Visit—A Handful of Dust

On a visit to Toronto, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit an interesting exhibit at the Ryerson Image Centre. Curated by David Campany, A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic brings together work from a broad range of artists (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Mona Kuhn and others), all connected thematically with dust. Campany has also published a book of the same name as a catalogue and further exploration of the theme.

The pieces, mostly photographs but with one or two paintings and a couple of video installations, seem to have been selected by Campany as conceptual responses to a photograph by Man Ray (Dust Breeding, 1920) of a piece by Marcel Duchamp. The monochrome photograph looks like it may be an aerial shot of a wasted landscape, but it is hard to get a sense of scale because of the lack of reference points and the uniformity of tone and colour. All the viewer has to go by is line, form and texture. In fact, the photograph depicts a glass plate that had collected a thick layer of dust while lying on the floor of Duchamp’s studio. Viewers are informed that the two artists may not have agreed who was ultimately responsible for the work and later agreed to share credit.

Robert Burley - Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007 — Robert Burley – Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007

The selected images are set in two rooms and, apart from a few dust-related quotations painted on the gallery walls, visitors are largely left to derive their own meanings from the display (which I welcomed). The sources of the dust vary—sand, destroyed buildings, human beings—but the overall message is one of human impermanence and mortality: sand covers everything in its path, the built environment doesn’t last forever, humans shed skin and eventually shed their lives.

At the same time, the dust that gathers can both conceal and reveal. It can cover tracks but it can also heighten our ability to see texture and form.

Nick Waplington - from the series Patriarch's Wardrobe, 2010 — Nick Waplington – from the series Patriarch’s Wardrobe, 2010

I went to the exhibit because I have often appreciated the shows that the Ryerson Image Centre hosts, although I have to admit that I was a bit doubtful because of the subject matter. In the end, I was won over and came away thinking that it amounted to an excellent meditation on aspects of the human condition. The images on display also served to show the power of abstraction and the role of imagination in interpreting what appears in front of us. In short, the show works.

A side benefit of the visit to the Ryerson Image Centre was a chance to see Extending the Frame: 40 Years of Gallery TPW. The show is a history of the founding and evolution of the Toronto Photographers Workshop (TPW), a group which has worked diligently to advance photography as an art form and has involved such people as Edward Burtynsky, Robert Burley, and the duo of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. It was fascinating to see how the dedication of a relatively small number of people has had such an impact on the direction of photography and art more generally in Canada.

Research point—Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (Brooklyn, 1962– )

B.A. from SUNY, 1985; M.F.A. from Yale, 1988.
Professor Adjunct in Graduate Photography at Yale School of Art.
Represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London.
Elaborately staged scenes in small town American. Cinematic, extensive support crew for staging and lighting.
“In all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Despite my compulsion to create this still world, it always meets up against the impossibility of doing so. So, I like the collision between this need for order and perfection and how it collides with a sense of the impossible. I like where possibility and impossibly meet.” (Gregory Crewdson (2016))
Influences include movies Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe, also Edward Hopper, Diane Arbus.
Retrospective of work from 1985–2005 shown in Europe from 2005–08. Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship.

Responses

There is certainly more to Crewdson’s work than aesthetic beauty, although it undeniably has that. The coldness of the images and the unsettling scenes they portray have an uncanniness to them—they seem more real than real. The attention to detail, flawless lighting and calculated impact on the viewer reveal suggest that the artist is not simply drawing on aesthetic categories, but using the everyday to produce a particular effect or experience.
The work certainly seems ‘psychological’ to me, in that it is designed to produce an unease and questioning in the mind of the viewer. There is a distinct sense of foreboding, the same kind one feels when watching a thriller—what ‘it’ is has not yet happened, but it is about to and the psychological tension is palpable. It verges on the physical, as if the viewer was about to experience the events directly. If anything, many of these images are like Nordic Noirs in a single frame.
My main goal when making pictures has not at all been to create an elaborate world of my imagination, but to respond to things that I find visually appealing (in a broad sense: light, line, colour, form, mood…). My studies with the OCA have been leading me to question this approach, however, as I see the opportunity to make images in an entirely new way—more deliberate and purposeful, rather than just responsive. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with making beauty one’s main goal—we could certainly use more beauty in the world—but I think that aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics can become divorced from other important commitments like truth or justice. Beauty itself can be fickle and concentration on it can lead us down some very strange paths, like self-indulgence, an unhealthy preoccupation with certain kinds of beauty or deliberately ignoring the non-beautiful.
I don’t think it is necessary to set “elaborate direction”against “subtlety and nuance” in photography, any more than it is necessary to set pure fantasy against documentary or biography in any other art form, such as cinema. There is a place to appreciate all of them and the different responses they call forth, while keeping in mind that they are all, to some extent, fabrications.

References

Gregory Crewdson (2016) At: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson (2018) At: https://gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson – 84 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson – Bio | The Broad (s.d.) At: https://www.thebroad.org/art/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Photographers in Focus: Gregory Crewdson (s.d.) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpIRm5BsXeE (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Silverman, R. (2016) Alone, in a Crowd, With Gregory Crewdson. At: https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/alone-in-a-crowd-with-gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Reading—Barthe’s Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes’ short book on the nature of photography seems, at times, less about photography than it is an extended personal reflection on grief and the persistence of memory. The death of his mother prompts him to look at photographs of her and of his family, to see what he can recover that reminds him of her essence. At the end of the book, the answer appears to be: relatively little. Along the way, however, the reader is treated to a discussion of photography’s unique genius, a kind of extrapolation from his experience of his family’s photographs to statements about the medium as a whole (73).

Part of photography’s uniqueness lies in the way that it “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (4) and that, unlike painting, it forever carries its referent with it (5–7). A painting can portray a scene that has never existed, but a photograph (for the most part?) points to something that once appeared in front of a camera. Describing the pre-digital world, Barthes separates the phenomenon into a chain of Operator (photographer), Spectrum (the image or spectacle itself) and Spectator (the viewer; 9). As a non-photographer, however, Barthes concerns himself only with the last two of these (10).

[Question: What would Barthes have made of digital image generation and manipulation?]

The photographic subject is always aware that he or she is posing, which introduces a series of distancing states of mind and behaviour: “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art” (13). The act of taking a simple portrait is clearly not so simple—and Barthes hasn’t even introduced the place of the viewer in interpreting the portrait once it has been made.

[Observation: the various layers of thinking between photographer and subject could serve as a useful set of interpretive questions.]

Barthes introduces his thoughts about the relationship between photography and death early in the book and returns to it at several points. Cameras are “clocks for seeing” (a lovely phrase!) that have the power to freeze an instant and render the subject locked in time, dead (14–15). Photography is related to theatre, with early connections with “the cult of the Dead” (31).

The author speaks about the importance of affect in photography, which the Spectator experiences “as a wound,” (20–21). This will help to set up the later discussion on the presence of the punctum in some photographs—probably the central contribution of the book to the understanding of photographs.

[Question: why is Barthes interested in some photographs but not in others? Is it an issue of affect rather than interest? (25)]

Barthes introduces his categories of studium and punctum. The “studium is of the order of liking, not of loving” and leads us “inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions” (26–27). It “is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices…” (28).

[Observation: from his description of studium in this passage and others, I get the distinct impression that Barthes is not much interested in photographers or what motivates them. I believe his word for much of the process and practice photographic would be “banal.” He is not a photographer himself and, while he seems to have a romantic attachment to the sounds of shutters and the appearance of wooden cameras (15), he is largely preoccupied with his own experiences as a Spectator. It is likely for this reason he spends so much time on punctum: it directly touches his own feelings.]

The punctum is a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27).

[Observation: I did not fully appreciate how idiosyncratic and personal Barthes’ idea of punctum was until much later in the book. I had thought, at first, that every good (?) picture would have both studium and punctum until I saw how Barthes used punctum: the reactions and associations he has with odd elements in an image, filtered through his feelings and experiences. There is likely no universal punctum we can appeal to or look for in an image—it is all about the Spectator’s response. I have to admit being a bit disappointed in this, but I suppose that it is largely accurate: we respond to particular images because they call up something in us, consciously or unconsciously. It reminds me of the French verb, interpeller—it calls forth something from me, questions me.]

Barthes carries on this line of thought in a small passage that is worth noting: “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks” (38; cf. 55). The punctum, then, does its best work when it does not hit the Spectator over the head—this is too obvious and looks too much like advertising—but when it causes the viewer to reflect after seeing the image. This does not happen in unary photographs, which are too literal—they are pornographic rather than erotic, leaving nothing to the imagination (40–41).

For Barthes, the punctum has “more or less potentially, a power of expansion” (45)—that is, it can open up meaning rather than closing it down—and is not created deliberately by the photographer (47). It should be “revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it” (53). The punctum “is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). Counter-intuitively, Barthes declares that “[u]ltimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes” (53).

[Observation: I think this last sentence is wonderful. It describes the power of the most striking images to remain in the imagination after the they have been viewed, allowing the viewer to keep turning them over in the mind’s eye. Barthes’ development of the punctum reminds me very much of the way the parables of Jesus function rhetorically in the Gospels: each one is a little world in itself, a little baited hook in the thought world of the hearer. They are time-release capsules that do not admit of a single, final meaning, but continue to draw the attention, like a spot—Barthes’ wound?—that goes on itching.]

Most of Part II of Camera Lucida is given over to a series of readings of photographs where Barthes walks out the insights he has outlined in Part I. He generalizes from the specific cases of individual photographs to the general case of all photographs, while illustrating by example how personal is his understanding of punctum (73–75). He returns to his earlier assertion that part of the genius of photography—as distinct from other visual arts such as painting—is the referent in each image (76–80). The photograph “is literally an emanation of the referent” (80). The photograph does not tell us what is or “what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” (85). For this reason, a photograph is not a memory, “but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (91). Photographs are unreal and perish (92–96). A photographic “likeness” is not actually like anything, except other photographs (102–103).

Although they appear several pages before the end of the book, I think that these words sum up well where Barthes’ discussion leads: “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge” (106).

It is a mistake to look for memory and the real in a photographic image. Instead we should be aware of what we bring to the act of reading an image, recognizing the highly personal nature of the punctum that we may find in it. This is challenging enough to keep in mind as a Spectator; it is all the more difficult to swallow as an Operator.

Reference

Barthes, R. (2010) Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. (Paperback ed.) New York: Hill and Wang.

Study Visit—Ruth Maclennan

I was looking forward to taking part remotely in the live study visit to meet Ruth Maclennan and hear her discuss her work, “Icebreaker Dreaming,” on display at Pushkin House. The visit was organized as part of the BA Photography and OCA’s Arts & Environment series, led by Dan Robinson and Melissa Thompson.

I very much appreciated Dan’s efforts to make the study visit accessible to a wider audience than just those who were able to attend in-person. Distance from the UK is a downside of being an international student at the OCA, so many of us make extra efforts to compensate with participation in Google Hangouts (both tutor- and student-led) and our own visits to events and showings closer to our own homes.

Unfortunately, the audio was so poor that I thought it would be better to bow out after a few minutes. There were several issues with the audio: low bandwidth (garbled and missing bits); a lot of echo in the room and more than one voice speaking at once. I suspect that two of the three problems could be mitigated with a using a separate, directional microphone pointed at the speaker/presenter.

So if Dan, and/or other tutors (I believe I recognized Andrea Norrington in the group) are willing and able to take that suggestion on board, I would be very glad to take another crack at remote participation in a study visit. It’s a great idea and I’d love to see it done successfully, not just for me but for all OCA students who could benefit.

Or perhaps some enterprising student will take it on him/herself and we won’t need to wait for the tutors.

Hangouts—12 January 2020

Forum Live

Good turnout today with 10 people participating: LS, KA, SG, CW, KW, AF, SS, NM, DL and me hosting.
KA wondered if having someone else produce the scans of her analogue work was acceptable. No one could see an issue with this, largely because many elements of the photographic process are already made by someone else: camera body, lenses, film, chemicals, sensors, etc.
AF raised the question of what a subverted landscape might be and if it would be acceptable in the Landscape course. NM indicated that she didn’t have a single (traditional?) landscape in her landscape set. CW suggested that we think of landscape as a metaphor.
KW is preparing her blog for assessment and was given a number of suggestions on how to do this most effectively for assessors. She also asked whether it would be acceptable to submit her work for DIC via Instagram. The answer was a resounding yes, with strong encouragement to have a backup plan in case there is a problem with the platform during the assessment period.
SG, a L3 student, is working on Polaroid landscapes and may have a book of her WiP to show us at the next Hangout. KA mentioned the collection of Polaroids she shot at Lacock Abbey.
KA agreed to host the next Hangout, likely on Jan 26.

Rest of the World Group

My second hangout of the day, but with fewer participants: LK, MR and MU. In short, two Canadians and two New Zealanders, none of us born in the country we live in.
LK is working on an essay of the ethics of the FSA.
One of us learned that assessors don’t read essays but depend on the judgement of the tutor involved.
MU mentioned the importance of patience and organizational skills for L2 and L3. Participants traded names of OCA students whose learning logs are particularly well laid out.
MR encouraged us to look at Time.com’s list of best photobooks of 2019. He thought American Origami looked particularly good.
LK suggested that MU look at the work of Shona Grant re: bookmaking.
I mentioned that I was looking at L2 courses now that I am close to completing L1. It seems that Documentary gives relatively little space to doing photography, while Landscape is lighter on research but may involve a project over a whole year. This could be a problem, given my travel plans. May also want to look at Self and Other and/or Digital Image and Culture.
MR agreed to host the next hangout, possibly Feb 23/24.

Visit—Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel

Àbadakone (Algonquin for “continuous fire”) is the second exhibition “in the National Gallery of Canada’s series of presentations of contemporary international Indigenous art, features works by more than 70 artists identifying with almost 40 Indigenous Nations, ethnicities and tribal affiliations from 16 countries, including Canada.”

According to the National Gallery, “the title Àbadakone was provided by the Elders Language Committee of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. They felt that its connotation of a fire within each artist that continues to burn would be an appropriate title for the second presentation of this ongoing series of exhibitions showcasing Indigenous art from around the world.”

Indigenous art and culture is drawing a lot of attention in Canada and other countries dealing with the history and ongoing impacts of colonization of the “New World” by European powers.

I found the exhibit exciting as it opens up a broad range of discussions that are important not only for Indigenous people, but for anyone who has an interest in place, identity, the construction and evolution of culture, and the importance of narrative for creating and bearing meaning. The introduction at the entry to the exhibit indicates that the broad theme behind its curation is one of “Relatedness, Continuity and Activation.” In brief, this refers to the interconnection of all things, the links across time and generations, and “how an artist animates a space, an object, or an idea through performance, video or viewer engagement.”

(All images taken on my cellphone.)

For me, there were several threads that ran through the exhibit, particularly the challenges of:

colonization;
industrialization;
globalization;
environmental degradation;
technology;
migration; and
tradition.

Without taking anything away from the specific issues and questions facing the Indigenous artists who created these works, it seems to me that many of the challenges are also faced by non-Indigenous people. As a result of the challenges I’ve listed above, very few of us can simply take for granted the place where we stand, the identities we have inherited, the histories that have shaped us or the futures that lie before us. In a time of profound uncertainties, it will be important to draw selectively on our knowledge of the past, on our best understanding of our times and on the most promising paths forward. It is fascinating to see that while Postmodernism rejected meta-narratives, we continue to need overarching stories to interpret the past, create meaning in the present and have hope for the future.

Àbadakone has given me a number of ideas for the theme / concept I would like to explore for C&N A5 (“Making it up”), and perhaps even an approach for realising my ideas. I see Indigenous artists opening long-overdue conversations and I think we will all do well to participate in them honestly.

Hangout—12 December 2019

Today’s hangout was well-attended, with nine people participating for the full discussion and a tenth arriving for the last moments of the meeting. There were two major points of discussion:

AF was concerned about the possibility of self-plagiarism after a discussion with his tutor. Is there a chance that returning to themes or motifs may amount to an inappropriate use of one’s own work?

The consensus was that self-plagiarism was only a real danger if one submitted the same, or substantially the same, work for more than one assignment or course. In fact, tutor CS mentioned that it might be possible to go too far the other way by doing something completely different for every assignment and never really developing a body of work.

I am not overly worried about this, but I must admit that I have approached many of my assignments for OCA as a chance to try something new. My aim hasn’t been to aim for coherence but to use at least the Level 1 courses as experiments to see what I do and don’t like. If I don’t experiment now I may wind up producing much the same type of images that I have for years. We’ll see where this goes as I get ready to take on Level 2 early in the new year.
ES raised the topic of cliches and tropes, and what the different terms meant for our work. The other terms that she raised (such as “synecdoche”) were familiar to me from my studies in rhetoric and have been popping up in some of the theoretical readings we have been asked to read. The rhetorical terms are useful as shorthand but I wonder if we sometimes run into difficulty as we transpose them from the written/spoken word to a visual language. It seems to me that theory and technical language are only useful insofar as they allow us to understand, but they should never be allowed to get in the way of effective communication. They should follow the process of making art, rather than controlling it.

I volunteered to host the next hangout session on January 12, 2020 and have set things up on the OCA website to allow people to sign-up and identify their topics for discussion.

Hangout—2 December 2019

Eight of us participated in this Forum Live discussion (CW, AK, AF, JC, KA, SS, NM and me) and it was good to see some new faces.

The first item of discussion was SS’ wish to find a way to better photograph his pencil drawings from a sketchbook. He wanted to be sure to capture not only the correct nuances of shading and line depth/blackness, but also something of the texture and tone of the paper itself. This led to a number of suggestions (and a bit of a tutorial) about how to use a histogram to adjust curves and black/white/gray points to achieve desired results in an image.

AF presented some WIP for a project tentatively titled “I am still here.” The work comprised a series of photographs that were taken on a neighbourhood walk, almost a return to EYV’s Square Mile assignment. Participants viewed the images and made suggestions about sequencing and how it might be important to provide the viewer with some context for understanding them, given that the individual photographs depicted fairly mundane settings. Although some pictures have interesting compositional elements, it won’t necessarily be clear to others what the photographer had in mind. AF himself wasn’t entirely clear on how to pull the images together, although the resonances with his childhood were apparent (he has lived in the same neighbourhood all his life). CS thought the work had potential and suggested including an artist’s statement, with pairs of images playing off one another.

There followed a question and response from KA, who wondered whether using film would be acceptable for her next course (first at L2?). The answer was a clear ‘yes.’

The group decided that it would be good to meet once more before Christmas and then again a month later. The next dates are December 15 and (tentatively) January 12.

All going well, I will try to have most / all of my CAN A4 essay ready for the Dec 15 discussion.

Reading—The Aesthetics of Affect

My tutor suggested this reading as part of the feedback I received following A2. It is not an easy piece to navigate, but the argument seems to run as follows:

Contemporary thinking about art has neglected its aesthetic dimension and has not sufficiently taken into account its special nature of being both “a part of the world […and…] apart from the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001: 125).
The interpretive frameworks of Marxism and Deconstructionism have viewed art from two poles: a historical approach based on the time of the work’s production (Marxism) and an ahistorical approach that views the work with little or no regard for its creator or origins (Deconstructionism).
Although each approach has something to offer, both locate the import of the work in reason while “[a]rt, whether we will it or not, continues producing affects” (126).
By “affect,” O’Sullivan does not mean something transcendent—or “beyond experience”—but something “immanent to experience”. Rather than being carried out of oneself, one is involved in “an event or happening” (126–127).
Art invites us into a happening by showing us things we would not, or could not, otherwise perceive. A simple way of doing this is through the use of technology, such as very long or very short photographic exposures. More profoundly, O’Sullivan (referencing Georges Bataille) asserts that art functions as a “mechanism for accessing a kind of immanent beyond to everyday experience; art operates as a kind of play which takes the participant out of mundane consciousness” (127).
In this way, art does not invite us to a transcendence beyond ourselves, but works “to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of” (128). Further, art is “[l]ess involved in knowledge and more involved in experience, in pushing forward the boundaries of what can be experienced (130).

Response

I wound up enjoying O’Sullivan’s article once I had had the chance to digest it. I think that there is a lot to be said for mounting a defence of “affect” as a way to approach art (how does it make me feel? does it bring me something different or new?) given that, for many people, there is an expectation that we will think our way through it (where does it come from? how does it mean? what does it signify?). I think that this may be particularly true in the developed world and that we may have cut ourselves off from other or more complete ways of appreciating the art around us. It seemed a little ironic to me, though, that O’Sullivan makes such a cerebral appeal for the importance of feeling.

I was also surprised by the extent of the religious language and metaphor in the text, from the contrast of transcendence and immanence to the use of terms such as “sacred” and “incarnation.” I imagine that many readers might either move past these quite quickly or categorize them as “spiritual, but not religious” (as the common expression goes). For someone with academic training in Christian theology, however, much of the language O’Sullivan uses has particular resonance and it would be interesting to map his usages against those of a theological aesthetics.

Without having time to do that now, I will limit myself to one question that occurs to me: if we follow O’Sullivan’s emphasis on the place of affect, is it necessary to make such a sharp delineation between immanence and transcendence? For example, if we are to take the concept of incarnation seriously (and it is O’Sullivan who raises it), Christian theology sees it as the very place where immanence and transcendence actually meet—in the person of Jesus.

I don’t expect at all that this is how O’Sullivan will develop his thought, but it is suggestive and meaningful to me. I will likely return to it in my thinking as I work through the OCA program.

Reference

O’Sullivan, S. (2001) ‘The aesthetics of affect: Thinking art beyond representation’ In: Angelaki 6 (3) pp. 125 – 135.

ROTW Hangout—3/11/2019

Lynda (BC, Canada), Mark (New Zealand) and I have been meeting regularly for some time now and have branded ourselves as the “Rest of the World” (ROTW) Hangout. We all recognize the value of hangouts but don’t always find the other OCA meeting useful because of the differences in timezone. We had been hoping for more people to join us this time, given that 11 people had signed up. As it turned out, five participated—the usual three, plus Bob (UK) and Nuala (France).

No one had WIP to present, so I started things off by talking about my experience with the little exhibit I had on display in a local bistro for six weeks. I sold five of the 13 pictures I had on display, so I have effectively covered my costs and am quite please with that as a result.

I also mentioned some of my struggles around CAN A3’s self-portrait work and received some helpful suggestions from the group. I think Nuala’s work for this assignment (“Thou shalt not age”) was quite gutsy, so I may go back and look at it again.

Mark talked to us about his own prep work for CAN A3 and it sounds as though he will go the “absented-self” route. He is looking at doing it with reference to the Maori term Tūrangawaewae which indicates “the place where one has a right to stand.” Several of us made suggestions, based largely on our own experiences of being immigrants/foreigners in places where we live and the history of colonization. This will be an interesting piece to see develop.

Lynda is working through her Documentary course and having some difficulty in locating historical images of the area where she lives. I suggested that she might like to look at the National Archives collection online, check into the layers of meaning suggested by the original Indigenous place names, and also sent a link to some work done by Bonnie Devine that I found powerful during a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Lynda also introduced us to the work of Diana Thorneycroft, which has a particular resonance for those familiar with Anglo-Canadian culture. I got a kick out of Thorneycroft’s humour and imagination at the service of serious subjects.

Nuala has completed a 2.4m dot-matrix scroll on the story of the Internet’s creation and is also thinking of creating a related video.

There was discussion around the relevance and outdated nature of some of the assigned readings and a concern that writing in the field is often more difficult to read than it needs to be. I think this is a common complaint about academic writing and can be put down to a few things: the occasional need and benefit of a specialized and technical vocabulary; bad writing habits; and the fact that the audience in mind is often other specialists/peers/people who control academic tenure. In other words, a broad readership is usually not in focus and, for some academics, not desired.

Bob made some good recommendations of printing paper, particularly for black and white (Pinnacle FibreGloss 320gsm) and the work of photographer Manuel Vasquez.

Mark agreed to host the next hangout in roughly a month’s time, to make sure we get it in before the holiday season starts.