I attended a Black Lives Matter community forum today in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and found it inspiring and thought provoking. As I listened to the speakers relate personal stories of racism and oppression, it dawned on me that it is the black and indigenous peoples who are the true heroes. To have your land taken away, or escape slavery, live in poverty, live with segregation and residential schools; and not only survive, but THRIVE —this should be celebrated, not ignored or downplayed by white people. Imagine being told by the white majority that you are not equal, that you are second class. And in extreme cases, not really human. Imagine this inhumane treatment happening for 400 years. It’s challenging for white people to try to comprehend the depths and reach of white privilege. We should all be proud of black and indigenous citizens and of how they have succeeded in spite of racism and oppression. There is so much white people can learn from them, from their resilience and community strength.
If whites had escaped enslavement or survived residential schools, they would have been lauded as cultural heroes and icons. It’s telling that many of our monuments are for the men who were the greatest oppressors. The colonialists, slave traders, land barons. Why can’t we have more monuments for those who succeeded even when everything was stacked against them?
Black Lives Matter is very important in 2020. For all those who say All Lives Matter, I say that’s true, but imagine living in a world where the playing field is slanted in the other team’s favor (and has been for hundreds of years). Could white people even survive in such an inhumane world?
Signs are everywhere. They can give us important information or directions, but can also be used to make visual jokes–like wordplay, except with images.
These photos were taken this year, some of them over the past month. They are meant to show the ambiguity and humour of signs.
Photography as Meditation was a presentation given by Avard Woolaver at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Halifax in July 2019.
Photography as Meditation
Taking photographs can give us a different
perspective and a fresh way of seeing. More than that, however, photography can
offer us unique ways to engage with the world around us. Whether we seek a new
start, a satisfying sense of closure, or a novel way to meditate, using a
camera can help us move forward.
I’ll start by reading a quote from American
photographer Henry Wessel:
“Part
of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of
this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical
sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some
point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.”
For the most part, I take photographs of everyday life. I rarely go out of my way to take pictures. I’m content photographing the surroundings of where I happen to be. I’m interested in New Topographics—the human altered landscape—how human activity has changed the earth. I carry a camera everywhere I go, whether it’s a trip to the supermarket or a drive into Halifax to attend the Universalist Unitarian Church of Halifax.
This one is called Spiritual Centre—it’s the exterior of the minister’s office at UUCH. I displayed some photos in the Ballroom Gallery several years ago and this was Rev. Fran Dearman’s favourite one. She bought a copy and keeps it in her office.
One of the points of mindfulness is that we
just observe what’s here with us now, without judgement. When we meditate, we
try not to categorize or judge. We try not to say: this is good; this is bad.
When taking photos, we can also try not to
categorize in similar terms. We don’t have to think in terms of judging, like:
“This is pretty; this is ugly.” We can just think—”This is here.”
American photographer William Eggleston came up with the term The Democratic Forest—no subject matter is more or less important than another. A telephone pole is as valid as a lighthouse. There is poetry in the everyday.
This was taken at the corner of South Park and Sackville in Halifax. There seems to be music in the overhead wires.
Here is another quote from Henry Wessel: “In a
still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you
press the shutter. That’s all you have.”
When we’re taking photos, we have to give up control. Standing there holding your camera, it feels as if you’re the one in control. This is an illusion. You have to let go of the idea that you’re in charge of the people who’s picture you’re taking. If you’re outdoors, or by a window, you aren’t really controlling the light. It’s hard to control the movement of animals, or of traffic, or of crowds. Instead you have to just be there, ready for what unfolds.
This was taken on a cold and windy day skating on the Oval. Sometimes just getting a photo can be challenging. There is no controlling the wind and snow.
Another aspect of mindfulness that tracks closely with photography is the need for patience. Life demands patience of us, but it’s up to us to develop it on our own. From where do we draw these needed stores of patience? Most of us have to learn it, through practice. And photography is great practice for that.
We may have to wait for a car or cloud to come into the frame, for the sun to come out from behind a cloud, for someone to smile, or for the golden hour just before sunset. So often, it is worth the wait.
No one can predict the future, which means we
don’t know the future implications of pictures we take. The unique quality of a
photo is that it captures a moment in time.
Often a family snapshot has unique value for
us because it’s the only picture we have of a certain family member or special
place. Taking photos helps us document things throughout our lives.
This was taken in a hotel room in Toronto in 1982. My parents were on a trip and stopped off in Toronto for a short visit. My father was 59 (about the same age I am now), my mother was 50, and I was 24. It’s such a wonderful moment captured in time. A good memory.
I took a lot of photographs in the 1980s, when
I lived in Toronto, capturing street scenes and ordinary aspects of daily life
that happened to catch my eye. I had no way to anticipate how significant they
would seem 30 years later. They show things that no longer exist, even though
it hasn’t been that long. Without necessarily trying to, I caught images of
buildings, cars, fashions, gadgets that are no longer part of our world. Toronto’s
entire skyline is utterly changed.
A photo not only helps you remember what you were taking pictures of, but also can bring back memories of how you were feeling and what you were doing at the time you took the picture. That can be powerful to reflect on when you look at the picture. It might not be such a great photo, but you can say, “Oh, I remember that day.” You may recall who you were with, what was said, where you went afterwards to get a bite to eat. The picture brings back all these memories that accompany it.
This photo of my daughters, Lia and Jane, from 2012 brings back a wonderful day at the Museum of Natural History in Halifax.
And other times you look at a picture and have
no recollection of it at all. You stare at a beach scene and you can only say,
“Well, it looks like I must have gone to the beach that day.”
For me, photography is all about observation—taking the time to notice the world around me. Growing up on a farm I spent a lot of time in the fields, looking at the landscape, the trees and the clouds. I was observing the world long before I had a camera to record these observations. It has taken me quite awhile to get back to that childhood state where there is no rush, where you can be patient and just let things happen. That’s what mindfulness is all about.
I don’t get caught up too much in the technical aspects of fancy cameras and long lenses, or manipulation in Photoshop. And I use my camera mostly in automatic mode because it gives me more freedom to capture the moment. It has been said that the best camera is the one you have with you, and I believe that. Most people these days have smart phones with camera and video. This is a perfect tool – you don’t need an expensive camera to get worthy photos.
I took this photo in Amherst, Nova Scotia. After I got home and looked at it, I realized that it may have been the setting for Alex Colville’s 1954 painting “Horse and Train”.
Horse and Train, Alex Colville, 1954
Colville grew up in Amherst and later studied at nearby Mount Allison University in Sackville. This train line runs between Amherst and Sackville.
And now I’ll give you a few photo tips:
Try to include something in the foreground. It provides a point of interest and a sense of scale. This was the first photo tip my father gave me.
People take photographs for all sorts of
different reasons–and whatever those reasons are, it can be rewarding and
worthwhile to document what’s happening to us and around us as we go about our
daily lives. Taking photos with a relaxed mind and an open heart can be a
profound and beautiful way for us to engage with the world and with one
another.
I’ve always been amazed at how images, like words, can convey so much emotion. I have always thought of black and white photography as an abstract medium and colour photography as a psychological medium. American photographer Elliot Erwitt said, “With colour you describe; with black and white you interpret.” If it’s true that colour appeals to our emotion and leaves less to our imagination, then it makes sense for us to be judicious in using it.
This can have a lot to do with how the photo is framed—how much of a particular colour, or colours to leave in or crop out. When I view a scene, then, I look for ways to combine colours–for me, it’s about balance. Sometimes a tiny splash of red is enough to counteract a sea of green, or a little orange goes well with a lot of blue. There are no hard and fast rules here, but the conscious combining of colour is something I keep in mind when I’m out with my camera.
The photos in this post are from my new book Colourville. In this book I take a visual trek across the colour spectrum following the colours on the rainbow flag seen above. Violet to indigo, to blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, and finally grey. It is my hope that the photos are interesting on their own, without the colour connections. They are a glimpse into Colourville—a marvellous place.
Colourville is a place in my mind where colour lives, the part of my brain where colours meet and mingle. It’s what propels me to record colour scenes with my camera. But it wasn’t always this way.
For a long time, my photos were almost all black and white. I paid a great deal of attention to lines and form and the abstract qualities that monochrome provided. My influences had been Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander who were all about documenting the social landscape. It seemed that this type of photography was so much better suited to black and white, or as Frank called it, “the colours of hope and despair.” The price was another big reason to use black and white. A darkroom could be set up anywhere, and it wasn’t so difficult or expensive to process and print black and white film. I had almost no access to a colour darkroom. It was 90% black and white and 10% colour.
While attending Ryerson in Toronto, I did learn how to process and print colour film. Thanks to a wonderful professor named Don Snyder, I became quite proficient at colour printing but didn’t get use the skill for several years.
In the 1990s, when I co-owned and operated a custom photo lab in Toronto, the hundreds of hours spent balancing prints, dialling in the cyan, magenta, and yellow, taught me so much. I learned more about colour photography doing this, than in the previous decades of photography.
One client was a designer whose understanding of colour astonished me. She created a line of elegant women’s fashion, and our lab printed catalogues for her annual shows. Not only could she identify and choose from among subtle differences in colour on a print, she could even remember shades without looking at them—the way some people have an uncanny gift for recalling the characteristics of a wine they tasted years earlier, or a music performance heard in childhood. Working with clients like her helped me understand colour precision, and relationships between colours. It made me appreciate the photographic potential of the world around me in a new way.
When I began using a digital camera in 2006, I began shooting almost entirely in colour. Living in the country, I became more aware of light temperature and natural colour casts in the sky. And I no longer needed a colour darkroom. The magic that I felt in my early days of photography had returned.
In this book I take a trek across the colour spectrum following the colours on the rainbow flag seen on page 2. Violet to indigo, to blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, and finally gray. I also have included images that serve as a transition between two colours. It is my hope that the photos are interesting on their own, without the colour connections. They are a glimpse into Colourville—a marvellous place.
