Feb. 24, 2015
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
In early 2015, as part of a solo exhibition of my photography and to launch the accompanying book produced by the Art Gallery of Guelph, I gave a 30-minute artist talk. Unfortunately, I had stupidly turned off automatic back-ups because they slowed my computer down. And after I wrote my speech and built my slides, my hard drive died (lesson learned!). I have the speech I initially wrote because I had emailed it, but I lost my slide deck. So until I can rebuild the slide deck, here is the speech I wrote.
CONTENT NOTE: In this talk, I inadvertently used trans-exclusionary language and conflated women with reproductive biology. I now know my language around motherhood was problematic, but I’m still puzzled about how best to address it in this circumstance. I think the discussion around stereotypes of mothers and women is still fine, but it might get a little problematic around my lived experience. When my kids were babies, I felt strongly that mother was a verb – for me it seemed a way of centering the physicality of my experience. Now that my kids are older and that early physicality has shifted, and now that I’ve learned more about trans and gender-non-conforming people, I happily call myself simply a parent. For now, I’m publishing the speech as written. If you have ideas for a better approach, and you care to spend your time and energy sharing your thoughts with me, I’d love to hear them.
********************************************************************************
I thought today I would take you through a little bit about how I came to make the work that’s on the walls and in the book we’re launching today. Everyone is going to take their own experience and meanings from my work and I don’t want to dictate the possibilities of that. But one of the things in the work that I’m going to trace is the desire to show more of mothers than the stereotypical passive, self-sacrificing, asexual, nurturing tropes who only exist in service of their children and families. I don’t know any mothers who are actually like that.
That was how my interest in roller derby girls started… when I went to my first bout, I didn’t bring my kids because I wasn’t sure it would be “family-friendly.” I didn’t really pause to investigate that thinking because I was also happy to go without them. But when I got there, I discovered it was one of the most family-friendly things I have ever encountered. Not only were kids tolerated, but they were welcomed with a dedicated area with all kinds of activities and all ages of kids to play with, for when they didn’t fancy watching the bout (admittedly, roller derby bouts can be a bit impenetrable the first few times you try to follow them).
And then I discovered that a lot of those of kids were watching their mothers play. I knew immediately that I wanted to know these women more. And I also knew that they might be a lot like me. Although roller derby is generally seen as an ‘alternative’ pastime or identity, the women in my photos show characteristics that most viewers could probably identify as ‘normal.’
By showing the plurality of derby girls, I wanted to show the plurality of women and mothers. I used roller derby to foreground the misconception of female identity as maternal, nonviolent and sexually passive and twist it to show the rich complexity of real women’s identities.
And it turns out that I am like derby girls in another way. When I started telling people about the exhibition – in all realms of my life – worlds started to collide. People were shocked. They had no idea I had this secret life of art-making.
After the exhibition, one person said to me, “I had no idea you were so cool! I thought you were just a mom!” Apparently I have revealed my own alter ego.
Which is kind of the whole point I guess. We mothers have identities outside of our kids. Of course I widened the work to show lots of women, many who weren’t mothers, because I would hate to suggest any kind of reproductive imperative. And sometimes there are mothers in photos without their kids. We can never really know anyone, only pieces of them as they reveal themselves. So I hope the portraits raise lots of questions about the people when you look at them.
But back to how I came to make this work… Although I originally got into photography back in 1998, it fell away from my life around 2000/2001. My story as a photographer really begins in 2006, with the birth of my first child.
A friend of mine once said:
“Having a kid has changed just about every thought I have and just about everything I do – not in an infantalized, happy Mommy sort of way but in a cranium-exploding in a million shards of light sort of way.”
That was true for me too.
I went through a time of voraciously reading essays and other narratives of motherhood, trying to find someone else who shared my experience. I’ve seen lots of stories of new mothers feeling they’d lost their identity, their selves, their art, whatever, and had to find all that again or rebuild it. But for me it was different, and I haven’t seen many people telling stories like mine.
For me, I feel like motherhood brought me back to myself. It reawakened my feminism, my idealism. Now that I had a kid who was (hopefully) going to survive me, suddenly the state of the world truly mattered.
Now, my baby was kind of a lousy sleeper. I mean, he slept fine, for two hours at a time, as long as he was cuddled up with us somehow or in the stroller. He was 17 months old before he slept for a five-hour stretch.
In the beginning, I spent months obsessively reading every baby sleep book I could find and trying all their prescriptions to try to get him to sleep for longer stretches, and they all said the secret was to get him to sleep alone. But it just made us all miserable before I finally gave up. When he was about seven months old, I bought a sling and just surrendered to this baby who wanted to be cuddled while he slept. And it felt positively indulgent to just cuddle him. So during his naps, I either put him in the sling and read or wrote, or I put him in the stroller and walked.
It was amazing the things I could do when I wasn’t obsessing about my baby’s sleep!
It wasn’t long before I started to see photographs I wanted to make, and in late 2006, I started to capture them with my husband’s little 3 megapixel, digital point-and-shoot camera. Which, by the way, captured some of the pictures that ended up in an exhibition in New York City in 2009. So it really doesn’t matter what camera you’re working with. I have upgraded my camera a few times since though.
Even in these early photos, I can see some of the visual elements I’m still playing with:
text and wondering about how the text came to be there and the person who made it so…
shadows and reflections…
shapes….
the things we leave behind and the stories they suggest…
All those photos were from late 2006, some of the first photos I took.
Anyways I took these walks and I made some pictures. They started out mostly in places where nobody else hung around, and I eventually learned to keep a foot under the tire of the stroller or put the brake on after a few experiences of it rolling away while I got absorbed looking through the lens.
I started to photograph more people, and with more people looking back at me.
So I did this sort of street photography thing and worked on getting braver about photographing people. I also got really into post-processing each image. But after a while that all felt kind of shallow. And what was the point of all these photos piling up on my hard drive? What was I doing this for?
That was the perfect time to discover the work of Alec Soth. I had gotten really into blogging and reading blogs, and I loved seeing what other photographers were working on. And his name kept coming up so eventually I was like who is this guy and why is he such a big deal? When I visited his website, his book NIAGARA NIAGARA was pretty new, and that was the first body of work I looked at. The first pictures I was like, “Is this all?” They were kind of boring, of cheap motels. But I kept clicking, and then came the interior of a hotel with two swans made of towels on the bed, then the falls, then a young couple holding each other close, then an old love letter. Now this was getting good. More hotels, tuxedoes, wedding dresses, rings… hmmm… Niagara Falls is the honeymoon capital of the world or something. Then a sign that said “Joy’s Divorce Party” and I realized this wasn’t really about Niagara Falls as a place at all. This was about love and its fallibility. It blew my mind to think about a group of photos that might be about so much more than what was in front of the lens.
So that started me thinking more deeply about what I was doing and about making a project. And thinking about motherhood and how prescribed appropriate mom behaviour is and the limited representations of mothers and women in pop culture, I tried something new. I used to belly dance, so I got some of my belly dancing friends and put them in front of urban and suburban scenes. But that felt too fashion-y. I was choosing the outfits and the settings, and it wasn’t really about the women I was photographing at all. They were my friends, but they seemed like models, really, and I was dissatisfied with that. I wanted more of a collaboration.
In the spring of 2009, some of my photos were included in an exhibition at the Alma Gallery here in Guelph. To prepare for that, I had gone through all my photos of the last few years and I’d noticed that although Guelph is a pretty picturesque town, my photos were often dark and desolate and lonely. Most of my photos showed a place that I don’t think people would want to move their young family to, which of course is not true at all. It occurred to me that these photos weren’t really about Guelph but about my own state of mind when I made them.
Being a mother is lovely in so many ways, but culturally it kind of sucks. And I really felt that ambivalence keenly. I remember in university learning the literal definition of ambivalence: ambi meaning both and valence meaning powered. But I never truly understood that idea until one day, when I was holding my first baby, and I was exhausted and full of love, probably breastfeeding him, and in that moment, I wanted to put him down and run as far away as I possibly could and never come back. And at the very same moment, I just wanted to stay there and nurse him and hold him forever and forever.
So I made a self-published book called Two-Powered.
[photos]
I used the photos from those walks and paired them into diptychs to approach some of the ambivalence I experienced, but I didn’t want them to be a simple dichotomy: good/bad, light/dark, sun/moon kind of thing. In the book I paired the diptychs with passages from stuff I wrote during the same two years. That really felt like my first body of work, I think.
For me, becoming a mother has brought more of everything into my life: love and joy, but also rage and fear. It has pushed me to the limits of my abilities and resources and possibly my sanity. Perhaps sometimes beyond those. Culturally, motherhood and mothers are idealized; but it’s lip service. There’s very little, meaningful support for or value on the very hard work we mothers do.
Nuclear family units are kind of useless in this regard. I heard one speaker last fall say that the person who thought up nuclear families created something just as toxic as nuclear waste. Breast is best but that message mostly just ends up adding stress and pressure to a nearly impossible situation. Breast may not be best for mothers who have experienced sexual assault. We’re starting to talk about postpartum depression but it still ends up pathologizing what I think is kind of a logical response to an impossible situation. Birth, which should be a process that helps a woman transition into motherhood, often ends up traumatizing mothers. Those parenting books I obsessed over have ridiculously contrary, crazy-making instructions but all are delivered with the same condescending tone that mothers couldn’t possibly figure it out without so-called experts, and they all promise the same dire consequences if you don’t sort this out. Right. Now.
Who wants to be responsible for messing their kids up? And yet who gets blamed for messed-up people? Mothers. Sometimes both parents, but almost always mothers.
And this stuff starts with pregnancy. With all the rules now about what you can’t consume when you’re pregnant, it totally negates the woman as a person in her own right with her own tastes. She becomes a vessel, almost public property with the way that strangers sometimes feel comfortable talking about her body or even touching her belly. Who would do that in any other circumstance?
So those were some of the things that I was thinking about when I made Two-Powered. At this point, I’d embraced thinking in terms of photography projects and I was looking at a lot of other people’s photography and reading a lot and thinking a lot. You know, learning. What I really wanted to do was to photograph people in their homes. But I had no idea how to go about getting someone to agree. It seemed like a very intrusive thing to do, and I couldn’t imagine why someone would say yes.
So in 2009 I took a documentary photography workshop with Donald Weber, a Canadian documentary photographer. I figured there was some secret knowledge that documentary photographers had, and I wanted it. I wanted something to plug and play. A step 1, step 2, step 3 kind of process. So you can imagine my disappointment when I came out of that workshop and was forced to draw the conclusion that there is no formula. It’s all just trial and error on your own, a struggle. There’s no right way. I did however, learn that the way you get someone to let you photograph them in their house is… this is revolutionary: you ask them.
It’s not always that simple of course… sometimes you need to use your knowledge of people and your intuition to figure out the right time and context to ask, and sometimes it takes a long time to build the relationship first. But sometimes it is that simple. And as for why someone might say yes, I have actually asked a few of the people I’ve photographed why they said yes, and they pretty much all answered the same way. They said they wanted to see what would happen, what it would be like. They were curious.
Anyways, that was when I started working with John, a man with multiple sclerosis, who I had met while volunteering at the Drop-In Centre. So we had a kind of collaboration and I photographed him in his home and as part of that I found myself paying attention to the kinds of things he kept in his home. I’ve always been curious about people and their stories, so my photography just extends this interest. But at the same time, I’ve always felt kind of guilty about photographing people. I don’t know if it’s because I read writers like Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag too early on, or if it’s just me. In case you don’t know, Barthes said things like “The photograph is violent” and “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
Susan Sontag, who incidentally was Annie Leibovitz’s life partner, said “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
Let me first say, I don’t agree with those things at all. I read those things when I was young and just discovering photography, and they held my mind for a long time. But those views come from a time when we thought cameras never lied. The camera is an instrument used by a human being full of subjectivities, so of course nothing emerging from a camera will be objective. (Not even Google Street View.) I also think that photographs are also always a little bit of fiction. Each one is such a tiny fragment of time and space and you can only guess what came before and after.
Since reading Barthes and Sontag, I discovered advice from Alec Soth that young photographers should only read about photography from working photographers, and that seems like good advice to me. Yes, photographers are voyeurs, and yes photographs have power. But on the spectrum of crimes against humanity, being curious about people, snapping some pictures and showing them to other people barely warrants a blip if you ask me. I mean, I do feel a sense of responsibility to my subjects, and compassion, but this is not any kind of subliminal murder, soft or otherwise. And it took me a long time to be ok with it.
In 2010, Alec Soth came to Toronto to teach a five-day workshop and I immediately applied for it. I didn’t care about the cost, I was going to meet him and learn from him. I had been happy with the project with John, but when I tried to make a project while visiting South Africa, I was not happy with my work there.
Luckily, I was accepted to the workshop, and it was an amazing and harrowing experience. Alec helped me figure out what I wasn’t happy about, compositionally. Basically, I needed to use a tripod. Apparently I’m more than a little crooked, so every time I handheld the camera and tried to get things straight, I failed.
I resisted so hard when he told me because that would make things SO SLOW. I’ve always identified with the words of Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer who said “I tried being patient but it took too long!” So I tried to fake it for a few days but he busted me every time. Anyways, eventually I relented and just used the damn tripod, and that really was what I needed to do. When I finished that workshop I was raring to go with my next project idea.
Representations of motherhood – and in particular combating useless stereotypes — were still on my mind in a serious way. And how the things we surround ourselves with in our homes speak volumes about what’s important to us, our struggles, our identities. And I didn’t want to photograph the Other (capital O).
With my work in South Africa and with John, I had become uncomfortable with the possibility that I might be photographing The Other. Even if I didn’t feel that in the dynamic, the photo, once made, can easily reinforce stereotypes, and I felt uncomfortable with that. So I decided to photograph closer to home, so to speak. When I first went to a roller derby bout, I thought I could be a derby girl. I don’t anymore, after seeing so many injuries, but I did then. And when I visited the women in their homes, I almost always found at least one interest or experience to connect personally with them about. It felt right to be photographing people I identified with, to be able to photograph a mixture of ways they’re different from me and ways they’re similar.
I’d like to leave you with a quote from a derby girl in Washington DC, named Rachel MadHo, from a blog post about being queer and a roller derby girl. She said:
“Within the derby community, minority though I may still be, I am neither invisible nor spectacle. I can’t think of another context where being a minority does not mean being in the margins. My difference, my queerness, is known and acknowledged—yet I am not treated like the Other. Most of my leaguemates see the real me, and appreciate instead of gawking. They get it. Even the straight ones.
“Because, I think, there is a queerness about rollergirls—whatever their gender preference in partners. There is an understanding that as women, the world we’ve been given and the roles we’ve been assigned aren’t quite right, don’t quite fit. There is a determination to do things differently, to in fact do everything we aren’t supposed to do: act out, speak up, take up space, know ourselves and be true to ourselves, own our sexuality and whatever it means to us, fight for what we want instead of accepting what we get, always have each other’s backs.”
Kate Wilhelm 