Ampersand & Company

Merlin Eayrs

2012-01-23T07:19:00.001-08:00

Merlin Eayrs. Student of Architecture. Taken August 29, 2011

Why Portraits?

If I pick up a pencil to draw in a serious way, I always want to draw faces. Everything else seems mute and powerless. Drawing well still seems just beyond reach, but photographic portraiture is within my scope. A successful portrait for me is one that conveys the same feeling as a good painting or drawing. Its not that I want the photo to look like a painting - that is backwards and can lead to gimmickry. What I want is the presence - the feeling or emotion that flows from a good portrait.

So far the best description I have found of this process comes from British artist Tom Phillips:

"Once I get to work on a canvas I find it a nerve racking endeavour. I fear to waste the sitter's time as I dither, frittering away the hours it seems in indecisive manoeuvres. It is immensely frustrating to work for session after session without seeming to make any progress, but somehow (and in the final analysis I do not know why or how) some presence seems to emerge, a statement real enough to argue with. Getting a likeness is not the problem: any professional should be able to achieve that in a couple of sittings. The problem seems to be in reconciling a set of possible likenesses into a unity that has the feel of the subject's actually being there. The great test, as HWK Callom says, is to turn the picture to the wall and see if it seems that someone has suddenly left the room. Once, so to speak, this lack of absence is caught, many problems fall away, new elements suggest themselves to occupy the space that reality has created: painting a person has turned into painting a picture."
Tom Phillips* - The Portrait Works

It is surprising how similar the process is with photography. There is a precarious attempt to do two things at once - engage the subject and capture that engagement.

Phillips says "getting a likeness is not the problem" and indeed, with photography the problem of getting a likeness is almost entirely absent. You never find that you have made the nose too large or the ears not quite right. But the ease with which technically accurate images emerge only sharpens the question of what makes a portrait. You know when you have one with a certainty that is as strong as your inability to express what it is. Perhaps this is closer to the truth, the portrait speaks for itself and you cannot speak for it. It has a voice of its own that has uttered "a statement real enough to argue with".

True it may take weeks after the shooting for the eidetic dust to settle. And our conviction may grow stronger or change with time, but that is the essence of the process. So far, this feeling of an image working as a portrait has been the strongest with Merlin Eayrs. It brought me a tremendous feeling of satisfaction when it was finished.

* I found out about Tom Phillips through a book published by his daughter, Ruth Phillips. "Cherries from Chauvet's Orchard: a Memoir of Provence" tells about her life and marriage to another British painter, Julian Merrow-Smith. Julian's blog Postcard from Provence, which auctions a painting online every few days, is highly recommended, a brilliant idea, and often held up by me as "the clever use of technology to live the life you want." Oddly, I was led to Mr. Merrow-Smith by Vancouver-book-designer-who-fled-the-rain-for-the-South-of-France, Dean Allen, who's fitful web presence has faded but who's "About the Author" (the only reliable web page left) can still make me smile.

Book Nineteen

2012-01-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

Claire Fontaine
Your sheets are very smooth,
I like to rub my pen across them ... do you feel the way i do?
Claire Fontaine, who are you?

Hawksley Workman, Claire Fontaine

It was the summer of 1999 when I abandoned my ascetic attitude toward journals and bought a tiny Claire Fontaine* notebook at Paper Ya on Granville Island. Thus ended - with breaks for travel - a six-year period of bibliopuritanism where I sought to avoid filling books with ephemera, photos, and other paste-ins. I was happy to be in the world again. The book was full in a few months.

I began writing character descriptions from old photographs. I made a colour photocopy of a class photo from the 1940s, cut the individuals out of the group, and started :

Boy #1 Top row, far Left.
He had eyes like raisons. His father was a tailor for the theatre but the family was poor and so his clothing was made from audacious fabrics. He wore a crooked smile and stayed only a year. Later in life he would move constantly, staying no more than a year in any place. He would be happiest in transient, short-lived jobs. A cook in a logging camp. An attendant at elections. He became an expert in part-time labour: a master of impermanence.

Boy #2 Top row, 2nd in.
He was inseparable from his family and his family held him fast. There was no need for discipline because he was incapable of acting outside of family character.

Boy #8 (not shown)
He was the type of boy who could not be corrupted. The certainty of his character was balanced by his complete lack of ambition.

He was a young man who took up mountaineering to avoid the press of urban life. He believed that he saw in the passing faces of beautiful women a desire which he could not acknowledge. It was as if all of humanity were beggars and he was the only person left who had pockets full of coins. He may have thought that mountaineering was a virtuous life - free of the moral torment, which he, in his heart, knew to be result of his desperate imagination. He believed that if he could climb high enough he would be assumed into heaven.

At an early age he had an experience with books that led him to believe that everything that could be expressed could be expressed with words.

... I am most happy when I work on the books.

Here is a list of the books.

* Claire Fontaine still make their own paper. But, despite the beauty of some of their books and Hawksley's lyric endoresments, the Claire Fontaine website is a visual atrocity and I can't, in good conscience, link to it without a disclaimer lest you think me mad. For example, Claire Fontaine also runs Rhodia (another notebook favourite). We all know writing is fashionable. But maybe not in this way:

Lawrence Kristmanson

2012-01-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

Lawrence (Kris) Kristmanson. Artist. Taken August 8, 2011

You never think of television as a hand-drawn medium. But as a young artist, one of Kris' jobs was doing pen and ink illustrations of Vancouver scenes to be used as CHAN TV interstitials. It was the era of the indian head test pattern, before the frenetic rotating logos, animations, and tickertape news feeds. In comparison to today's television, the local news at that time was more like a slideshow at a community hall. He once told me he was reprimanded for doing an illustration of Vancouver's east side. It was a "We can't put that on air. What the hell were you thinking?" kind of thing. No urban decay or dope fiends, mind you - just buildings and streets.

Throughout his life, Kris has tried his hand at almost every image making technique. Illustration, painting, prints, lithographs, watercolour ... he even has a small foundry set-up to do castings and he shares a credit for a medal design for the the Royal Canadian Numismatic Association. Kris taught for a number of years at the Alberta College of Art and Design where he inspired a generation of young artists. Visiting the Kristmanson house was like touring the back rooms of a museum. But it was a museum where a very curious person had gone through the deep storage and pulled everything out to see what could be found. Paintings and sketches by well-know BC artists would be leaning up against a complete set of Krazy Kat cartoons, next to a book press, next to an etching press, next to a stack of lithographic stones that he had found abandoned in an alley behind modernizing print-shops. It was a maker's house, a house of ideas. It was always a stimulating visit.

Book Seventeen

2011-12-30T12:28:00.000-08:00

This one is not a journal but a scrap book. Built from the solid bones of an Ampad 22-156 computation book, it started out containing design notes for teapots but soon was given over to illustrations and photography culled from discarded New Yorker magazines. Some of my favourite illustrators are found here: Adrian Tomine, Lara Tomlin, Seth, and others. There are clippings of photographic work that has been far to good to be tossed out with the recycling. There are sad obituaries for both Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.

#17 is still ongoing. When space gets tight it is time to sharpen the scissors and eliminate the stacks of periodicals. Over time it is surprising how much of a sourcebook the scraps become.

Despite the terrible name, Ampad makes great books. If you are the type who keeps a laboratory, and you need to make notes on the progress of experiments - you know, diagrams showing how your genius takes form, vectors, equations, forces, chemical names, explanations and observations - you could find no better book than the 22-156. You could paste in an entire 8.5 x 11 inch sheet and still have a margin left - which is why these work so well as scrap books. They are sewn together, finished with book binding tape, but have no spine - and so there is no spine to break. Some gentle rough-housing and they submit and lie flat. They are not cheap - especially North of the border. They may not be available for much longer, either. As the Wiki tells us, Ampad filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005. Stationer's trivia: Ampad invented the yellow legal pad, beloved of lawyers.

Keeping a scrapbook always leads me to contemplate images and essentialism. I keep images because they hit me in a profound way. Being something of an image mechanic, I'm always looking for the essence that makes an image work. You can see me late at night, turning the pages, muttering: what is it? what is it? Damn you - give me your secrets! Invariably these books hint that whatever it is that makes the image work, it is never exactly what you think it is.

Here is a list of the books.

Pancho and Sal Pace

2011-12-11T09:29:00.000-08:00

Pancho and Sal Pace. Musicians. Taken August 8, 2011

Also known as the Rio Samaya Band, I know of few other people who's lives have been so given up to the Music. Inspired by it, governed by it, constantly following it, drinking it, breathing it in and exhaling it as life.

While I set up they took out instruments and began to play. I was particularly struck by Manhã de Carnaval. The song was sad and tragic, filled with beauty and rhythm. I had to just listen. I may have set up the room for a photo shoot, but they instantly transformed it into a Brazilian café.

Pancho was born in San Jorge, Argentina. As a young man he moved to Europe. He told me he was fascinated by instruments and always wanted to learn how to play them. Which instruments? I asked. All instruments! he replied. He followed his ambition; to create music and use it as a way to travel the world. After touring many countries, he was a confident troubadour-style musician.

The biography on the Rio Samaya Band page gives more detail: "While playing with Gypsies in the South of France, he learned rumbas and flamenco. His compositions reflect these influences of flamenco and other folk rhythms. After years of exchange with other musicians, his original music has a wide diversity of styles."

"Sal, who was born in England and raised in Canada, met Pancho in Cuzco, Peru, and from then on together as a family and musical duo have established a name for themselves. Sal compliments the music with her vocals, accordion, shakers, chachas, bombo and guitar. They have a unique poetic style of translating simultaneously from Spanish to English."

You can see many of the videos from their concerts at riosamayaband.com. They are presently touring India.

Book Fourteen

2011-12-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

This book is composed of rough, almost unpleasant craft paper. Two pieces of galvanized sheet metal make up the cover. I cut the sheets and put the whole thing together during a month residency at the Banff Centre. It was February 1997 and I was working on a contribution for the "Deep Web" project. The results are still available on this site. An Index of Possible Saviours is a collection of animations I made of the concrete poems of Canadian poet b.p. nichol.

In 1997 Web animations were a kind of Zoetropic machine. They played at erratic speeds, were made up of low resolution GIFs, and were generally quite tiny. These qualities became advantages for web pages delivering time-based poetry and text. I adapted some of my own work for the medium. Bloodwork: An Epigram to Anna Akhmatova is a dedication to the Russian poet and Birds of Good Omen for Sandra married slow progress of the text with the stop motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge.

I also completed an animation of Leonard Cohen's "Two went to Sleep." As neither the images nor the text were mine I didn't put it up. But, I still like it, and there is something in the way the text and the images repeat that links Muybridge and Cohen together.

I was in the mountains and it was desperately cold. Each morning I would awake in the inky blackness and walk over to the Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building. Elk hunkered down in the thick snow and sometimes you would surprise one in the darkness. A magnificent but unsettling experience.

In 1997, when my month was done I left the project I copied my work onto a CD. A technician brought in two special pieces of equipment - each about the size of a desktop computer. The first was a dedicated hard drive the second was the CD burner. The process took all afternoon.

That CD no longer works and the word files on my computer from that time will not open. I have the pages of the journal to read and some letters in a box. Things fall apart. Time passes.

Does time pass differently for everyone? I think it might. For a while I asked people if they had a shape or a notion of how time passed. I asked because, for me, the year has always been a circle with the summer at the top. Christmas and new years are at the very bottom. Hence "the height of summer" or "the depths of winter." I tried to realize this notion by breaking the circle and swivelling out the lower half to make a sine wave. I thought that a web page that scrolled horizontally would contain this idea well. The page would scroll from left to right - like time itself. The project was hindered by the limitations of web browsers but I still have a desire to return to it one day.

Here is a screenshot of the beginning. Click on the image for a larger version.

Here is a list of the books.

Miriam Gil

2011-11-16T23:15:00.000-08:00

Miriam Gil. Artist. Taken August, 2, 2011

I first met Miriam in the early nineties while volunteering at the Pacific Cinematheque. We worked the coffee bar. It was loud and the combination of the coffee machine, popcorn machine, and her Columbian accent meant that I could almost never catch what she was saying. When I could hear her we talked about art, film, and writers. Since high school I had loved the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Miriam told me that in Columbia he was so popular they just called him “Gabo”.

The only certainty was that they took everything with them: money, December breezes, the bread knife, thunder at three in the afternoon, the scent of jasmines, love. All that remained were the dusty almond trees, the reverberating streets, the houses of wood and roofs of rusting tin with their taciturn inhabitants, devastated by memories. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale.

I rented a room in her house for a few years. There were late night conversations over bowls of steaming chocolaté. There was a tulip tree that grew too close to the house. I could open the kitchen window and hang a bird feeder in the branches. I filled it in the morning with a teacup tied to a broom handle. The Steller’s jays loved the seeds and screeched their delight when it was full. Miriam had many friends and one Christmas she made a huge basin of a traditional Columbian potato-chicken soup. It was not served until late and it had a strange narcoleptic effect on the guests. Taking turns, in twos and threes, the guests fell asleep. A couple would doze for ten minutes, and wake up, only to find that another couple was drifting off.

She is a teller of stories, a painter and artist. You can find her artworks on her site miriamgil.com

Book Thirteen

2011-11-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

Tuesday October 24, 1995. Heathrow Airport

Upon landing, and shuttle between terminals it occurred to me that there is a vast incongruous country composed of all the spaces that are nowhere. Fast food and gas stations along the 401 between Cornwall and Windsor. Airport lounges. The space after security checks where one can only wait. Citizenship is exclusive and strictly controlled. Rights are tenuous. Laws and currency are polyphonous.

November 6, morning. [while on a three-day journey by boat from Venice to Izmir, Turkey]

Today there are no horses in the waves. Today the waves are the slowly evolving typographies of distant mountain ranges. They are monotone aerial photographs, animated like some abstract film from a lost formalist school.

We are on the top deck now, and where we sit there is no wind. We are on the bow, but because the ship travels with the wind our seats are breezeless. The sun comes through the clouds to make islands of light. People stand by the rails, pensively, or speak in small groups. We are slowly approaching a group of islands but I have no idea what they are called, or what country claims them. Today we are further south, though none of my maps shows where we are.

Last night Salim mentioned that he got car sick. He trained himself to go to sleep as soon as he got into a vehicle. As a result he had no idea where his own school was and when he finally had to drive to his own graduation he had no idea where to go.

Mid-evening. Today I've been restless. We sat in the sun and practiced some Turkish, had lunch after which Salim and I played cards. J. and I spent the afternoon together but I found it very much frustrating. We have a long protracted way of conversing which holds a lot of silence. There is so much heavy empty space between the start and end that I am exhausted. This being true I had a nap. I worry that we don't talk about anything other than exhaustion. The more tired she is the more plans I make to wind up our trip as it seems to be lacking purpose. We pass from one exhaustion to the next. The work, the trip from Vancouver to London to Paris to Chartres, the two days of hitching, the night train to Venice, the search for a boat and now the boat itself. We are sleeping on the floor and it is a painful, cramped, ineffective way to rest. On deck it is cold and inside everyone smokes.

Do we all start out as realists? Do we open the door to see the world as it is, tire or become obsessed and then create another? Or, is the world what it is and no other? Looking out the window it is dark and I can see only the patina of salt on the glass. Why does this answerless question persist? What is the point in even asking such a question? There is now a low cloud of smoke in the room. It hangs at its own level and is only slightly dispersed as someone walks through it.

... The market was a village of strange voices. A laugh and an angry word mixed in the air which was already heavy with many smells. So it seemed to T that the market contained all things, like a magic case or a gold coin, it could become anything. He nursed in his heart a desire to know more about all the things in the market than anyone else. Every mineral in the apothecary would be known to him, the names of flowers would blossom on his lips as he inhaled their fresh and pungent perfume. Fine styles of ornament would be to him like the names of his family and people would travel many mile for his opinion ...

The ship is trailing a white cloak of foam behind it. The moon is white and full. This room is clouded with Turkish cigarettes. The Turkish men speak in their oddly aspirated language. Some, who have just entered the room, sing softly.

Here is a list of the books.

Jaron Freeman-Fox

2011-10-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Jaron Freeman-Fox. Musician. Taken July 13, 2011

Constantly in motion and generating a climate of theatre about himself, Mr. Freeman-Fox offered up endless possibilities. He can be seen here, listening to the bridge.

Jaron grew up on one of the Gulf Islands, in a uniquely west-coast environment. Now he calls Toronto home. He is one of the many musicians influenced (and fortunate lad, mentored) by legendary musician and composer, the late Oliver Schroer (who was lovingly known as Canada's talest free-standing fiddler). Jaron carries Oliver's five string fiddle with him. He uses it to play his own compelling interpretation of Field of Stars. The fiddle was accidentally decapitated in September, sending shock-waves through the folk music world. The fiddle has been restored and lives again. If you are in Toronto you can probably catch Jaron playing solo or in one of the seemingly endless combinations of musicians that make up the TO music scene. If you are on the West Coast, keep your eyes on the Sunshine coast.

Check out Jaron's music here.

Sechelt Festival of the Arts 2011

2011-10-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

[update] another picture of the opening event by Bob Evermon.

Tonight was the opening of the Sechelt Festival of the Arts Juried Art Show. My portrait of Giorgio Magnanensi hung right beside a work by Todd Clark - so I felt in very good company. As it turns out juror Greg Bellerby selected Todd's work for purchase by the District of Sechelt. Congratulations Mr. Clark.

This is my first public exhibition of photographic work. The show runs until the 23rd of October. All work is for sale.

Chris Coole

2011-10-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Chris Coole. Musician. Taken June 29, 2011

Chris arrived, banjo in hand. The banjo is a great instrument and the one that Chris brought was a five-string, open-back banjo. It was beat-up and wonderfully photogenic in itself. To my surprise, Chris had some postage stamps inside the body of the instrument - one of which was the Canadian commemorative of Yousuf Karsh. How interesting. We got some good shots of Chris with the body held up next to his head. We even tried some with Mr. Coole looking like a orthodox icon.

My assistant, Esme, is crouching behind him, holding the banjo, trying both not to be seen and keep the banjo steady. Sadly there is not much of a connection between old-time music and Russian ikon painting or the photo would have been more useful. I much prefer the laughing Chris at the top.

Check out Five Strings Attached with no Backing it's a favourite or Old Dog - his solo CD. If you ever get a chance to catch one of the many bands that he shows up in you're in for a treat.

Find out all about him at his site chriscoole.com.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Eleven

2011-10-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

Book eleven was a mistake. When I made it I tried to avoid pasting anything in. It was to be text only. It was designed in a very self-concious attempt to focus on my writing without the distraction of graphic elements. It was a kind of textual puritanism. It took me five years to complete and undoubtedly failed to record what is most compelling about the passage of time - the ephemera, the visual, and the transitory.

This was the first book that I actually made. In that regard I have always been happy with it. I unbound an old atlas purchased at a second-hand shop. After painting the pages with a mixture of gesso and acrylic medium (designed to give a white surface for writing that would still permit the maps to show through) I folded them into signatures and sewed them together as instructed in The Craft of Bookbinding.. I completed it with a metal hinge. Part of my prohibition against pasting materials into the book was the inevitable expansion this caused. The metal hinge would not stand for this. The cover holds an engraving from the days of moveable type - it is a photograph, screened and etched onto a copper plate with four holes for mounting on a wooden block. The book boards are covered with tar paper - a preferred construction material for me at the time.

Some fragments:

July 12, 1995

A good book is the kind that is difficult to read. A book, the bones of which, catch in the throat and, if read at the right moment, can choke the reader. It's got to be a little like a difficult poison, like alcohol that burns on the way down and leaves you with false impressions. A good book will ruin your vision that way.

I have discovered the most eloquent melancholy in The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

"He is an isolated individual who can express himself, but is unsure who he is."

"I never gave credence to that which I believed. I filled by hands with sand. I called it gold, and emptied my hands of all of it. The sentence was my only truth. With the sentence said, everything was done; the rest was the sand it always was."

If I had a camera I would always film everyone running towards the camera. Bright sun. Globs of light in everything.

August 16, 1995

Ears like a peel of grapefruit, large and pithy.

August 17, 1995

He always found the railing quickly in a stairwell for fear that someone would push him from behind. And the grocery store exuded a smell that was almost like almost every spice he knew. It must be fragrant to live in your world, they thought, where everything is the essence of something else.

If you knew that someone would never be happy would you be justified in taking their life? If you knew that humanity was doomed to misery what could you do? What does someone do who is faced with a meaningless life - sycophant.

He walked up to my front door one day. I said, "You look like you have something on your mind, what's the matter?" He said, "I am plagued by a meaningless existence. I merely am."

June 27, 1998

For a while every time someone said something to him he thought of a tree.

"I have lived in this city for ten years" elicited the image of a weeping willow. "She barely remembers" made him think of cedar. His sister was a Japanese maple. Each letter of her words, a leaf, the leaves, veined with green veins, spines across the body of leaves or else a silk hair drawn over the green fabric of her speech. The letters over and over again, growing into the space between worlds. Sounding so unlike the gravel of his conversation. HIS talk like nothing but sharp stones underfoot - like the prick of burnt grass on the bare instep in summer. His talk a thistle, his way of talking, thorn after thorn after thorn, pressed into the tender flesh of her sole."

Here is a list of the books.

Dan Bouman

2011-09-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Dan Bouman. Photographer. Conservationalist. Taken June 28, 2011

In 2005 Dan Bouman turned a room in the Gibsons Public Art Gallery into a giant camera obscura. Entering it was an unusual and strangely unsettling experience. It was a bright sunny day in lower Gibsons and the interior of the camera was very dark. It took about four minuted for my eyes to adjust to the light. But when they did I could see the water, the dock and fishing boats of the harbour inverted and "projected" on the wall of the room. It made even ordinary events like the passage of a car or the progress of a person seem magical. As if the movement confirmed that this was not simply a reflection or faint slide projection, but was, in fact a copy of reality. The magic was accomplished with no more than darkness and a tiny hole placed in exactly the right spot.

There is a famous scene in the Pressburger and Powel film A Matter of Life and Death (also known as Stairway to Heaven) that opens with a man in a camera obscura, observing, godlike, the daily goings on in his English village at the time of the second world war. The scene has implications for what will transpire in the rest of the film. [I've embedded the clip at the end of this post.]

Dan is also the man behind a set of very well done photos of thespians in the Heritage Playhouse. Mostly completed around 2001, Dan took some time to set up the shots. They are perfectly lit and communicate a wonderful sense of humour and drama. The photos lined the theatre entrance and I was always inspired by them every time I passed by.

On the Sunshine Coast many of us know Dan as the director of the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association. Dan is the director. His clear-headed, tireless work is much appreciated. To back up this endorsement I made an on-line donation to the SCCA the day this post went up.

Dan's camera obscura and pin-hole photography is the subject of a review in Going Coastal Magazine and a feature in The Georgia Straight by Andrew Scott. You can find out more about him in the directors page of the SCCA.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Ten

2011-09-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

I carried this around with me in a pannier as I cycled to work at Duthie's Bookstore on Robson Street. It became wonderfully worn. One day I was walking down Commercial Drive and I found a discarded grinding wheel. I used an exacto knife to cut a hole the exact size of the wheel in the cover of the book. I was able to fit it in. It was a snug fit and it stayed put.

Among the finds that this book records are the journals of Peter Beard. I would take a copy of The Adventures and Misadventures of Peter Beard in Africa away on my lunch break and I would make colour photocopies of key pages. It was a revelation. I couldn't afford to buy the book at the time and it quickly became hard to find. The Duthies flagship store had a large art section with a good sampling of contemporary photography. I never realized until now the influence that it had on me.

It was here that I began the experiments that would become 25 Ways to Close a Photograph. I would look at a photograph of a person and try to come up with a description of them. The exercise was inspired by a line of commentary I once read. I've forgotten the author who was praised as "being able to convey in a few lines a more compelling description than most authors do in an entire novel." I would come up with a description, print it out, and paste it over a portrait. The effect seemed to me quite powerful. I began to scour the junk shops and antique stores for old photographs - group photos worked best. The writing seemed to take advantage of a quality that was at the centre of photography itself. The context of a photo is like the glue that holds the photo in its album - often it simply lets go with time.

One of the books we sold at Duthies was the heavy and formidable An Autobiography by Richard Avedon. We had a display copy that was all but destroyed - the spine was broken, signatures had come loose and the pages were very worn from customers flipping through the book. I asked the manager if I could have it. The answer was yes. I kept it closed for a long time, opening it one page at a time and trying to write a description of the person on the page. It was like a vault of inspiration. I felt like a man who had been at sea for years who had a secret basket of fresh crisp apples.

The influence of Avedon on my portraits is clear.

Here is a list of the books.

Chelsea Sleep

2011-09-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

Chelsea Sleep. Musician and Composer. Taken June 13, 2011.

I first heard Chelsea play fiddle when she was about 16, warming up outside the Gibson's Heritage Playhouse. A remarkable player, she has since become a courageous instructor of younger fiddlers. Her group Bad to the Bow worked most of this summer in the recording studio to lay down tracks for their first CD. Together with Emilyn Stam Chelsea also formed The Twisted String, a group dedicated to performing the work of legendary Canadian composer and musician Oliver Schroer. Chelsea worked closely with Oliver for a number of years before his untimely death in 2008. One of the earlier students of Michelle Bruce Chelsea was also a key player in the Coast String Fiddlers, a group that inspired an entire generation of musicians. Chelsea recently released her first CD, Simple Song.

We had a number of good things come out of the shoot. The Twisted String were well known for doing an entire-band jump in the middle of some songs. So we got a bit of air time. We also took a lot of shots of her with her violin. Given who she is, Chelsea has a lot of these and at one point she said, "you know, I have SO many pictures of me with a fiddle, I'd like something different." So we did that. One of them came out of post-production, solarized, not quite showing the tom-boy fiddler most of us know.

As a photographer the first question you run into is "is the post-processing going too far?" I've thought about that quite a bit as I go through the editing stages. Sometimes an approach to photography seems to hinge on an idea of truth. People can have very strong views on whether editing and post-processing is legitimate or not. Epistemology is contested territory in any field but it seems particularly problematic with photography. In the end I think there is no falseness in photography - only in how the photographer presents it. Said another way there are no dishonest photographs - only dishonest photographers. It's a shift in emphasis on Richard Avedon's famous statement "Every photograph is accurate. None of them is the truth."

I'm not sure why there is a need to deny the editing and post-processing in order to make a photograph seem more "artistic" or spectacular. Surely, as with any media, all the decisions someone makes are part of the art. Perhaps photography seems so invisible, and brings the subject so close, that the genius of photography is going into the world to find an exact moment - not staging it or making it up after. Obviously as a photographer who works in the studio you can't avoid staging your photos - an this leads one to be more generous with acceptance of post-processing also.

Find Chelsea Sleep's work here.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Nine

2011-09-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

Book nine seems unexpectedly productive. It has one of my favourite passages. A favourite because it actually happened. It goes like this:

Wednesday March 8, 1993

A week into March and still the snow persistently falls. I walk to the vacant field at noon with my father's Polaroid camera. I want pictures of the ground, traces, the footprints in the field, but instead I am drawn toward the playground. Everything is black and white except the slides and monkey bars which are blue and red. I take the pictures but I must put the polaroids next to my skin, against my chest, so that they will be warm enough to develop. I walk back across the empty field with pictures forming under the warmth of my shirt.

That night I dream of a Polaroid camera for photographing paintings. The pictures do not develop like ordinary pictures–as if someone were slowly turning on the lights in a darkened room–but rather they develop as the artist produced the painting, brush stroke by brush stroke. I point the camera at you and squeeze the release on the shutter. The picture forms slowly, through all the years of your life, your face growing into the frame; while the background flows by like a road through all the places you have ever been.

The book also contains some typographic poems made in an early graphics program for windows. They were inspired by Herbert Spencer's Pioneers of Modern Typography. I remember thinking they might make good postcards. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Here is a list of the books.

Giorgio Magnanensi

2011-09-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Giorgio Magnanensi. Conductor and Composer. Taken May 30, 2011.

The morning opened with torrential rain, and although it stopped by noon (when our shoot was scheduled) it was still grey and overcast. This shot was done right at the very end when we tried some very formal, very still shots. Giorgio had on a white shirt, the backdrop was white and his beard and hair were shades of grey - the whole thing came out flat and soft.

Initially I was very disappointed. In my head I wanted high-contrast. But each time I encountered this photo in my editing it jumped at me. I decided to emphasize it's natural character even more in the processing stage. The surprising result is better than I could have hoped. When I met Giorgio to give him his print for the sitting, I gave him the choice between this and another more high-contrast print in which he is speaking and looking very prophet-like. It was at a gallery opening. Nadina Tandy was also there. Everyone emphatically agreed on the image above.

I have since had this one enlarged to 2 x 3 feet and mounted on aluminum. It seems to emerge directly from the early history of photography.

Giorgio Magnanensi is the Artistic Director of the Vancouver New Music Society, and even though his work necessitates a certain fluidity with technology, he still writes all his compositions and scores by hand. He brought a CD of his recent work with Veda Hille titled Young Saint Marie. He was great to work with, full of ideas and new ways of thinking, affable and generous with his time. And yes, he does have a fantastic beard.

Find Giorgio Magnanensi's work here.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Eight

2011-08-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

I bought a thin spiral sketchbook to take on a week-long trip to Morocco. It holds the end of an epistolary romance, broken in the landscape of North Africa. This book contains some Arabic script, notes from the night-train to Marrakech, descriptions of waking up in Tangier, and my impressions of the souks, streets and sands of Morocco.

February 5, 1993

Morning Tangier. The city looks very 1940s as if there were a vast building spree that began in the 20s. Bicycles go by with crates of oranges. Gas canisters. The bikes are motorized. Not quite motorcycles and not bicycles either.

Evening, hotel-top. Beginning to cool off. Full moon, high clouds. Sea breeze. Moonlight on the Mediterranean. God, it’s a backdrop for a 1950s cheap romance. Whistles, beeps, below. Clean fresh air.

Today we ventured out of the hotel and, as we had been warned, we were immediately swarmed by hustlers, offering to take us everywhere, show us anything. They are incredibly persistent, unshakable. One followed us for an hour and when we tried to shake him he threatened to kill my mother.

There are certain things you can do that are really excuses to occupy space in an environment. I don’t smoke, so the pleasure of extending one’s stay at a café table while finishing a cigarette is lost on me. But a notebook is a reason to linger anywhere. Instead of the elusive pleasures of inhaling tobacco (gone with the last traces of smoke, leaving only ashes, carcinogens, and a bad smell) you have the traces of words. Maybe your coffee was done and you just needed an excuse to occupy a table for another hour, fine. But later that day, week, year, you encounter the page from that café table and you will find something there - for in the book you are still sitting at the table, the sunlight is still warm on the wood. The over-ripe oranges on the trees in the courtyard are still falling, landing with a dull, soft thud on the moroccan tiles.

Here is a list of the books.

Diego Samper

2011-08-20T01:24:00.000-07:00

Diego Samper. Artist. Taken May 22, 2011.

Diego is a difficult man to describe. He has led me to some incredible photographers, the most influential being Hector Acebes, a Columbian who travelled alone through northern Africa in 1947. Diego himself is a gifted photographer who also paints, draws, constructs, assembles, makes films, and is an architect. The most general thing you could say about his work is that he never takes an idea half-way. Everything is developed until it reaches a kind of final organic, ecologic conclusion. I think this is why I enjoy his painting most - the abstract works seem to be, not an artist's explorations, but rather self-contained landscapes built from the very ideas of colour and texture.

He once made an entire book that followed the progress of a burnt hole through the pages. It is one of the most interesting objects I have ever seen.

Diego came to Canada from Columbia to avoid the frequent abductions and ransoms that were part of the drug wars. His family included two teenaged daughters when he arrived in British Columbia. Since settling on the Sunshine Coast he has been able to return to Columbia and re-establish his presence there. Here is a biography from his website.

See Diego Samper's work here.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Seven

2011-08-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

The first of the travelling books. It started life as a spiral bound Strathmore sketchbooks. I added a front cover of hard cardboard and pasted on a page taken from a mathematics text published in Irish Gaelic. I worked on it through the winter of nineteen ninety-two when I had gone to live on the west coast of Ireland to write. The book opens with sunny, optimistic descriptions of Edinburgh in November.

November 21, 1992

Edinburgh again. The smell of coal and rain. Cars and diesel. Rain. Gey and a drizzle and then a stronger rain. Later, a rain that might be thinking of snow, branching out into larger drops, falling slowly, subject to a different sense of gravity; the drops from an eavestrough or awning falling slowly to sit in your hair with a trickle down your forehead.

Edinburgh has so much old stone. Stone that ages black, ages by turning the colour of the coal smudge that devours it, the oldest monuments black with a grit that hurts your eyes to look at.

Later.

It is rainy and damp. This is the kind of dampness that will fit into the bottom of your pocket and follow you for days. The kind of dampness that keeps oil paint from drying. Window frames painted in the nineteen-twenties are still wet, the paint catching at the ridges of your fingerprint. The kind of weather in which your hair goes mouldy and your fingernails curl into your palms. Fires give off only steam. Fruit begins to rot while still in the bud, before it can even grow.

It was weather like this when Jerico's uncle exposed his heart. He could be walking through that permanent dampness and think only of her. But always he saw her dully, as if through a heavy mist or under miles of water. Edinburgh, he thinks, reeks of stone, of black hearts kept in the cellar, of metal turned black with coal dust. This is your city, where nothing glows brighter than the headlights in the rain. Stone and clocks. A city where nothing is choreographed but the clouds and the drizzle.

Most of the rest was completed in a cottage in Connamara. I loved it there, despite the winter and the weather. This book contains a pop-up of donkeys made while staying at the donkey rescue service and a number of pictures of Wales where I spent Christmas with a collection of New Zealanders. I wrote a lot of letters that winter and lived for the arrival of the postman.

Here is a list of the books.

Buckman Coe

2011-08-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

Buckman Coe. Muscian and Composer. Taken April 13, 2011.

I first met Mr. Coe in 2009. He was singing at an event held in a furniture warehouse that had been converted to a gallery for an exhibit of Bengal textiles. His voice had an eerie floating quality that seemed to come from very far away - as if he were channeling the spirit of a Tibetian lama.

During the shoot he made a comment that let to the creation of this site. We were positioning some lights and getting ready. By a strange coincidence the shoot was taking place in the same warehouse were I first met him. He took some pictures of the set-up on his phone and said "What's your site? I can mention it if you like." My last site update was almost 10 years ago. How embarrassing. I mumbled some excuses and said that none of my work was really online yet.

But now it is.

The shoot went well, but was beset by a number of technical problems. Lights kept failing and there were some focus issues. This was my second indoor session and I was struggling without the wonderful soft-everywhere daylight of my outdoor studio. Buckman was patient throughout the whole thing, though, and we had a great conversation about songwriting and creativity. He tried some tricks, like the stand-up-hair-flick on the left.

I was leaving in a few days on a trip, and Buckman was putting the final touches on his latest CD. I sent him some comps in case they might be useful and one ran in a review by Mike Usinger in the Georgia Straight. The CD is called By the Mountain's Feet. Design was done by local photographer/designer Reine Mihtla of Artpowerhouse. The full story of it's production can be found here. It is a beautiful piece of work.

See Buckman Coe's work here.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Six

2011-07-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

Hardcover Sketchbook. Given to me by Sarah Clift in the spring of 1992 and recovered three times. As each of the paper covers wore out and fell away, the centre portion of the front was pasted into the book. The final cover was made from cutting up a poster for the Vancouver Opera and a Knopff book catalogue. A friend once criticized it for being "too romantic - too emotional."

During this time I was reading a lot of Milorad Pavic and became fascinated by Derrida's The Post Card. And so the book contains several short lines very much in the style of Pavic:

She is a very delicate woman. The sound of a plate breaking could kill her.

While the derridian influence played out in other ways: I had a short relationship with a woman where I sent her a post card after each time we met. In the years when this book was written you could go into a drug store and purchase a colour photocopy for 49 cents. This was unprecedented. Photocopies were by definition designed to obliterate subtlety and detail thus reducing the world to a washed-out, yet high-contrast version of itself. With the colour photocopy all that changed. The technology has such implications for artists that the Western Front Gallery ran a show with the Xerox machine itself installed in the gallery. The saturated colours entranced us. It was tempting to put everything onto the platen: autumn leaves, fabric, old photographs, younger versions of ourselves.

Here is a page that interests me. On the right, a photocopy of a photograph of Georgian Bay, on the left the text reads:

Poem to the hands of a dead uncle

Unpack your hands

Joint by joint unhinge the fingers. The bones of a bamboo kite lacking paper, built of torn string and knots. Your hands are the ribs and skeleton of a crow.

It is important to realize that, just as there are fields that dogs will not walk through because of scent, because of noise, because of dust; there are some things these hands will never do. They will not spill tar on rooftops or gather salmon. As if it would be easier with a felt-tip pen to darken squares on ariel photographs, or wade through supermarkets.

If I could help you I would. Tighten or loosen the skin stretched over you palms with a key placed in your wrist. Lengthen your lifeline to improve fortune. But I see from the state of your body it is too late for mechanics.

Later travelling the bus through Vancouver winter: the branches more like hands here. The long black fingers of a woman extended to catch rain.

Here is a list of books.

Self Portrait

2011-07-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait. Taken October 25, 2010

"Time passes. People grow old, fall out of love, go their separate ways. Charis and Weston met in 1934, married in 1939, in the fall of 1945 she wrote to tell him she was leaving him, and in 1946 they were divorced. Weston took his last picture in 1948. He died in 1958. These are the dates. Nothing has caused me more problems in writing this book than the interminable need to establish and verify dates. I hope they are all correct but in one sense dates are irrelevant. The value of a life cannot be assessed chronologically, sequentially. If that were the case then the only bit that matters – like the closing instants of a race – would be how you felt in the closing seconds before your death. (This is one of the questions posed by photographer Joel Sternfeld – 'Is what we are at the end ultimately what we are?' – in his book On this Site.) The moments or phases that make life worthwhile can come early or late. For atheletes, and women dependent solely on their beauty, they always come early. For writers, artists, and everyone else they can come at any time. If you are unlucky they do not come at all. Sometimes these moments are preserved in photographs. The acts – in the artist's (or model's) case, the works, and, in an atheletes, the results – that redeem a life can come in advance of everything requiring redemption. Chronology can, sometimes, obscure this."

Geoff Dyer – The Ongoing Moment

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Five

2011-07-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

Hardcover sketchbook. It is not a very nice book to look at. It is worn from being carried in a bicycle pannier for three months. There is nothing interesting pasted inside, and it is messy. Still - so many things began in this book. It has drafts of poems that I would complete later. Like Birds of Good Omen for Sandra. It also has bits of writing and thoughts that would find their way into finished works. Once piece that remains unpublished goes like this:

In the nineteen-seventies a fascination develops with dare-devils. Swimming pools are converted into shark tanks, the Grand Canyon bristles with approach ramps and the remains of rocket engines litter the rocks. High-wires are strung between the tops of skyscrapers.

Marcel d'Extrodinaire has a special car built with two accelerators. One for the driver and one for the passenger: "Like sewing in a second heart." he comments to the press.

He offers the passenger seat to anyone who will get in. "Experience the greatest thrill of all! The thrill of pure speed!" A large crowd blossoms around Marcel's vehicle, a flower of expectant faces. The crowd withers and disperses when Marcel tells them he has also removed the brakes.

He is finally approached by a young woman. When he reminds her there are no breaks she is unflinching.

"I will get into your car Marcel" she says, "on one condition."

"Yes?"

"That I drive."

Marcel's family has a long history of tempting fate.

I was young - only twenty-five. Writing and wanting to write. I would set myself the challenge of describing things. Often I would use photographs because there was a moment of drama in them. Sometimes there was a character there that could be brought to life with only one or two lines. I would go to art galleries or photography exhibits and describe the people in the pictures.

- A man holds a child and smiles. The child is terrified.
- A man alone. Formal.
- A woman, her head turned left.
- A young girl, a baby, and a pair of arms holding the child.
- A daughter and mother facing each other.
- A young boy with thick black-rimmed glasses.
- A man with a dog - a great Irish Setter - the dog is blurred, trying to get away.
- An older woman in a black sweater and heavy eyelids, a small string of pearls around her neck.
- Two men, their arms are crossed as the each clutch the other's nose.
- A nun.
- A man in a raincoat and sunglasses. In each hand he holds a toy gun. The sunglasses are thin and do not hide his eyes.
- A frightened cat on a garbage-can lid.
- Three girls, their faces distorted as they try to press each other out of the picture.
- A woman with roses.

And as always there are fragments of things. Little bits that cast a partial, twenty-year old light:

The boy is shown frantic. He clutches at the neck of a large bird. The bird flies and the ground is missing. The eyes are wide on the boy. On the bird they are just ordinary avian eyes. Natural, unconcerned with the passenger attached around the neck. This is a natural form of flight. The kind you experience in dreams, when what is unnatural is the ground - placed like a wall in your path.

And the only thing I consider strange is that in the morning I awoke and my arms are clutched frantic about your neck. The plumage of your wings is crumpled beneath the weight of my body.

If I could give advice to a young person it would be this: Write everything down. Always. Absolutely everything - leave nothing out. The result will be like living twice.

Here is a list of books.

Nadina Tandy

2011-07-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Nadina Tandy. Painter. Taken October 25, 2010.

Nadina arrived early and soon we were earnestly talking about daughters, trading stories about hers and mine. She conversed fluidly and with emphatic gestures. We switched between white clothing and black background and black clothing and white background. I ended up with a number of good shots but I couldn't decide on one that could communicate the way I wanted. This is often the case. It took me over a month before I decided on the top image. Often I end up in the centre of a field of possibility and I can push my interpretation in a number of directions. I almost decided on this one.

She was just a little tired and paused to rub her eyes, but the gesture is one of deep fatigue or unconsolable grief. It's not a great portrait of Nadina but it is a portrait of something.

Where is the truth in a gesture? Part of our fascination with photography is our fascination with the very idea of truth. We often have a strong emotional investment in the ontology of the image. Has it been changed? Is it trying to fool us or manipulate us? These questions are as old as photography itself.

From its beginnings, photography has lived in persistent conflict with the nature of its being and those elements which can define it. this conflict arises over whether it is the representation of truth or a mechanism for metaphors. Photography is the most painful reiteration of what we are and what we don't want to be. It is the truth constructed with pieces of truth and pieces of lies. It is what anyone wants it to be ... With photography, there is always a mystery, a veil which does not allow us to have the clarity we desire.

Jorge Gutiérrez. Director 1990 to 1994 Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero, Cararas. Quoted in "Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America."

"a mechanism for metaphors" I love that. Images, what are they other that the workings of the old eternal metaphoric machinery.

See Nadina's work here.
Here is an index of portraits.

Book Four

2011-07-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

A hardcover sketchbook, completed mostly in 1991. I was so happy to find a hardcover book that did not have lined pages. Perhaps they always existed and I had just let a sheltered provincial life, but my joy was profound.

The front endpaper is a figure I devised, named the "mythic aleph" It is composed of an aleph, photocopied over and over again until it reached the size of a sheet of paper, collaged with a cutout of a double ouroboros. In the study of mathematics the aleph is used to number transfinite sets. The figure (and my interest in many aspects of philosophy) was inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges storey, "The Aleph." This notebook is filled with notes from my Master’s Studies in Philosophy of Science.

The back endpaper is the notorious "Bertie Bassett" Liquorice Allsort man. He is an anthropomorphik - a human-ish figure made out of inanimate parts - like the Michelin Man. He led at lest one poet from London Ontario to produce a book of poetry. Anthropomorphiks by Robert Fones was the result of thinking "What power held all those inanimate parts together?"

Skimming this journal twenty years after it was written, I find wonderful (to me, at least) lines like:

Metaphoric considerations cannot be adequately dealt with by the framework of logical empiricism due to the simple fact that a metaphor is not subject to empirical confirmation.

And:

Every game of perfect information has a solution in terms of pure strategies.

And earlier, an outline for a cross-diciplinary presentation given to a class in the English Department:

Language Theory – Adaptation of the model theoretic argument.

What is a formal language and why would we want one? Leibniz's answer for a universal characteristic. The alchemical equation - that language is an exact copy of the world. Hence to master the world is a logocentric endeavour.
What would the failure of attempts to recover the adamitic language imply?

          - Occult Platonism
          - Anthropocentricism or anthropological relativism
          - The failure of the axiomatic conception of science as realism
          - An undermining of any realist theory based on linguistic distinctions
          - Failure of the Universal Characteristic and confirmation of the fall.

"Adamitic" language is the lexical system used by Adam before he was kicked out of the garden, or the language used in the world before the tower of Babel was cast down. The rigour of the argument depends not one jot on religion, or if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. All you need to believe (mistakenly, as it turns out) is that there exists an exact correspondence between language and the world.

There is a break in book four - a number of blank pages - and then if fills with notes on hypertext. They became the foundation for my contribution to what is now The Electronic Labyrinth.

One of the hypertext platforms of the early '90s was called Hypercard. As I was working I kept a series of notes for a hypertext to take advantage of the hypercard platform, "HockeyCard" was to be a collection of citations and anecdotes in hockey card format detailing the loss of life and violence associated with the game. Research let to these notes:

In 1907, a game between Ottawa and Montreal included several stick swinging battles that moved the Montreal Star to call the game, "an exhibition of butchery." Later that year, Owen McCourt of Cornwall died the day after being struck in the head by a stick.

On March 28, 1950, in a game between Detroit and Toronto, Gordie Howe went into the boards and suffered a brain concussion, a slashed eyeball, and a nose fracture. Doctors discovered severe hemoraging in the brain. "When they opened up Gordie's skull," recalls Sid Abel, a team mate of Howe's at the time, "blood shot to the ceiling like a geyser."

And so on. I'm keeping "HockeyCard" in the wings - if the hockey riots keep happening, maybe I'll complete it.

Here is a list of the books.

Matthew Talbot-Kelly

2011-07-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

Matthew Talbot-Kelly. Animator and Filmmaker. Taken October 23, 2010.

We did this shoot in Matthew's animation studios on Granville Island. He was working furiously (as he often does) on an animated story that takes full advantage of the iPad platform.

I've kept journals for years, and I have often wondered about the possibility of bringing the kind of collage that works so well on the page into film. Peter Greenaway has come very very close to this idea, but, as much as I admire his books and films, they don't quite capture the ... ummm ... something I can't quite name ... of the collaged page. Matthew's two short films, "Blind Man's Eye" and "The Trembling Veil of Bones" do.

I was hunting for subjects and Matthew needed some promo shots for a webpage and a magazine cover featuring him. We moved some desks and book cases out of the way and did a quick shoot against the white walls of his studio. Even though it was only nearing the end of October, I knew that these would be some of my last sessions of the year. When we would meet again in the spring, Matthew would give me some ideas about portraits that would open up very large and interesting doors. More on that ... later.

See Matthew's Moving Tales here.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Three

2011-07-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Souls are living mirrors, images of the created universe.
- The Monadology, 1714. Gottfried Leibniz

In the autumn of 1989 I began keeping a journal of my dreams. But it is almost impossible to record them as the act of writing destroys the fabric that holds them together. You are left with nothing but tatters. As you seek to order the eidetic fragments with words you realize that you are not recording a dream to interpret it later - you are already interpreting a dream to record it now.

Despite the slippage that occurs, it is a curious and necessarily surreal exercise, often bearing strange fruit. Here is an excerpt:

It is a world war and I am on a hill, toward the top, looking down the slope. It is a nice green hill like the kind you would find anywhere in suburbia. The outfit I am with is advancing. Everywhere people are shooting and being shot. I only fire half heartedly and I aim to miss. I think this is senseless. As we advance the enemy start shooting themselves. We are not distinguished by race or uniform. There is a referee and a fool. The only way I know he is a fool is because he shoots the referee with blanks.

My mother and father are eating brunch in a hotel/motel. They invite me to join them, but I decline, I am trying to find a plate on the wall that tells what type of brick was used in the building. I go around to the front. The building looks like an old three-storey walk-up. There is a ladder going into one of the apartments. I know it is Eva Braun's. I climb the ladder and my parents follow.

It is a very small apartment with only a fridge and dusty kitchen. It is old an decaying as if the building had been abandoned since the war. On the fridge is a portrait of Hitler in his last days. His moustache is missing. His face is long, drawn and wrinkled, and he appears to be wearing make-up. Blush rouge in attempt to cover the yellowness of his skin. He wears the uniform of the SS. There are also blankets. I ask Mom and Dad if the blankets are theirs. They say no. I leave and take the picture with me.

Here is a list of the books.

Buckman Coe photo published

2011-06-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

Press

In April I did a portrait session with Buckman Coe. I was very happy to see that he just got an excellent and well-deserved review of his second CD, "By The Mountain's Feet." His review was supported by this shot and ran in the Georgia Straight.

Review by Mike Usinger. Publication date June 30, 2011

http://www.straight.com/article-401311/vancouver/buckman-coe-sounds-thrilled-be-alive

Michelle Bruce

2011-06-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

Michelle Bruce. Musician. Taken October 20, 2010.

On the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, where I live, there is a strong fiddle culture. Part of the reason for this is Michelle Bruce's love of music and equally strong love of teaching. She has inspired an entire generation who are now musicians and teachers themselves. Her influence can be still be felt in community halls and summer music festivals all over BC.

Some thoughts on framing.

One of my inspirations for this series is Richard Avedon's work "In the American West." For that project Avedon worked with an 8 x 10 view camera which gave him a large negative with a characteristic border. In his books the frame may or may not be included, depending on the aspect ratio of the book and the editor's preference, but in exhibits, it is always there. The frame provides a ground to balance and enclose the featureless white background and keep the composition intact.

I'm working with a digital camera and so there is no frame. And there is no negative. The camera yields an image in an 8 x 12 format which creates a problem when you want to make an 8 x 10 print. Unsatisfied with the rather drastic changes in composition when the image is cropped down, I created a "digital" frame for the subject to exist within. It is a variation on a view camera border with some playful additions. I particularly like the idea of a digital "safety image" - now digital photographers no longer need worry about their archive of data spontaneously bursting into flames the way the old nitrate negatives did.

The faux border is clearly a fake - but is it a fake in a good way? Opinions are welcome in the comments section.

Here is an index of portraits.

Book Two

2011-06-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

There is an intense pleasure in filling a page with script. This pleasure could lead to hypergraphia, but for most of us a blank page is a threat rather than an enticement. I understand the many inhibitions keep us from the pleasure of the text - fear of spelling, anxiety over saying something stupid, or worse, saying something banal; a worry about describing those you love with the voice of a petty-minded, spoiled ingrate.

In 1986, when I started this book, I felt all these things. But I also had, often just before sleep, a strong narrative voice in my head that sounded like prose. If I had been reading, the rhythm and drive of the author's style would persist, but with my thoughts, shaping what I was thinking as if it were being read from a page. I found it added order to so much that was chaotic in how I thought - about people, about places, about feelings, about everything.

I was twenty when I filled this book. I've never really revisited it in detail, but it waits, and as you dissolve over the years, dropping bits of yourself and changing other bits of yourself, forgetting and remembering, it keeps a paper version of you safe between its covers.

Here is a passage that I found:

May 1986
In the morning Mark, Mother and myself pile into the truck and drive out to poplar hill where Grandmother lives. Poplar hill, that’s the perfect name for a village where your grandparents retire. I mean, with a name like that, you expect to find people like grandmothers with cookie jars, and huge willow trees. The kind of place where one summer afternoon seems to last forever.

Grandfather passed on in the winter. December. So we are going out to clean out the garage. It was a strange feeling, cleaning out a dead man’s garage. There were so many things that I remember faintly from when I was young, and we used to play up in the loft over the garage. There was a bobcat that had been stuffed and mounted on a birch log. I always used to be fascinated by the marble eyes. Now he was falling apart and his fur was coming off in clumps, his claws showing through.

After lunch we went to visit the cemetery where Grandfather is. We drive in, and the trees are huge, immense things filtering the afternoon sun and casting shadows on the graves. Everything is soaked in peaceful shades of green that you can walk through. It is a quiet, restful place. The sunlight comes down like liquid gold, perfectly poured, it bounces off the cars, the trees, the graves and into my eyes. I remember walking through and wanting to describe it perfectly. We stand in small groups, Grandmother places flowers on her husband’s tombstone. We walk through and read the stones. While standing apart from the others I can imagine all the people buried here standing by their places dressed in the clothes of their time...

Here is a list of the books.

Ian MacLeod

2011-06-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Ian MacLeod. Painter. Taken on October 20, 2010.

I'd known when I started that I wanted to photograph Todd, Maurice, and Alan. There were others that I wanted to work with, but it was taking time to co-ordinate schedules. In the meantime, I didn't want to waste the good days before the rains set in and I had to stop using my outdoor studio for the winter. Todd offered to make the suggestion to some of his contacts and passed me Ian's name.

Ian was the first subject I had never met before. He is a calm man, easily moved to laughter and so my best shots of him were in a light mood.

There is a lot to keep in touch with while working - the technical aspects of the photo, depth of field, composition, the camera, the lighting, the lens, and so on - and the interaction with the subject. I talk to the person the whole time. In some ways, there is so much going on that photography becomes almost like automatic writing. At least that is the impression it gives me. You want to be fluid enough with the camera to catch things, but not so premeditated that you lock out possibilities.

It is an interesting fact that almost no one can pose and converse at the same time - and so I use the conversation to keep the subject from stiffening up into a pose. The play of emotions that crosses someone's face even during a single sentence is amazing. But when a person poses they tend to become like cardboard. There is a dynamic between what people want to show and what they actually present. The subject is giving up control of how they are perceived and that involves quite a bit of trust. Or anxiety - depending on who you are.

Irving Penn has a great quote about that:

"Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world... very often what lies beyond the façade is rare and more wonderful that the subject knows or dares to believe."

Irving Penn - quoted in 'Portraits' at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

It's a great quote by a great photographer.

See Ian MacLeod's work here: http://www.ianmacleodpaintings.ca

Here is an index of portraits.

Book One

2011-06-14T17:43:00.000-07:00

I was given this blank book as a present by my parents. As a child I could not spell. In high-school aptitude tests my results for grammar were shockingly low. One english teacher was impressed with the content of an essay, however, and encouraged me to revise, correct, and re-type it. It won an award and my parents, sensing there might be a scribbler in the house, a notion encouraged by my love of dusty secondhand bookshops, bought me a blank book for my next birthday.

I filled the book over two years, largely with terse poems and observations in the style of Leonard Cohen's "The Energy of Slaves." On a dreary winter day in 1998 I looked through it and found it's contents to be largely embarrassing and so, after tearing out two pages with some song lyrics I wanted to keep, I burned it.

I mentioned this to a friend. She said she understood, but told me that; "if you could have kept it for another ten years you would have likely changed your mind." Time has proven her correct.

The song lyrics are from a band that used to play in London Ontario called "Feast of the Mau Mau's." They named themselves after a Screamin' Jay Hawkins song, and among the permanent members were Frank Ridsdale and Jack Whiteside. They did a ballad in the spirit of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" called "The Ballad of Ned the Killer." It didn't take itself very seriously - being about a killer smelt. I'm glad I kept these pages. I don't know why but the lyrics still amuse me.

The Ballad of Ned the Killer

The talk has been told from Whiteshead to Mish
of a fish in Lake Erie waters

The tale was found in Port Stanley town
the home town of old Ken Palmer

I heard a man shout that the smelt were about
I knew that he wasn't funnin'

The ice broke like starch on a cold day in March
it was then I knew of their runnin'

Oh, flautists use flutes and fishermen use boots
each has a tool of his trade

He's only three inches long, though no nets been as strong
enough to hold Ned that's been made

Fifty-four years old, with his blood that runs cold
like a bad dream Ned keeps recurrin'

Year after year fishermen tremble with fear
when to Ned, someone's referin'

For many show signs of a bruise or a welt
from trying to capture Ned ...
The KILLER SMELT

Mish's brother Paul. He was the bravest of all
and he said to the lads there a' drinkin'

"Well that killer smelt Ned, well tomorrow he'll be dead!
On this, I've been doin' some thinkin'"

Jack said, "Don't forget!" as he picked up his net
"That many men have died just a' tryin'

"That fish is an omen, like a evil wind blowin'
"I'm in no mood to see you a' dyin'

For many show signs of a bruise or a welt
From trying to capture Ned ...
The KILLER SMELT

Well there was barely a cough, when they heard Paul scoff
and he said, "I'm gettin' kinda tired

I'm bagin' some Zees cause tonight you'll freeze
and you don't catch any fish when you're wired

So Paul went to bed and he was dreamin' of Ned
and he dreamt of bells ringin' and ringin'

He dreamt about death and loosing his breath
and his hide on a plaque just a' hangin'

Well steel be the will, when the waters that chill
rise up above crotch level

But paul had no time to pay it any mind
when lookin' for a fish that's a rebel

He was barely five minutes in when he spotted that fin
that holds the scars of the ages

Well all the rest ran, but Paul stood fast and man
did he ever look courageous

Together they splashed and together they thrashed
in the chillin' Lake Erie waters

And excitement was abound in Port Stanley town
the home town of old Ken Palmer

Well the fight went on all night long
and the residents grew weary and retired

When the sun hits their eyes, in the morning they arise
just to see what had transpired

And what they saw, Oh it should a' been against the law
cause it looked so damn horrendous

Well the women they cried and the men they sighed
Lord God, please defend us

Well Paul was dead, but so was Ned
he hit him with a ball peen hammer (whump!)

And the bells did sound in Port Stanley Town
the hometown of old Ken Palmer

We'll you've all heard of Ken, he plays mandolin
in a band called the Dixie Flyers

By the Flyers he gets paid, and by the Flyers he'll stay
Until the day he expires

... two, three, four
Ned the killer smelt! Ned the killer smelt! Ohhhh Ned Ned Ned Ned the killer smelt! etc.

- Frank Ridsdale.

Here is a list of the books.

Todd Clark

2011-06-12T05:31:00.000-07:00

Todd Clark. Painter. Taken on September 22, 2010.

Todd works mainly in abstract landscapes. Every summer he has an open studio for a week at his place in Gibsons. It is a bit of a menagerie: two llamas, two emu, chickens, and a flock of peacocks. He has gained a certain notoriety in town - whenever someone spots a llama on the road his number is at hand. The studio and openings are great events. Blissful. In my mind it is always early summer there.

Todd is wearing the coveralls he uses when painting. It was a tough decision to stick with the black and white because the colour of the paint splotches was so good. He has had this set for a long time and the texture on the front is very compelling.

You can usually see some of his paintings on the Sunshine coast, especially if you stop somewhere for coffee. The works hang in a number of cafe's. Here is a link to his studio. As I'm posting this, his 2011 open studio hasn't happened yet - catch it if you can.
http://www.toddclarkstudio.com/.

Here is an index of portraits.

Maurice Spira

2011-06-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

Maurice Spira. Painter and blockprinter. Photographed September 20, 2010.

You can see a sample of Maurice's work on the first post of this blog. He did a blockprint portrait of me almost ten years ago. I love the way he works with blockprints - such a strong sense of line.

When I first started this portrait project I had in Maurice in mind so I called him up and set up a shoot. He was very accommodating as we tried different backdrops and lenses. We kept the conversation going the whole time. I ended up with a number of good shots.

Now I had to decide what I wanted from the editing process. It's difficult, like feeling in the dark for some object. Also photography is, maybe, a little like writing. With writing you can tell about someone in a compelling way that shows their character, but the subject might not be so happy to read about themselves with their flaws and quirks exposed. It is similar with photography. You can get some images that show the frailty of someone, the exhaustion or uncertainty - something really human - but I don't think people want to see that in themselves. So it is a challenge to push past what the subject may think of the photo and find the one that expresses something more. I didn't have this concern with Maurice, but I've encountered it with other subjects.

Maurice's Website: http://www.mauricespira.com/

Here is an index of portraits.

Alan Sirulnikoff

2011-05-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Alan Sirulnikoff. Photographer. Taken on September 15, 2010.

Probably one of the most curious people I know, Alan was already an established photographer when I started messing around with a Pentax ME Super in April of 2004. He enthused about photography, had his own style and approach, and was often experimenting with the medium. He also delivered some of the funniest slide shows I've ever attended. Photographically, he's been an inspiration and so it seems appropriate that I post his portrait as the first of this series.

We were working in an outdoor studio when this was taken. I had a Nikon D90 tethered to a laptop and Alan was looking at the screen as I took pictures. He is, in a way, looking into the mirror.

Of all the photos I've done this remains my favourite.

Here is a link to Alan's website.

See an index of portraits.

Missive: The New Epistolarian

2009-07-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

A cover for an imaginary periodical. I did the sketch as a quick gesture exercise. I would have really liked to read this issue. The teaser line reads: In This Issue: The beginning of Time | 1000 Journals | Why Mornings are Better | The Post Box at the End of the World.

The Lost Pages of the Kama Sutra

2009-07-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

A book cover for an imaginary title. We are always loosing something - the libraries at Alexandria, the family photographs. Why not pages from the Kama Sutra?

Black Irish

2009-07-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

Another cover design for a book that was never written. I started with a concept for this one - my own (possible) ancestry. Some of the Irish have swarthy skin, tan easily in summer and have dark hair and brown eyes. They are known as the "Black Irish" and are generally supposed to be descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada which was wrecked along the Irish coast in 1588. It seemed a good title for a historic fiction, a family history, or a memoir.

Karma Thief

2009-07-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

In 2002 I was creating book covers for imaginary titles. I've always loved book design and if I ever have a ticklish design problem I can often solve it by considering the brief to be for a cover rather than for something else. I was reading a lot of Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe at the time. I got the title from mishearing some song lyrics. I still really like the title and maybe one day if I write a novel I'll use it.

&&Co # 1

2009-04-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

Blogs are to writing (and publishing) what cameras are to making pictures. They are a great mechanism for enabling; a simple way to make content and cast it about.

On the most abstract level they bring simplicity to the chaos of web pages by setting everything into the unforgiving cement of chronologic order. Perhaps this explains why in the ‘90s everyone had a web site and now everyone has a blog. Progress is the introduction of time. They also look much nicer.

So in early 2009, clearly about five years too late, I began the task of dismantling box19.ca. I have been so invigorated by the ease with which one can push content into the blogosphere, so beguiled by its natural ability to incorporate bits and pieces and fragments and lists and ephemera in an elegant, graceful way, that I’m going to try out a couple of projects that have sat in the dustier corner of my mind for several years now.