A request from a friend sent me into the backyard on a day when I felt more or less abandoned by magic. And wouldn’t you know? I found some out there, hiding in the lee of a maple tree.
Go out into your backyard – or into the world surrounding your door – and show us mini-worlds and fairy dust. Do not wait for perfect light. Just go.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001), “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
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Share with us wonder and questions and eyes bigger than ordinary. Share with us faith and unfaith and how it looks to wonder what happens next.
The revelation with a new wide-angle (wider than my beloved nifty fifty) lens? The previously elusive arm’s-length portrait. Note the absence of the word ‘self’ because it’s not just about capturing photos of me, but of noting my presence in the midst of a captured day. And the crapshoot nature of a manual exposure that shoots into unknown light behind our heads, the best-guess aim and the dubious focusing? Just fun stuff.
Mama: present! (raises hand)
This monday, show us you’re here. Show us your arm’s-length portraits, and tell us what about that moment had you turn the camera that way.
At night the window is open and once all settles and the light gives up, we scooch down under the duvet with the breeze at our heads. We fall asleep to the nocturnal song of the peeper frogs in the marsh down the cove, earth from the day’s weeding still tucked in the upturned hem of jeans that lay crumpled in a pile on the floor.
The only thing better than a vegetable garden of blackberries, carrots, asparagus and beets is that very vegetable garden, yet-to-be-planted. A square of earth — worms, spiders, rocks, last fall’s wayward dinkies, treasures to be dugged out and tugged at. An afternoon as agreeable to the four-year-old as to his horizontal mother, who selflessly conducts scientific trials as to the healing properties of hammock-plus-sunshine.
(This is for the good of all mankind, I tell you. Please do not disturb my revelations.)
This Monday, show us a piece of your home that’s so vividly restorative we can smell it, or hear it, or feel it on our face — newness and rebirth and vitality and mischief.
Or, as they say — show us the spring in your step.
At my church we roast marshmallows, and everyone arrives on tricycles. There are banjos, and there is woodsmoke. Everyone is loved without conditions, and nobody is judged, as long as they are kind, and that is the only rule that’s absolute. Snotty noses are welcome, as are rosy cheeks, both being great and worthy tributes to whatever universal energy sparked all this.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
On this night a song merged with photographs and got me to thinking, and I went to my imaginary church, and hey, that’s pretty neat. It made me feel peaceful. So tonight, share with us a song informed by a photo, or a photo informed by a song—and tell us the story of why they go together.
Forgive me for issuing a challenge and not quite meeting it. I had written about Ben’s upcoming birthday, and how I’m going to do my best to appear with a Star Wars cake in one hand and the memory of Liam in the other, and it didn’t feel right. So it’s gone poof and all that’s left are some very tenuous threads from tricycles to banjos to a hymn, and now it’s 2 AM. But you’re all inventive sorts, and so I’ll leave you to just listen, and look, and knit the rest on your own.
Oh, look at that. You are perfect, just there, right now. You are perfect and beautiful and precious and made of all the same stuff as me and the sun, and isn’t it marvellous.
I am not a photographer.
I futz around with a camera is all, addicted to this silent, bewitching relationship. The camera obeys aperture, shutter speed, ISO—all the same concrete rules and perameters that every photographer in the world must navigate.
Writing is qualitative meditation. It is wrangling, fumbling in the dark for undiscovered words that wriggle just out of reach.
Photography is quantitative. With a camera in hand, the perfect shot is always accessible as the solved rubik’s cube of someone else’s future waited in my twelve-year-old hands. But you know what? Twisting and turning and watching colours change… that’s right good play.
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Spring is here in Nova Scotia. The crows and the gulls are up to no good once again, and the air smells earthy and rich, and the ground is saturated with sluggish awakening. And with all that the light and the ease of shooting with grass underfoot returns. Joy!
Last summer I had the pleasure of spending a day with a family who asked me, explicitly, for a portrait shoot. To which I said but I am not a photographer and to which they replied but we saw your flickr.
Spring arrives and with it arrives the promise of a few more pretends, of explicit shoots (as opposed to me showing up with a camera and opting to chase the kids instead of being a grown up).
I can’t wait.
Right good play.
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Amateurs—tell us about your forays into playing capital-p Photographer for a day, and show us the results. How did it go? What surprised you? What did you learn?
Colville paintings fit comfortably with fiction because they often hint at an imagined world of relationships and a subliminal level of emotions. His symbols register as fragments of stories that are never entirely told, rather the way Paul Simon writes lyrics as fragments of narrative.
What Colville shows is engaging, but he hints that something even more gripping is happening offstage, not that he would be so literal as to show it. … He quotes with evident pleasure a French critic who remarked that in Colville there is always something terrible happening, over the horizon, just out of sight.
(The National Post, October 31, 2000)
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Ever taken a photo and watched as it took on some unspeakable, barely-there hint of something else? Has bokeh felt like impressionism? Has visual staccato or abstract line or repetitive pattern or blocks of colour in your photos reminded you of modern art?
Today, share with us a photo that — intentionally or unintentionally — feels like art. Feel free to get specific, as to a particular period or artist (a painter, another photographer, any medium) or simply share with us something that feels artful to you.
Grade twelve, it was, when we met, both of us The New Girls in the last grade of high school. And so we joined forces, cliques be damned. We were shrill with beer and opinions, bristling, ants in our pants, trailing conspiratory snickers wherever we went.
Wait. Now we sound insufferable. C’mon. We were eighteen. We were cool, if only because when uncool has company, it becomes cool.
This is Daphne, truthful and fierce and completely without drama, quite possibly the most sensible, go-anywhere person I know. As maid of honour she spoke at my wedding. Afterwards, we cracked up at the self-fanning she instinctually attempted to fend off the tears. It didn’t work. Daphne, you see, is both ruthlessly graceful in the calling-out of bullshit and is easily verklempt. At her wedding, guests introduced me as her sister and we giggled. It wasn’t the first time.
Please, for the love of god, do not make me do the math of 1991 to now. Let’s just say A Long Time and take a deep slurp of wine. I watch her with her Sadie and the shock never fails. Were we ever those girls? Are we really these mothers? Either way, she is my sister, because I say so.
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This week, let’s see the camera turned upon longtime friends. Has it changed with life? Have you?
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and the sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. ~ Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), The Prophet
Dear July,
I miss you. Please be prompt. That is all.
Unrequited love,
Shivers McWintery
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Show us a photo that’s a tease of what you want the most.
Unless it involves naked vikings.
In which case please send all submissions directly to sweetsaltykate(at)gmail.com. Kidding. Mostly.
(waggles eyebrows)
As with almost all things you can observe good bones underneath neglect. Line, shape, echo. A home, a boat, a woman. Look at what she might have been, had she been loved.
Hollow cheeks and a weary posture belong among us. They speak when voices do not. The wind-shredded tarps tell the story of her abandonment more harshly than proud, bare wood and so we trudge through snowbanks and across this hayfield to visit her again, to whisper to her of her dignity. I lay my hand on her as I always do, pet her like an old dog demoralized with immobility and deprived of its vigor-giving toil.
Sadness makes outrage and outrage makes conviction, if only this: I will never fail something so lovely. I will give it love, even adoptive love, even if all that can be is to give her the pulse of the ocean from the palm of my hand.
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Do you see beauty in solitude, abandonment? Does your camera tell stories for the voiceless?