Insight section, Saturday Star, February 25, 2012.

Globe Life section, Globe and Mail, February 27, 2012.

When the 13 photographers assigned to shoot Easter Seals camps across Canada filed their black-and-white photos last summer, in most cases they didn’t submit text. As with previous PS projects such as Cancer Connections and Inspiring Possibilities, a writer would be tasked to write the captions, as well as the stories of the camps. Enter me.

Much of my time last fall was spent first speaking with the photographers about their pictures and experiences at camp. Then I criss-crossed the country by phone to find out more about the people within the frames. (Five or more photos each X 13 photographers = 65+ subject interviews + interviews with photogs and camp staff/directors = a lot of talking and transcripts.) Often I spoke to the kids themselves, but their parents were also an equal part of these conversations, filling in the blanks and providing context.

Photo ©Scott Munn, PhotoSensitive. When Mary Burtt dropped off her daughter Laura Osborne at camp for the first time, she brought along a journal – not for her daughter, but for the counsellors. She wanted them to make notes in it, because, she says, when the 22-year-old returned home “she wouldn’t be able to remember a name, or what she had done, or anything.” However, what mattered most to Mary wasn’t which activities Laura participated in, but the impact camp as a whole had on her. “It was amazing . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen her react to something that strongly for an extended period of time,” Mary says. “There’s many things that we do with her, for her, that she’s excited about in the moment, but that one continued for days and days.” Laura, Mary explains, lived the life of a typical teenager until she was 16. Then the tremors in her hands started. At 18 she was finally diagnosed with Metachromatic Leukodystrophy, a progressive and terminal genetic disease that affected her mobility and memory, among other things. Laura, pictured dancing with counsellor Mike Moors, loves music, and her ability to remember lyrics doesn’t seem to have been impacted. “I’m sure music will be a part of her life as long as she can get words out of her mouth. Time will come when she can’t speak, but as long as she can speak, there will be music coming out of that little girl.”

I’ve always been sensitive to words, especially when it comes to disability. Perhaps it goes back to a brief write-up about myself in high school that began, “Despite her physical difficulties ….” Despite. Ouch. Several years ago I was also involved in a visual storytelling project called Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference, in which participants constructed their own stories using personal narrative and photos.  In writing the text for Kids Who Can, it was important for me to find out as much as I could about the children within the frames and to best represent their lives.

This brings up a related conversation for another day: How much will people read when they look at a photograph in an exhibition or online? How much more do they want to know about the subjects in text? Personally, I’m in the “more is more” camp, so one of my challenges was keeping to a word count. I could write several books about the people photographed in Kids Who Can, and perhaps did with my initial drafts, two of which I’ve included in this post. (They’ve since been edited down to about 100 words apiece.)

If there was one thing I did keep hearing over and over from the parents, without any prodding, it was that summer camp was a place where their kids could just be themselves, not Joe/Jane With a Disability. Some of the kids said this, too.  They were just like everybody else at camp. That, in a way, was the whole purpose of going to camp.

Photo © Todd Korol, PhotoSensitive. “Sometimes I like falling into the water, and your team has to pull you back in,” say Hannah Blischak, pictured being pulled out of a raft by Casey Fisher, front, and Anke Viljoen. Hannah first went to camp when she was 10, very soon after she learned she had diabetes. “I was diagnosed in June, I went to camp in July,” she says. An active 14-year-old who wrestles, swims and plays basketball and volleyball, Hannah says she loves camp because of all of the team-building activities, but also because it is the one place where she isn’t the “loner” who has to give herself a needle. Hannah has one more year left before she can return as a counselor in training, which is her dream. A three-week program for teens 16 to 18, Camp Horizon’s Counsellor in Training Program “would be good for leadership skills, I think, and the fact that you’re surrounded by so many people who have the same disease as you and they’re going through exactly the same thing,” Hannah says. “And you’re helping them out: you’re helping them to take better care of their body and to just have fun.”

 

From the over 650 student submissions, 44 were chosen for the show by myself, PhotoSensitive co-founder Andrew Stawicki and James Burns, who coordinated the work from the pros. Many of the students whose work was in the show, as well as the teachers who coordinated submissions on their end, came out for the night, and it was great to finally put faces to names, voices and emails.

Graphic designer Rizwan Ali put together the exhibition panels, and they were cleverly turned into a book with pull-out pages. Below are the Young Lens layouts.

Related link: PhotoSensitive blog post

Emily Metcalf, 3, reaches to switch off a light in her home in Trenton, Ontario, on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Emily's parents, Adam and Shari, were inspired by Earth Hour to try to reduce energy consumption in their home and are taking several steps to meet this goal, including teaching their children about saving energy and involving them in the process. Says photographer Rachel Psutka: "I thought this image would be good to represent the Energy Project by showing the future of saving energy. Teaching children from a young age about how to conserve energy and instilling these habits as part of their psyche is almost a surefire way to prevent an energy crisis in the future." Photo © Rachel Psutka (Loyalist College)

It’s been rather quiet here in this space these last months, as I was spending much of my time coordinating PhotoSensitive’s The Energy Project: Through a Young Lens.

Most of the submissions can now be found on the site in the Student Gallery. We are currently in the process of selecting the best images for the Energy book as well as the Young Lens show, which will debut in October at the Henry’s Photographic, Video and Digital Imaging Show before touring schools across Canada.

Back in May and June on the PhotoSensitive blog, I posted some of my favourites at the time. I also posted a few on our Facebook page, including this creation from OCAD University’s Emily Doyle, which arrived just before the June 30th deadline. It’s electric.

Another new Canadian collective made its debut this week, officially launching their website, blog and Twitter feed. They are called Rogue, and with 10 photogs from Victoria to Montreal (and one in New York), they – Deddeda Stemler, Brett Beadle, Todd Korol, Jason Franson, Tim Smith, Marianne Helm, Jennifer Roberts, Christopher Pike, John Morstad and Jimmy Jeong – have most of the country covered.

On Thursday night I had a quick Skype chat with Brett (Vancouver) and Jimmy (New York), who said Rogue has been in the works for about two years — or at least the idea for the group was first ignited about that long ago.

As with most of the collectives popping up, support is a key reason for coming together. But so too is collaboration, as their first group project is already in the works. Says Beattle, ”Being able to approach a situation and say, the 10 of us want to work on this, and make it happen, that final product will be so much more valuable, in my mind, than if we did it separately.”

Related links:

NPAC Photographer’s Q&A: Jennifer Roberts, Jimmy Jeong, Jason Franson, Tim Smith, Brett Beadle, Deddeda Stemler

“I knew he was tuned differently, and I needed to build a bridge, get inside his head, learn what made him tick.’’ – photographer Timothy Archibald on his son Eli (above), on today’s Lens blog.

For a while I’ve been wanting to post something about Timothy Archibald’s Echolilia after coming across it this summer when I began work on a story about a young woman with Asperger’s syndrome.

Today Lens has posted a a story about how Archibald collaborated with his first son, Eli, who is autistic,”in formal shooting sessions that rarely lasted more than 5 or 10 minutes but were regularly scheduled and initiated by an object or notion that interested Eli.”

Archibald’s wife, Cheri, initially wasn’t too sure about the project. Jane Gross writes:”She worried that Eli was being exploited to serve her husband’s need to make sense of his own suffering. Eventually, however, Mr. Archibald said (Cheri) grew enthusiastic as she saw Eli’s pleasure in the work and the results.”

On Alison McCreery’s Photographers on Photography blog, the photographer explains the title.

For me, I wanted a title that people would approach without any previous baggage…something no one would know what it meant, but they could kind of figure it out by the sound. My word, ECHOLILIA, sounded like “echo” and sounded like a pretty flower “lily” and those two things summed it up for me. In medical books about Autism, the word “echolailia” appears, which refers to this type of verbatim copying of sounds and sentences. I liked the actual meaning because it reminded me of what I was doing: copying my kid, copying his stuff, photography is like copying something…it could go on and on. And I liked the meaning one would guess at, even if they didn’t know what it meant.

Related links:

Look inside the book
Feature Shoot Q&A, Sept. 10, 2010
Discover magazine’s Inside the Brain/T.A. blog, Sept. 27, 2010

I’ve been a little MIA in posting recently, instead often using Twitter to share things of interest. I’ve also started a new job, working a couple days a week for PhotoSensitive. The non-profit Canadian photo collective has embarked on a new project, Energy, and I’m helping to get students involved in a mini version of the show, “Through a Young Lens,” a concept first tried for Cancer Connections. If you’re a Canadian student or a teacher who’d like to get involved, drop me a line at tanya@photosensitive.com

A couple for the notebook

Meanwhile, I’m constantly thinking (okay, aren’t we all?), which made this video I came across yesterday — via Finn O’Hara on Facebook via APhotoEditor via duckrabbitblog — appropriate viewing. The four-minute piece is a book promo for Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and another ever-clever timelapse animation from RSA Animates. Nothing against getting things done quickly, but I get/like/understand his notion of “the slow hunch,” especially via RSA’s doodles, as well as how it relates to connectivity. Johnson’s longer TED talk from July on ideas can be found here.

On a similar theme … A week ago I also attended some of the lectures at the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Festival in Toronto. I’m hoping someone (obviously not me) was smart enough to record Stephen Mayes’ hour+-long talk on restructuring the photographic process, as it was another one of the VII managing director’s speeches that should be out their circulating. Mayes touched on many of the points also in his June Sortir du Cadre interview with Gerald Holubowiz (below) — the currency of ideas, the changing value of photography as a product,  VII’s shift to publisher from supplier, the emergence/importance of transmedia. Just my own two cents, but I think if Mayes’ thoughts were condensed to four minutes they’d also make a good RSA animation (hint, hint).

Related link: Tribble & Mancenido blog: Stephen Mayes