Notes on Photography (unrevised) Three

William Notman studio, on Bleury in Montreal, 1875

13. After photography was invented, it was a fairly easy process to have one’s portrait taken. The recording of someone’s appearance--their portrait--was democratized so that even working class people could now afford a photograph of themselves. A camera could take a perfect likeness of a subject at very little expense. The change this effected in art is that the artist was no longer only an artisan or someone who was “objectively” reproducing a scene, or a person’s image; instead, the artist was now primarily expressing his own inner perception, his vision, of what he was painting. The invention of photography helped change the role of the artist.

14. Who is to say what art will last and what art will be forgotten by future generations. I had no idea that Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali—two artists whose work never much appealed to me—would be even more famous after their deaths than they were when alive. I remember Louis Dudek saying that only time determines what lasts and what is forgotten regarding the arts; years later, I read the same comment by T.S. Eliot.

15. I am an amateur in photography, I have no intention of trying to sell my photographs or even exhibit them beyond what is on this site. I don’t own a digital camera and my “darkroom” is the drugstore where my film is developed and printed. A few of my photographs have appeared on poetry book covers, but I have never made anything of this or even mentioned it to anyone until now.

16. My photographs are either documentation with respect to my work on family history or an expression of an emotional, psychological and spiritual state. My photographs are possibly an addendum to my work as a poet; being a poet has always been my self-definition.

17. My concern in art—what I am concerned with in my work as a poet and as someone who also takes photographs—is the soul and spirit, the inner being, and how this manifests in daily life. My vision in art is a development along a continuum from when I began to write to the present moment.

18. Three quotations:

Nature is a world of symbolism, a rich hieroglyphic book: everything visible conceals an invisible mystery, and the last mystery of all is God.
                                                                        —Christophe Ernst Luthardt

Rabbi Burnam was once walking outside the city with some of his disciples. He bent, picked up a speck of sand, looked at it, and put it back exactly where he had found it. “He who does not believe,” he said, “that God wants this bit of sand to be in this particular place, does not believe at all.”
                                                                        —Hasidic story

A good man finds every place he treads upon holy ground; to him the world is God’s temple; he is ready to say with Jacob, “How dreadful this place!” This is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.
                                                                        —John Smith

19. A public open-air exhibit of Notman's photographs taken in the 19th Century, which can be seen on McGill College Avenue between President Kennedy and Ste. Catherine Street, celebrates memory and Montreal's history as it is recorded in Notman's photographs. The importance of photography in Montreal is evident in Notman's work, whether in books that reproduce Notman's photographs, at the nearby McCord Museum where Notman's archives are housed, or in an exhibit of his photographs that is open to the public as is this exhibit. Notman is still the preeminent photographer of 19th century Montreal.

20. My cameras: A Kodak Brownie, used in the early 1960s, with which I took black and white photos (was it 127 film?); a Kodak Instamatic 100, 1963 to 1977, took mostly slides; a Nikkormat FT2, used from 1977 to the present, bought second hand from a neighbour, Lenny Ganz, now rarely used as too heavy to carry; various Olympuses from the mid-1990s to the present: a Stylus Epic (still used), a Stylus 80 (still used), another Stylus (given away), a Trip XB40 AF (free for opening a bank account and no longer used). For a while I used disposable Fuji cameras, bought at a pharmacy, that cost about $12.00 each and included processing. All of these cameras gave good service.