Quarry Near St. Eustache

Edith Sweeney Morrissey, early 1960s.

Ivy Lewis Morrissey, early 1960s.

That Was Then, This Is Now (1)

                                        Photo dated on back: May 2, 1948.

                                Edith Sweeney Morrissey outside of 11th Avenue cottage.

                            Ivy Lewis Morrissey and her son, Herb Morrissey, dated 1948.

                            My Uncle Alex and Auntie Ivy (late 1950s).  ; that was then ...

                                                                 ... this is now.

From the mid-1940s to the late 1960s various members of our family had summer cottages in St. Eustache, now a half hour commute to Montreal. In the top photo, my grandmother is outside of the cottage on 11th Avenue that she bought with my Uncle Alex. In the summer my grandmother, Aunt Mable, Uncle Alex and Auntie Ivy lived together, escaping the heat of the city. My parents had a summer house built for them, but after my father died in 1956 the house was sold and my mother rented a cottage across the street from my grandmother's. They were happy summers surrounded by family. I was warned to never return to St. Eustache, that it is unrecognizable. They were right. The summer cottages have been winterized, the trees that lined the street have been cut down, and where we swam at the bottom of the street has been made into a park. Instead of summer cottages and country, the area (north of Montreal) is now expressways, big box stores, and suburban housing. What we had is gone forever.

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.

Trees by the Trout River

A Home in Los Angeles, California (2)

Edgar R. Morrissey, around 1928

St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal

A Winter Night

A Home in Los Angeles, California (1)

A Tree In Hollywood, California

The Vehicule Poets

The Vehicule Poets, Montreal, Maker Press, 1979. Front cover, top: Ken Norris, Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey; back cover, bottom: Endre Farkas, Claudia Lapp, Artie Gold, John McAuley. Group photo taken at Vehicule Art Gallery by Chris Knudsen.

Doors and Portals

The Chinese gardens at the Montreal Botanical Gardens.

A mausoleum at Mount Royal Cemetary, Montreal.

An upstairs room at St. Michael's Church, Mile End, Montreal.

An upstairs room at St. Michael's Church, Mile End, Montreal.

An entrance to St. Patrick's Basilica, Montreal.

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.

St. Hubert Street

The sidewalks on the several blocks of St. Hubert Street are covered, making it an attractive shopping district. This is the street in Montreal where brides' and bridesmaids' gowns, and just about everything else that is needed for a wedding, can be found in the dozens of stores lining both sides of this street. St. Hubert Street is a Temple to the Wedding, a street dedicated to the Feminine, to union, new beginnings, an affirmation of life, sexuality, and joie de vivre.

Stairs, St. Patrick's, St. Joseph's

Stairs on St. Alexandre entering St. Patrick's Basilica, Montreal.

Stairs at St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal.

James Wilson Morrice

James Wilson Morrice was born at Montreal on August 10, 1865; he died in Tunis, Tunisia on January 23, 1924. Morrice was one of the first Canadian modernist painters and achieved acceptance in Europe before being acclaimed in Canada. Regarding Morrice's work, George Woodcock writes, "They are among the first truly great Canadian paintings."