This Ted talk with Alison Gopnik is great. I particularly love her description of being a baby as like being in love in Paris for the first time after drinking 3 double espressos!

I also find it interesting to think about the idea (based on research she mentions) that the longer the “childhood” the smarter the animal, and how that might relate to the trend toward “childhood” expanding into the twenties. It fits with the idea Ive talked about before that nowadays “adult” is a state where one is continuing to “develop” instead of being completed as it was thought of in the past.

Gopnik also talks about childhood being a time when your job is to learn and have ideas and adulthood being when you put what you learned into practice, Research and development vs production and marketing … its a great analogy.

At the end she proposes that if we want to be more like this, open minded, open creativity, then perhaps adults should think more like children. Another connection of children or “child-like” and being creative. It’s interesting to think about.

image: Patricia Lay-Dorsey

Patricia Lay-Dorsey is another photographer I met at Filter Photo Festival that I found connections with. We talked mostly about her project “Falling Into Place”. Looking through the work, what came to mind immediately is how much it shows the point of view of the subject. It is done in such a way that I think it invites the viewer to see from her perspective and enter into the scene in an experiential way not as much as an outside observer.

As I looked through the images I began to notice something familiar about the point of view; it reminded me of the vantage point I am often photographing from. I found a connection between the actual physical point of view of Patricia in her photographs and my experience of a “child’s point of view” or rather my point of view while relating to very young children. I also realized there is a similar interest in embodying the subject through the photographs, getting away from an object to be viewed from the outside and moving toward inviting you in to connect with this person and their experience…. something I love to explore in my own work.

I think my picture making has been linked to my interest in connecting with people, finding a similar view point as a place to relate, empathy as a way of understanding, and relating to how they are experiencing the world as a way to communicate. I feel like Patricia Lay-Dorsey may be doing something curiously similar in her work.

www.patricialaydorsey.com

"Watch Me Grow" Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman

Two weeks ago was the 2011 Filter Photo Festival here in Chicago.  I was invited to be a reviewer as editor of F-Stop Magazine.  I met with seventeen photographers and saw a lot of interesting work. In talking with a few of the photographers I found interesting connections between their work and my own interests and photography.  Here are the first two photographers.

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman are two photographers who collaborate on projects exploring “narratives of femininity”.  It was cool to find out they were interested in meeting with me because of connections between their work and mine, and there truly are… many interesting ones.

The work they showed me was “Ponder Food as Love” and “Watch Me Grow”.  “Ponder Food as Love” is a series of beautiful images with layers of meaning that are still rolling around in my thoughts for now …

The series “Watch Me Grow” shows the “storefront” sort of view of urban daycare centers and the images and language used on their exteriors.  I think what connects for me in this project is the taking of a sort of traditional style of photographing – the storefront image – and applying it to a not typical at all subject. It strikes me as humorous and adds a curious layer of meaning to the project.

I find this relates to my interest in the connections between art making and children…  it often seems children are not yet “adults” so their creative output or experience or subjecthood is not given the same consideration… And so something funny is brought about when you juxtapose or insert children the idea of children into an “art” context. I began to talk  about it a little bit here in talking about project plans for a “dérive as a walk with a toddler” and mapping the movements of a baby’s daily activity.

Here is a link to their site:

http://www.ciurejlochmanphoto.com/

I have recently started reading the book “Becoming” by Carol Mavor. In it this morning I read that there is a cliche of “the artist as eternal child.” I found this interesting and it got me rethinking my wonderings about the connections between the idea of “child” and “childlike” and being creative as an adult. I wondered if I had been evoking this cliche in my writing about my work when talking about how I as “artist” relate to children, but I don’t think I have.

In making photographs relating to children/childhood I have often gotten the comment that the images are “childlike” or that they are about me as an adult looking at things from a “child’s point of view.”  This always struck me as odd because it seems to me it was MY point of view I was exploring. It is from examining these two ways of looking at this that led me to the discourse of childhood and how it has developed and changed over time.

My original interest began with how our understanding of childhood is changing toward the “knowing” child and our understanding of adulthood is changing toward the adult no longer as a state of completion that a child develops toward but as ever “developing” or as always becoming. This, put simplistically, results in children being seen as “beyond their years,” being given more power and say in their lives and adults having multiple career changes, marrying later, having kids later and continuing to learn and “grow” throughout one’s life. This shift in ideas of child/adult also correlates to changes in economics and societal structures.

So basically the boundaries of these two categories of people are blurring. And because of this, I would say my pictures are in fact about my adult point of view relating to the people and spaces around me. Maybe in a way I’m talking about claiming this way of looking and way of experiencing the world around me as ADULT. While at the same time  children are being thought of as already complete human beings not the blank slates to be filled.

Anyway, some things I found interesting in the book (p25):

Modernist art “grew hand in hand with the invention of a new understanding of childhood: as free, unsullied, playful, utopically in touch with the world.”

“For Baudelaire, the skill of an artist turned on his ability to find ‘childhood recovered at will.’ For  ‘the child sees everything as novelty; he is always intoxicated.’”

Mavor also says that Freud believed “that to find childhood is to make art.” and “D.W. Winnicott saw…the artist’s creation of objects (as) and extension and refinement of childhood play.”

(Included above and below are some iphone pictures)

This past week, I have been reading and thinking about “the everyday” in art. Up until now I really hadn’t thought much about the everydayness of what I myself photograph or of “the everyday” as a context for my images. But I would say I am definitely engaged in photographing what I see and experience within the everyday. So with that in mind the essays and discussions about art and the ideas of “the everyday” become an interesting way for me to think further about what my photographs are about.

The anthology “The Everyday (Documents of Contemporary Art)” has a great introduction to what “the everyday” is and the history of ideas surrounding it. It briefly presents Henri Lefebvre and his “The Critique of Everyday Life.” In reading this introduction and a few of the essays, what got me thinking was this idea (that I think comes from Lefebvre and maybe is linked to the Situationists) that within “the everyday” are the makings of transformation, or change or even revolution. Or, that perhaps even in just examining the everyday you transform it. This is appealing to me possibly because I have always had a sort of mild fear of the mundane, everyday, monotony or sense of sameness in life and I find it interesting that there could be some sort of amazingness buried within.

In the introduction to the book, Stephen Johnstone quotes Lefebvre who wrote that the everyday is the place “where repetition and creativity confront each other”(15) … and in “Clearing the Ground,” Lefebvre writes, “Simultaneously it is also the time and the place where the human either fulfils itself or fails…” (27) I love that here in this sort of invisible place of mundane sameness is the makings of “life,” of content, of creativity. It makes sense in an obvious sort of way but also seems like kind of a great contradiction that is interesting to think about.

Further on in the essay, Lefebvre writes, “… it is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity.” (31) As part of becoming human we create and that creating creates us. This “becoming human” I associate with childhood and the idea of development, which has recently expanded beyond childhood to the idea that we are always developing, always “becoming”. For me this gets at the idea that the state of “becoming,” this childlike exploration/development/growth, is inherently creative and to engage with it is to make art… or that life becomes art…or something like that….

I am also interested in Lefebvre’s idea that “the work of art acts as a kind of ‘play-generating-yeast’ in the everyday”. (p14) I like that he links art with play, and that they have creativity in common. It makes me think yet again of ways that Christy-the-artist and Christy-the-nanny are engaged in a similar pursuit. Playfulness/playing in the everyday leads to art making or better yet, it IS art making, it is an act of creation. This is certainly true in all the ways the imagination and the visual and the senses are engaged while playing.

I have talked in the past about the link between art/creativity and childhood/“child-like” and how this plays out in what I do with my photography. I think the added piece that this “everyday” discourse brings to my thoughts is this idea that in the everyday, within the repetitive sameness, there are these opportunities to become aware and to therefore create and transform the everyday into art – to have human fulfillment rather than fail?

Ha! I think I may be throwing together a lot of different ideas and maybe misinterpreting things here and there but it is a start to my thinking about these things, .

(for example I would think that as soon as the everday has “amazingness” to it, it would no longer be the everyday… and is that the transformation/change Lefebrve talks about?)

Johnstone, Stephen, ed., The Everyday (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008).