Notes on Photography (unrevised) One

Alexis Nihon Plaza, solarium, 2013

1. Unless I was taking a picture of a person, or a group of people, I always felt that people in my photographs spoiled the photo. Often, I waited until someone passing by would be out of the scene before I would take the photo. I don’t know where I got this idea of not wanting people in the photograph, but eventually I realized what I was doing and purposely waited to photograph a scene minus anyone who may have been in it. Perhaps knowing that there was someone there just a second before and perhaps a second after the photograph was taken, adds something to the photo. 

2. I began to see my photographs as another aspect of my creativity and not just snapping away at pictures for no reason. I realized that the photographs I took are an act of creativity in addition to the poems I was writing. Some of the photographs manifested the same psychic content of my poems. 

3. Today, I sometimes want people in my photographs. People in a photograph can sometimes heighten the intensity of the image. I am also interested in the irony one can observe in life, of the humour that exists in what might seem to lack humour. 

4. I never thought of my photographs as “snapshots” although perhaps that is what they are. These snapshots were always an expression of my inner being, unless it was a photograph of friends or relatives. Then it was archival work, documentation, family history or some event in which people congregated. But always the finiteness of time, of life, has been somewhere in my consciousness, even when I was a child, and it is present in some way in many of my photographs. Since I have researched my family’s history for many years, I have taken many archival photographs, or photographs for documentation and research purposes, of graves, churches, old buildings, and other places of interest. This is a large part of my body of photographic work. 

5. When I worked in the Science and Engineering Library in the Hall Building of Sir George Williams University in the early 1970s, I would look through books of photographs that were part of their collection. That’s where I saw a photograph of Dostoyevsky’s desk, which I mentioned in a poem in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1978). Later, over several years, I took photographs of my own desk. Then it occurred to me that these photographs of clutter were also a way to divine the psyche and life of the person whose desk was being photographed. It was a kind of photograph of the person, it was a way of seeing their psyche and ego in the clutter of the desk. I have always loved looking through books of photographs, whether it is famous artists like Diane Arbus or Anselm Adams, old photographs of cities and people by now anonymous photographers, or contemporary photographs by as yet unrecognized artists. 

6. A subject of some of my photographs are archetypal images, something that was pointed out to me by CZ. I believe there is an order to the universe that can be observed in mythology and archetypes. Life is not a series of random meaningless events; life is full of meaning, with an order to the universe. My photographs of archetypal images, as we tried to do with the Aquarian Symbols (Vancouver & Montreal, Coracle Press, 2000), are meant to open a portal into the depths of consciousness. 

7. I’ve always owned a camera. Since I was ten, eleven, or twelve years of age I’ve taken photographs; it was never considered "unusual," it was never a decision, if I was interested in taking photographs then I was given the means to take photographs. Photography has been a source of happiness for me. I have enjoyed living a fairly solitary life, and photography has been an important part of what I do, in addition to writing, in order to fulfill the meaning of my existence. Photography is a way, like poetry, that I can be creative, but I can also express my concerns about life. If there is an art form other than poetry that I feel is a true expression of my inner being, an expression of the divine presence in life, of the epiphanous moment that captures an existential reality, the transience of the human condition, it is photography.