Notes on Photography (unrevised) Four

Alexis Nihon Plaza, solarium, 2013

21. The Observing Eye: What photographs reveal is what the eye (the consciousness of the photographer) finds of interest, observes, and pays attention to. This is the observed world of the photographer, it shows a consistent and cohesive vision of the world. It is the documentation of the observing eye.

22. Krishnamurti writes, “The content of consciousness is consciousness.” What is recorded in the photographs is the consciousness of the photographer. 

23. A photograph records how a specific time and place is seen by the observing eye, photographs are the record of what is observed. In my photographs, I am aiming for an elegant austerity. 

24. Krishnamurti writes, “The observer is the observed.” What you think you are observing turns out to be… yourself.

25. Whatever I photograph has a deeper, personal meaning for me; some of the most obscure photographs refer to an image or a line or phrase from one of my poems. So, “Between Chaston and Green” refers to where my father is buried; “Natalie’s hat shop on Decarie Boulevard” refers to where my mother purchased a hat to wear to my father’s funeral; and so on.

26. Artists have access to what the public knows little about but feels is important, has value, and wants: it is access to the unconscious mind. 

27. Today, many people want to be artists. They want to publish their poems, they want to exhibit their drawings and photographs, they want to be creative. They want to fill the emptiness within themselves with their artistic expression, with their poems, their music, their photographs.

28. There is more to being an artist than creativity and talent, there is hard work, being alone, and an obsessive personality.

29. Why would anyone be as obsessed about death as I have been? or as consumed with the ancestors? or have taken so many photographs in cemeteries and churches? or have written obsessively about the same subjects, book after book, diary after diary, decade after decade?

30. It is necessary to speak one’s truth. I can say this with conviction, as someone who has always taught others not to censor their words, their vision. And yet, I have censored myself, I have held back what I wanted to say, I have doubted myself, been silenced by others, not wanted to offend or cause arguments, been too concerned that others not think badly of me and so remained silent. And yet, I have been happiest when I have spoken my truth; when I have not spoken my truth it has gotten me nowhere.

31. (from) Letters of Arthur Rimbaud: May 15, 1871: 

… The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in very brain a natural development is accomplished; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point:… Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face… One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary.

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.

Notes on Photography (unrevised) Two

Alexis Nihon Plaza, solarium, 2013

8. Reading Time and Life magazines in the 1950s and 1960s was a communal experience, shared weekly by millions of people across North America. Life magazine contained wonderful photojournalism, while we all accepted the articles in Time magazine as accurate reports of what was happening in the world. Both magazines (but especially Life) relied on photojournalism. Photography, published in a mass circulation magazine, had a place in our lives that we took for granted; these photographs changed the way we looked at the world and therefore changed our paradigm regarding the world. 

9. Looking at family snapshots has always been an important experience for me. I regret the absence of more photographs of the Irish side of my family, while the English side took many photographs of each other. The earliest family photograph on the Irish side is one of my grandmother and two of her sisters, probably Essie and Edna, with another quite attractive but unidentified woman, and perhaps this woman’s child, and a boy I believe is my Uncle Herb. The photograph suspends in time that moment in which it was taken. Here is this group of people who are stopping only for a moment to have a picture taken (around 1920) and then returning to whatever it was they were doing. 

10. Here is what I am trying to do in some of my photographs: I am attempting to capture a moment of silence and solitude; I am attempting to photograph the moment when chronological time, the finite, seems to give way to the infinite and then returns to the temporal world after the photograph is taken. These moments that come to us are outside of chronological time, and I have attempted to capture them in photographs. I first experienced and knew these moments as a child, sitting with my grandmother in her Girouard Avenue flat. There wasn’t much to do but sit in the space of silence created by an old person; I was never bored, her presence has stayed with me and enriched my life. 

11. As far as I can see, regarding digital cameras, the available technology far exceeds anything most people actually need. My series of photographs of a tree in our backyard, photographed one winter night when it was snowing, were taken with an Olympus camera I was given for opening a bank account. It is the artist’s vision that creates art. 

12. I am also concerned with archetypal images. There are several layers of archetypes, for instance, there are archetypal patterns of relationships (mother-son; father-daughter; and so on); there are also archetypal objects that can be found just about anywhere. It is the latter that I have photographed, the archetypal object (for instance, stairs, trees, water, rivers, and so on), which is also an entrance way to the unconscious or the collective unconscious. My archetypal photographs are meant as visual representations of archetypes as well as psychic openings to the collective unconscious.

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.