on stage, a few doing moves and some getting frozen with their arms in position staring at the audience. It was so adorable that everyone was laughing. Visually it was something I would have loved to take pictures of, all the little ballerinas in a group with one lost ballerina off to one side…. This got me wondering what it is that makes children doing this sort of thing so interesting and funny. I mean if it were adults the audience wouldn’t have been laughing, ya know?

It first struck me that maybe in looking at very young people doing things that are new to them but are familiar and not new to adults; we get some sort of insight into humanness or something? I find my visual interest as a photographer is consistently in children doing things in the world, not adults. There is something in seeing children act in the world that engages my mind, stops me to think and wonder… When I attempt to photograph adults similarly, it doesn’t resonate in the same way, it doesn’t bring up questions or a wondering. What is the curiosity?

Judith Butler, a philosopher/theorist I read a lot in the 90’s, presented in her book “Gender Trouble”, the idea that identity (specifically gender) is something we are performing. It is the idea that gender is learned behavior that we enact and these performances are then what constitute “male” and “female” identities. Gender is what you do, not who you are (and there are many variations). This idea expands to identity in general. We are performing who we are, our actions don’t reflect some sort of “natural” identity that already exists but instead our actions create it.

Perhaps seeing kids so clearly learning to perform, not just a dance for a recital, but how to be “grown up” people, reminds us ever so slightly that we ourselves have learned to be who we are and to perform ourselves in the world… and its kinda funny.

I find this connection between my undergraduate studies in identity and how we become who we are/ BE who we are and my photography of children and childhood interesting. Perhaps I find clues to personhood in the way kids interact/act with the world around them that are harder to see once become adults.

I just finished reading the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. The gist that I got from it is that if you over think things or have too much information about something you limit your ability to use your intuition (which has been found to often be more accurate). Granted it’s a whole book and its not as straight forward as that, but this is what has got me thinking. All that follows could very well be me warping his ideas to fit into my brain, we’ll see.

In Blink, Gladwell talks about how verbalizing something, through talking or writing can actually impair your “insight” – your ability of rapid cognition, your understanding of things, or your ability to solve things. He says, “When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired” and in another section, “Allowing people to operate, without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.”

Jonathan W. Schooler, calls it “verbal overshadowing”. The left hemisphere of our brain thinks in words, the right thinks in pictures. So asked to describe what happened or to explain oneself … your visual memory gets displaced. Your thinking goes from right to left hemisphere and it becomes your memory of what you said rather than what you saw.

Gladwell didn’t talk about this idea in relation to art making, but I wonder how or if it applies. If there is some kind of limiting or something that happens when we become too verbal about our pictures. Like say when writing about ones visual creations, or more specifically explaining one’s photography in an artist statement. This is something I have always struggled with (and in graduate school it REALLY felt like explaining yourself). I often come back to that idea, “If I could write about it I’d be a writer not a photographer”.

One thing I have found about myself is that I tend to take pictures as an exploration into something. I don’t necessarily know WHAT it is I am exploring when I start. But once I do know, once I have figured it out, the exploration is complete and then the project is sort of done. Also, I have often felt like the thinking academic part of me doesn’t really go with the visually creative part of me and trying to bring the two together often makes for some very controlled and boring pictures, or they get very literal or illustrative of the idea I have in mind.

So what I wonder is if by writing about your work in a sort of explanation of yourself and what you have done (artist statement about your photography), are you possibly taking away some of your “insight” from the photography? Or some of what makes it interesting? And would this be so only for you the creator or would it be in the viewer’s experience as well? And perhaps this would only be the case if you were still working on the project…maybe we should only write about the work after it is complete? Does the word thinking part of our brain play well with the image thinking part? I’m sure this has got to be different for everyone (though I get the impression that what the book is talking about is universal). Also from what I read, it is possible that if you make very logical photographs it may not get in the way at all to then explain what you did. In an experiment Gladwell discusses, they had people solve written problems of different sorts and they found, “with a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn’t impair their ability to come up with the answers.”

So I thought I’d share a group of pictures that came out of a project where we started with a myth and made very illustrative/descriptive pictures of the story and gradually worked our way to something more intuitive or insightful. We started out with lots of words and information about the myth and made pictures, then from that point on we let go of the that stuff and just made pictures. I had thought I’d show you the first pictures, the over-thought-out ones,  but I haven’t found them anywhere. They were photograms of drawings acting out the story. Anyway, the myth I started out with was Persephone and below is where I ended up. (The images are in black shadow boxes and are kinda dark inside so you have to really look into them to see)

I met Ezra over the weekend (actually two weekends ago now). He is two-ish months old and is Estelle’s brother. Being around him got me thinking about the way of being of an infant, what it is all about, all the amazing things occurring in the brain of a baby etc. Ezra staring up at his blinky star happy as can be, arms and legs wiggling. It struck me as baby meditation.

Being new to this world, it seems to me a big job of a baby is to observe, to take in huge amounts of information. It blows my mind to think about what they are learning to comprehend, tiny details and patterns that we are unaware of. While listening to an audio file of an Andrew Weil Meditation book, it occurred to me that meditation can be described as focused observation and being present and being creative in the world can also have to do with observation and being present….So spending time with the little ones as a nanny, it’s like this big part of my job is to be observant and present. Isn’t it kinda the perfect counterpart to being a creative person?

Okay, so there is observation and being present, but I have also found there is some sort of connection between the way I go about entertaining/playing with kids and with being creative, like maybe it’s the same way of thinking or something. I was sitting at a café and wondered to myself, “What if I was with Estelle right now? What would we do?” And I immediately noticed how the blue sugar packs made this lovely angle toward the yellow and then brown sugar packs in the sugar bowl and I would probably play with them or build something out of them or … and then Estelle would get interested and we would play and talk all around the objects on the table.

So what is interesting to me is that when I asked myself those questions, it was really an aesthetic response I had (in addition to nanny knowledge)… It’s the color and shape and placement I’m noticing and interacting with knowing that if I engage with this the child I am with will most likely get interested and it will go somewhere like decorating the table or a story with sugar packs as characters. Prior to wondering this I wasn’t paying attention to what was on the table at all, partly because I was busy on my computer and partly maybe because I have learned to be an adult in public and not play with the sugar bowl?

I guess what it is I wonder and think about is how this so obviously relates to my pictures of children and childhood – the way I engage with kids is similar to how I engage creatively. And I tend to think of this as part of what my pictures are about, that what I am doing is related and relating to what the kids I’m with are doing… But there is often this comment about me making pictures from a “child’s point of view” that I always stop and question because I see it as my point of view (and well obviously it is). I think maybe it’s just that the adult me point of view relates well with what we think of as a child’s point of view, which I guess now I am saying is sort of  inherently a “creative” view of the world (defined here as related to being visually open, curious and engaged in the present moment).

Is the grand thought behind this maybe about creativity and a way of being in the world that we are born with? Are we born artists (and scientists and meditators)? Are kids always in a creative state? I guess this really depends on what you think of as creative. I am thinking of the sort of visual pleasure/appreciation that can come from openly taking in your surroundings with an eye for something to engage with… Okay so now I see I have found my way around to perhaps we are all just born to appreciate the world around us through our senses and young kids are doing that much more readily perhaps than the average adult?

Oh the thoughts keep going and going….

Yay for me! I’m a nominee for the New York Photo Awards 2009 Fine Art Single Image category. I like the part where they say about the nominees, “It is clear that they represent the Future of Contemporary Photography, and we wish them continued success.”

So, for the past week or so I have been reading a bit about artists who use geography, movement and mapping in their art practice. It has been just bits and pieces so far, the introduction to the catalog for a show called GNS that was at Palais de Tokyo in 2003, blog postings that have turned up in my google alert for “Francis Alÿs” (whose work I love), and then things here and there I have looked up from what I have read. Something about this work really sparks my imagination and gets me dreaming up projects. I have always had an interest in making art beyond the two dimensions of a photograph, but who knows if I ever will…

I’m not sure at this point I could sum up this sort of art practice or even describe it very well. My interest in it has something to do with actions and setting out a plan for them or documenting them in some way and the use of space and documenting that… Sorta… It also has to do with the everyday and how people are in the world… Interestingly these things really do connect to the interests I have identified previously in my work.

One artist who I came across is Richard Long. He makes art by walking. For example, he walked the same path of a circle over and over again which resulted in the marking of that path on the ground. He documents his work with photographs, writing or maps.

This work and others got me thinking about how much time I spend in my own house and how interesting/funny it would be to see the path I walk into my apartment floor (if it was made of dirt or something). There would probably be a deep path between my desk, the bathroom and the kitchen . Thinking about it further and wondering how these ideas might relate to my photographs and videos, I thought how fun and interesting it would be to do this sort of action with a crawling baby or a toddler just beginning to walk. To see their path in the space of their home would be really interesting because I don’t think it would have the expected pattern like I describe that my movements at home would have. In my imagination of it the baby would be in footy pajamas and like covered in finger paint or something that could get thicker as the path was repeated. I wonder if you can hire a baby model to do that sort of thing?

I am really interested in how these movements and mapping of space activities could be applied to the home and specifically to a kid’s experience. I have lots of ideas floating around and a stack of books I’m working my way through.. I am also playing around with an idea of making a map to find my way “home”… I have had an ongoing theme of not quite feeling at home/trying to decide where I want to live for as long as I can remember it seems. I was reading and came across the sentence, “You need a map when your lost” and thought how that could be fun to try to create a map of some sort to get un-lost or find “home”. At the very least it gives me lots to think about, we’ll see if anything comes of it…

Stuff I have been looking at: Francis Alÿs, Psychogeography, Theory of the Dérive which, (at least on first looking over) makes me think of what it can be like going on a walk with a toddler, “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”, Experimental Geography exhibit, someone named Amy who works with maps, and lots more.