Daily Practice 270/365

Title: "Perpetual Motion Kitty"

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As I continue my reading of commentators like Frank Gohlke, Robert Adams and Gerry Badger, I've come to realize that one of the best things about photography is the way it can easily be integrated into every day life, and that the banal events of the every day can be suitable subjects for photographs. I think this is a natural outcome of doing this formal, "daily practice" exercise for a year - a repudiation of the idea that photographing is a special act reserved for times of "serious" art making and an appreciation for the possibility of integrating knowledge of composition and form, intent and expressiveness, into images of any subject made at any time. I will continue to make series of images like "That Summer at the Lake" and "My Beloved Rises from Her Sleep", but I can see that I will no longer restrict myself to making, or looking for, such specific series. An artist on Flickr whose work I greatly admire is Amy Fichter, who has been making images that acknowledge those singular moments of the day and express an appreciation for her surroundings as she finds them at those moments – her work greatly inspires me to integrate photography into my own day-to-day existence in a similar way.

  

So this is Appa. My sister-in-law is staying with us at the moment, and recently her daughter's cats joined the family here. Appa and I have a special relationship based on her unconditional acceptance of loving from me whenever she demands it. I generally come in the house through the basement when I get home, and for the past couple of months I have immediately heard a loud "thunk" from above me, rapidly sprinting little feet across the floor and down the stairs accompanied by little cries announcing the princess' arrival. Appa is in need of some immediate petting, but she is in constant motion while demanding that attention as I sit to take off my shoes and pay homage to her highness. So in one sense this is a mundane image of a banal moment in the day, but in another sense this image expresses that frantic motion with her eyes keyed into my hand at all times. One might question whether images like this are art, but I think that is too heavy a burden to place on a single image and I don't consider the question important to why I made the image. Viewers who have had cats in their lives will come away from this image with a personal memory of their time with cats and will also know a bit more about the personality of Appa. In my view, that makes this a successful image.

Daily Practice 269/365

Title: "Favourite breakfast spot"

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Every morning from early spring to the start of fall, I have sat on this little settee on the porch of the studio building to eat breakfast. It is a lovely shaded spot where I can deeply breath in the fresh air, enjoy the sounds of birds, bees and squirrels going about their morning routines. I also take the opportunity to do some reading while I eat breakfast. As you can see from this image, I'm currently reading Gerry Badger's book of essays on photography. I took this image to document my love of this morning routine, which will have to be abandoned in the colder weather of the winter. During those colder, darker, wetter winter months, this image will be one of the talismans I use to look forward to spring.

This morning I was reading the following passage in Badger's book, in an essay about the American photographer John Gossage. "Is the great photographer characterized by a style? There is a presumption...that photographers who are artists rather than mere photographers distinguish themselves as such by exhibiting a marked style. Therefore there is a tendency...to progressively distill one's vision, reducing the range of subject matter and its treatment until it can be claimed – usually by the gallerist – that so-and-so has developed an original and instantly recognizable style. Or are the really great photographers drawn from the ranks of those who reject visual style in favour of visual sensibility, those who recognize that the medium is profligate rather than reductive...Those accordingly who tend to put content before form...Great artists, great photographers, reach such a pinnacle because they do not follow the norm. They break the rules. They follow their instincts and convictions, not the herd and the smart money. But in my view at least, the best photographers come from the last category, those whose style and individuality emanates from deep within them, and is not...something grafted on from outside." Badger goes on to write: "Each clicking of the camera shutter should be a new adventure, an imaginative and appropriate response to a problem. Style in photography....should emanate from a particular response to a particular subject and a particular set of circumstances, acted upon by a particular sensibility." (Gerry Badger, "The Pleasures of Good Photographs", pp 89-90).
  

I find that Badger has hit on a number of key issues with making photographs. He does not dismiss style, but makes a distinction between the style that rises from within the photographer vs. the a stagnant, repetitious branding "style" that boxes a photographer into a very narrow range of subject and treatment. I also view each click of the shutter as a new adventure where my goal is to produce an image that is appropriate in style to the nature of the problem/subject before me. I find that my daily practice is expanding, rather than contracting, my range of subjects and photographic responses to them. One of the reasons I reduced my activities on Flickr came from a realization that I was starting to select images to post based how well they would generate comments from my "followers". This situation made me very uncomfortable, the idea that I would not share images that spoke to me personally very strongly because I knew the "market" would not be very receptive to them. I rebelled against this narrowing of my photographic activities, a rebellion made much easier because (a) getting comments on a site like flickr is a completely meaningless, arbitrary indication of "worth" and (b) I don't need to derive income from the sale of my art.

I wanted to end by pointing people to two photographer friends whose work on flickr very nicely illustrates Badger's thesis that internally driven work may or may not have a cohesive visual style, but is none the less recognizable as images made by the particular artist. The first example is the work of Jan Gates, who has a voracious interest in walking the neighbourhoods where she lives and documenting all that catches her eye. The work is strong in composition and its use of colour, and it is readily recognizable as her work. The second photographer is JM Golding, who has a deep personal connection to the landscape. Although on the surface the images have a very similar visual style, one can readily sense that this style is generated from deep within the artist, and is appropriate for what Golding wants to convey about the personal impact these landscapes have.

Daily Practice 268/365

Title: "Early morning still life"

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I liked the soft light, the way it faded in the distance, making the onions appear as satellites in the night sky.

Daily Practice 267/365

Title: "Steichen's ghost"

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I made this image when I returned home after a long work day. There's a rich tradition of making images with/by moonlight - there's something quite compelling about that isolated spot illumination. Although I realize that many will find the clothesline running through the frame distracting, for me it acts as a visual reminder that we see the moon everywhere - not just in an isolated park or forest, but just across backyards in the city. The pull the moon exerts on us is the same, regardless of location - a sense of longing and a call to adventure.

Daily Practice 266/365

Title: "YOU....WANT...NOW!!!!!!!"

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I've been walking past this bin on the way to and from my office for several weeks now, trying to decipher the message that's scratched into the side. The message was much more extensive, but most of it has been obliterated. So those three cryptic words are all that's left to us.

Daily Practice 265/365

Title: "The confessional"

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I was at the doctor's office for a routine check up today, and as I sat waiting in one of the exam rooms, I realized the room served the purposes of a confessional. I could hear faint murmurings of a patient and the doctor in a neighbouring room - no details, but that quiet murmuring made me think of someone making a confidential confession, seeking absolution from the doctor. I started to think what it might be like to make a series of images of non-religious confessionals. They might be straightforward images like this one, or perhaps dark and mysterious - shot from outside the space, a door half closed with the faintest hint of figures within. I'm probably not going to pursue this idea, but it illustrates what I love about making art - that freedom to consider any or all ideas, to think of how the idea might be developed in images, to consider how the images would (will) be made. It certainly kept me entertained while I waited, and gave the brain a nice work out in the process.

Daily Practice 264/365

Title: "Surrealist deconstruction"

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When I made this image, I was primarily drawn by the sharp, constrasty reflection of one of the newest buildings on campus in the windows of another new building. When I looked at it closer, I found myself loving the distortions, which called to mind surrealist paintings and photographs. The grid imposed by the window trim reminds me of David Hockney's collages of overlapping polaroids, which inevitably distorted the size and shape of the subject.