Growing Versions

I was humbled by a full-size copy of this CNN photo at the Human Right's Museum in Winnipeg last fall.  It is an arresting image. I'm sure I saw it or one close to it before that day in the museum. However, I also am sure my eyes scanned it quickly on my phone or in the paper, and although, I work with refugees and am saddened and hurt by this picture, it quickly faded into the background. In person, it is impossible to look away.  The hope and desperation co-mingle and cannot be dismissed. I came across it today and it had an even deeper impact on me.  It looks like the Last Supper or another Biblical tableau--a lesson as old as before we can all remember.  Reach over that chasm.  Take my hand.  You are not a stranger.  Let me hold your children while you find your footing on holy ground.

I recently took a refreshing and nourishing trip with my mom to two extremely photographed places, Niagara Falls and New York City.  In Niagara Falls especially, you could not not notice the multiple selfie-sticks competing for images along the water front.  People, myself included, crowded together at the look off points to take (near) identical pictures of the falls in spite of the fact that we could easily have just bought postcards depicting it.  It was a way of grasping at the enormity of their grandeur, the oversized scale of their beauty and all the ways they were opening up channels inside us, just like one would expect from an awesome experience in nature.  The falls are awe inspiring and cameras were our feeble attempt to catch the rainbow. Having said all that, close to the falls there is so much mist that I couldn't actually see through the lens of my cell phone. Time after time, I clicked with no real knowledge of what would come of it. This photo i...

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."-Leonard Cohen It is easy to take hope for granted.  Most of my days, I have hope without even realizing it.  Other times, when something goes wrong or something goes wrong for a while, I have to feel around for it again. So far, I have been so lucky that I have never truly lost it before. However, someone I know explained to me once what it is like to completely lose hope. They had to leave their country for political reasons.  Before they decided to leave, something happened first.  They lost hope. It was nowhere to be found. Nowhere. They were empty of it. They tried everything to revitalize it, but it was no use. They had to leave, they had to find hope somehow. And luckily, eventually, they did. When they told me this story, it made me realize that I had never truly contemplated before what losing hope might feel like.  Thanks to her patient explanation, I have tried to always keep in m...

In the summer I am barraged by images, that if it were any other time, I would be lunging for my camera. Sparkling water...abandoned houses...candid shots of my kids playing, picnic food...and on and on. But somehow I hold back.  These moments are precious, these times are not to be interrupted. Kids will protest, the wind will shift. Now it is fall, I am camera less at the moment. Again, the itch is there, the flicker, the inkling that something will be a good photograph. The shaft of light falling on yellowing leaves, the stack of cardboard boxes sitting next to farm produce. But for now, these images are going to have to come and go. I let their rich possibility steep for a moment and then walk away. I try to focus on this time as an incubation period. (One of the last photos with my now defunct camera phone. I had to try three times because it kept losing power...)

I came home last night and my son insisted I sit down with him that very minute to label the pictures from the "baby to 2" photo book, containing pictures of him. It was half-heartedly put together in the half light, half conscious days of his early life and it is the last of "the printed from a camera" pictures that I put together. He did not care about the quality or lack thereof of the photos. He just had lots of questions about what kind of baby he was (my answer, an always awake one ) He was born just around the time early adopters were acquiring smart phones. If he had been born even one year later, I might have had his baby hood photoshopped and stored (not printed) on my desk top. The likelihood that those images would have made it into a book like this, sitting on the shelf, eagerly pulled down and scrutinized would have been very low. I have photographed every square inch of their walk to and from school. My parents did not even walk with me to...

 Not all those who wander are lost. -J.R.R Tolkein

 "If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph." -Unknown

I regularly listen to  As it Happens while I wash the dishes.  Their interview with photographer   Sally Mann   made me want more dirty dishes so I could keep on listening. She explains her experience capturing her kids pre-iphone. She urges the listener to remember that photographs capture but a 30th of a second of their lives and they therefore, only tell one story.  The rest of their story will be told in other ways, some by their choosing, some not.  The rest of the interview is fascinating too about her Southern upbringing and her newer photography projects.

I used to take a roll of film to the drugstore or camera store to have it developed. I would come back in a few days to pick them up. If I paid extra, I could come back in 1 hour.  I would look at greeting cards and magazines while I waited. There was a phase for a while when you actually just popped it into an envelope and sent it away. It was the latest thing.  Now I wait a second, maybe 2 or 3 seconds, and then there I go, I have my photo.  (Having them printed as a photograph is a whole other matter). I sit on the bus and glance across the aisle. A girl sifts idly through photograph after beautiful photograph on Instagram.  I take photographs to pass the time. To get through something boring.  I look down at my coffee cup and get twitchy. Recently, a friend said she only had one photograph from her wedding. I started sweating just thinking about it, but although she wished for a few more, she wasn't too bothered. What if I didn't take out my phone...

The place where the bright blue sky met the top of the Lego mural captivated me. Looking up at the cloud through the bottom of a Queen Anne's Lace bloom was a new angle for me. The day lily up against the orange wall spattered with black paint struck me sideways. The reflection of sparkling water against the hull of the ship was gorgeous. My son entranced by the balloon animal artist entranced me. Words do not really do these images justice, but then again, neither do photographs. It is worthwhile forgetting my camera every once in a while.

What I'm really starting to like about photography is being surprised. I look through the lens seeing one thing and the picture itself shows me something more. The act of taking photos makes me notice in new ways. The act of seeing the photographs themselves helps me look again in yet another way. Even the most ordinary, muckiest thing reflects light.  Through the lens I understand that a little more each new day. Light on wall, line separating the sidewalk and the grass, the place where my hand has smudged the glass all absorb light and throw it back. I see that now.

The other day my dad brought this little rig along. It is called a "Paterson Design 101"  slide viewer. I must have seen it before in one of my many forays into their basement, but it kind of took me off guard.  It is so simple to use and yet it has a secret world inside, just waiting for me to pick it up. Along with the slide viewer, he brought along 20 slides of pictures from my time in Hungary almost 20 years ago. For the next hour, I spent time with the Paterson Design 101, peering into the back lit past. Pictures of new (then) friends who I haven't really seen since, houses, markets, the control room of a power station, and the grandparents of people I met. I retreated into a world where somehow I ended up in a parade in a town I cannot remember the name of... ...that had a culture house that kept homesickness at bay.  It illuminated a time in my life, a coming into my adult self. The slide viewer helped me to experience those images in a whol...

This parody,  Look at this Instagram , made me cringe.  It pokes fun at our collective obsession with taking pictures of every little thing.  We take pictures of pie, breakfasts, messes, evidence that we have cleaned our closets, before, after, toenails, feet in sand, feet in water, soap, basically everything we lay our eyes on. Ever since I picked up my iPhone my previous photographic output has become a speck in comparison. I would go months between photo taking spurts before. Even after getting a digital camera, I would either break it and have to save up for a new one, or lose the cord so I could not download the pictures or, well, there was always something. Now, of course, there are no limits and maybe that's a bad thing or maybe, just maybe, that's a very good thing. Predictably there are lots of concern about taking so many pictures, particularly of kids.  In this recent  article  published in the New York Times from October, the author ra...