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| Ikebana by Christine Lebrasseur |
"Art is the only way
to run away without
leaving home."
—Twyla Tharp
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Monday, October 25, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Artist
One of my daughter's friends does the most amazing self-portraits. She doesn't think she is pretty, and yet she is astonishingly so, with unusual and captivating features. I always get the impression from her photos that she is trying to understand her face. She has such a sense of color and fading and cropping. I'll only run one picture here, in case she would rather not be recognizable on my blog. But, for the record, I think she is a wonderful artist and a dear soul.
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| Self portrait by DM |
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Camera
I've rotated through scores of backdrops for this page ever since I discovered Blogger in Draft's new design templates. I finally settled on an image of a camera and beveled edged snapshots, because it felt like an apt symbol for every stage of my life. Since then, I've gone back to the old Blogger template because several people told me they were having trouble leaving comments using the new template. And let's face it, comments trump redesign. As every blogger knows, you comment therefore we are.
Still, I got to thinking why a camera and snapshots seemed so fitting a metaphor for the stages of my life. Ever since my uncle gave me his used Nikkormat FTN when I was 10, I have wanted to photograph everything. During high school, I developed my own black and whites in the washroom out back of our house at 37 Paddington Terrace. It was down a long flight of stairs and under the raised back porch, and it had a wooden door whose weathered slats let in the light from outside. I would tape black construction paper over the open seams of the door, screw out the regular lightbulb and screw in a red one, and set up my enlarger and trays.
I could spend hours in my makeshift darkroom watching images come to life in the the various solutions, printing some negatives again and again, burning in this area, holding back the light in that one, trying to get balance and contrast and detail just right. Sometimes I would be in there until late into the night, even past midnight, and my dad would sit reading on the back porch, keeping watch over me till whenever I emerged. I wonder if I ever thanked him for his patient vigil on so many nights? I can't remember. Children take so much for granted. We assume there will always be time.
Back then, I dreamed of working at National Geographic or Life. I wanted to be the one taking the photographs. I used to pore over the pages of those magazines and marvel at what the lens had managed to capture, the experience the photographer had brought to me in my little corner of the world. When it came time to apply to college, I sent off my application to Rhode Island School of Design, thinking vaguely that I would pursue art and photography (I used to also be very involved in painting on canvas with acrylics back then.)
But my dad, the pragmatic civil servant, intervened. He was not sending me across an ocean to study anything quite so frothy as art. He declared that I could sit on a street corner and paint for the rest of my life if that's what I wanted, but I was going to have a choice. I was going to get myself a solid liberal arts degree that would give me options. That, he would subsidize.
That's how I ended up at Barnard in the program in the arts. I started out as a studio art major, but quickly switched to writing, which had always held such secret excitement for me. I had wonderful English and writing teachers at Barnard, and so my fate was sealed. I wouldn't be the one taking pictures after all. I'd be the one writing the story that accompanied the photos, which was okay by my lights, since you had to go everywhere the photographer went in order to do so.
I went on to get a masters in journalism at Columbia and then a job at Life. I traveled all the time, helping to facilitate the photographer's work while reporting on location, camping out in subjects' lives for literally months at a time. I then came back in from the field and tried to do the experience justice in words. It helped that I already thought in a visual way. Everyone at the magazine spoke that same visual language. It was, in retrospect, an excellent and entirely satisfying way for to spend 8 years.
I also married a man who takes pictures. He is an advanced scuba diver, and the photographs that involve him the most are his underwater shots. Well, he loves other kinds of picture taking, too, but it was underwater that he felt most challenged to capture on film what he saw.
Now, my 16-year-old daughter takes pictures. My husband and I have often mused that if she wants to pursue photography she chose the right parents. We own so many different kinds of cameras, and see picture taking as a noble and magical affair. It's why my husband will shell out real money to support my daughter's photography habit, in much the same way my dad used to support mine. Our girl is allowed to use any camera in the house that she chooses, even the antique Leica, even her dad's expensive Nikon digital SLR. We trust her with any of those precious pieces of engineering, because her love of the medium is as great as ours.
I know we aren't picture-makers of the caliber of a Gordon Parks or an Annie Liebovitz or a Michael O'Brien (each of whom I had the great privilege of working with while at Life). We're not masters of the art in the way those greats are. But we love taking pictures. And love is enough.
Still, I got to thinking why a camera and snapshots seemed so fitting a metaphor for the stages of my life. Ever since my uncle gave me his used Nikkormat FTN when I was 10, I have wanted to photograph everything. During high school, I developed my own black and whites in the washroom out back of our house at 37 Paddington Terrace. It was down a long flight of stairs and under the raised back porch, and it had a wooden door whose weathered slats let in the light from outside. I would tape black construction paper over the open seams of the door, screw out the regular lightbulb and screw in a red one, and set up my enlarger and trays.
I could spend hours in my makeshift darkroom watching images come to life in the the various solutions, printing some negatives again and again, burning in this area, holding back the light in that one, trying to get balance and contrast and detail just right. Sometimes I would be in there until late into the night, even past midnight, and my dad would sit reading on the back porch, keeping watch over me till whenever I emerged. I wonder if I ever thanked him for his patient vigil on so many nights? I can't remember. Children take so much for granted. We assume there will always be time.
Back then, I dreamed of working at National Geographic or Life. I wanted to be the one taking the photographs. I used to pore over the pages of those magazines and marvel at what the lens had managed to capture, the experience the photographer had brought to me in my little corner of the world. When it came time to apply to college, I sent off my application to Rhode Island School of Design, thinking vaguely that I would pursue art and photography (I used to also be very involved in painting on canvas with acrylics back then.)
But my dad, the pragmatic civil servant, intervened. He was not sending me across an ocean to study anything quite so frothy as art. He declared that I could sit on a street corner and paint for the rest of my life if that's what I wanted, but I was going to have a choice. I was going to get myself a solid liberal arts degree that would give me options. That, he would subsidize.
That's how I ended up at Barnard in the program in the arts. I started out as a studio art major, but quickly switched to writing, which had always held such secret excitement for me. I had wonderful English and writing teachers at Barnard, and so my fate was sealed. I wouldn't be the one taking pictures after all. I'd be the one writing the story that accompanied the photos, which was okay by my lights, since you had to go everywhere the photographer went in order to do so.
I went on to get a masters in journalism at Columbia and then a job at Life. I traveled all the time, helping to facilitate the photographer's work while reporting on location, camping out in subjects' lives for literally months at a time. I then came back in from the field and tried to do the experience justice in words. It helped that I already thought in a visual way. Everyone at the magazine spoke that same visual language. It was, in retrospect, an excellent and entirely satisfying way for to spend 8 years.
I also married a man who takes pictures. He is an advanced scuba diver, and the photographs that involve him the most are his underwater shots. Well, he loves other kinds of picture taking, too, but it was underwater that he felt most challenged to capture on film what he saw.
Now, my 16-year-old daughter takes pictures. My husband and I have often mused that if she wants to pursue photography she chose the right parents. We own so many different kinds of cameras, and see picture taking as a noble and magical affair. It's why my husband will shell out real money to support my daughter's photography habit, in much the same way my dad used to support mine. Our girl is allowed to use any camera in the house that she chooses, even the antique Leica, even her dad's expensive Nikon digital SLR. We trust her with any of those precious pieces of engineering, because her love of the medium is as great as ours.
I know we aren't picture-makers of the caliber of a Gordon Parks or an Annie Liebovitz or a Michael O'Brien (each of whom I had the great privilege of working with while at Life). We're not masters of the art in the way those greats are. But we love taking pictures. And love is enough.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The more things change...
I'm starting to realize my daughter has been taking pictures for a while, that a camera of some sort has been constantly in her hands for several years now. I took the top picture at a cousin's wedding three years ago. My girl was using a digital shooter then. Since last summer, she's taken over the Nikkormat FTN that one of my uncles gave me when I was 11. I enjoyed a decades-long entrancement with that camera. I love how its photographs can reveal what the eye fails to notice. I cannot explain the profound awe I feel to know that my daughter, too, connects with this faithful old camera. The thing is built like a truck, it's heavy in your hands, and it's optics are true. It's a beautiful piece of technology. I am so grateful to share it with my daughter all these years later. Life is sometimes more perfect than we can dream.
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