Energy

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 [...]
Samantha

Work in progress — a few images I made Monday at the Rex for an audio slideshow I’m working on about 19-year-old singer Samantha Mutis, who is in U of T’s Jazz program.
Going Rogue

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 [...]
Timothy Archibald’s Echolilia

“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 [...]
Creativity, photography, energy
PhotoSensitive 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 [...]
PhotoSensitive’s 20th anniversary

In mid-September, PhotoSensitive celebrated its 20th anniversary with the retrospective exhibition and book Field of Vision: 20 Years of Social Change. Also produced for the event was this seven-and-a-half minute video featuring interviews with several of the founding photographers including Dick Loek, Peter Bregg, Bernard Weil, Patti Gower and Tony Hauser.
Behind the Veil, One in 8 Million win Emmys
Congratulations go out to The Globe and Mail’s multimedia team — including photographer Paula Lerner, reporter Jessica Leeder and multimedia producer Jayson Taylor (now at the Chronicle Herald in Halifax, N.S.) – for their second Emmy win in row. Last night Behind the Veil won the Emmy for New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: [...]
notebook Q&A: Boreal Collective
On September 1, six up-and-coming Canadian photographers — Rafal Gerszak, Brett Gundlock, Simon Hayter, Jonathan Taggart, Aaron Vincent Elkaim and Ian Willms — announced they had formed Boreal Collective, a “dedicated group of Canadian-based photojournalists who are committed to the documentation of injustice and inequities that exist environmentally, socially, culturally and politically in Canada and abroad.” As [...]
Via bulb: thinking outside the box with Mark Lubell
Just came across Gerald Holubowicz‘s 29-minute video interview with Magnum New York’s Mark Lubell, the fourth in the French photographer’s “Sortir du Cadir” (think out of the box) series. Lots of good stuff here, including the managing director on: – being open-minded re: distribution platforms and interactivity – why the first thing out of a photographer’s [...]
Animated poetry, creative collaboration
Anticipating How To Be Alone will soon make a MediaStorm or Multimedia Shooter must-watch list. For now, it’s on mine. (Via NFB on Facebook.) Poem and performance by Tanya Davis, film (animation, photography and editing) by Andrea Dorfman. Walter Forsyth is the producer.
Notes from: Photographing the Personal

I’ve just finished listening to Photographing the Personal, a live webinar featuring Briony Campbell (The Dad Project), Philip Toledano (Days with My Father), Sohrab Hura (Life is Elsewhere) and Leonie Purchas (In the Shadow of Things). For anyone working on a personal project in the most personal sense of the word — one about their [...]
The Burning question

What came first, the story or the storyteller, and should one be stronger than the other? it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario, but over in the “dialogue” section on Burn, David Alan Harvey is once again getting his faithful to weigh in with their thoughts on what makes for good storytelling after a viewer [...]
And the multimedia Emmy nominees are . .
Announced this morning: nominations for the 31st annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards, which include two multimedia categories. Among the nominees was the Globe and Mail’s Behind the Veil series, produced by Jayson Taylor, which received a nod in the New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Current News Coverage category. A couple of my personal [...]
Soul of Athens: What You Have

More on the theme of home: “What You Have” is a really nice series of video portraits by Brad Vest and Kelsey Spellman. A girl in the woods. A believer. An 80-year-old seeking to live out the rest of his life in peace. A couple and their “holler”. There is a continuous search for something [...]
notebook Q&A: Eric Maierson on Three Women

It’s been just over a week since I received this email from Eric Maierson: “Thanks for all the great plugs for MediaStorm. Did you have a chance to check out ‘Three Women’? Be curious to hear your thoughts.” Thus began an email conversation about Eric’s new piece — a series of three monologues depicted with [...]
Manufacturing home

Lately I’ve been thinking about the meaning of “home” — both the physical place and where we fit or feel at home in other aspects of our lives. So somehow it seems appropriate I stumbled across Manufacturing Home by Amy Eckert, which opened yesterday at the MPLS Photo Center in Minneapolis. “This project began in [...]
FilmPossible: Bringing visibility to disability
Earlier this week I received a note from Bloorview’s Karen Snider about FilmPossible, a new video contest they tweeted about last week. As the catchy tagline goes, FilmPossible is about “bringing visibility to disability.” I.e., shattering myths. The contest itself is pretty accessible, too. Open to budding filmmakers of any age, submissions can be made [...]
The two Airsicks

I went to check out MediaStorm‘s relaunched site this morning but got sidetracked by the presence of Airsick, which first appeared in January, 2008 at thestar.com in advance of Earth Hour. My first thought: wow, how cool for Lucas Oleniuk (photog), Scott Simmie (editor) and Bernard Weil (graphics and production). My second, always-an-editor thought: what did they change? [...]
Neighbourhood Stories

I’m going to try to make it out to this week’s launch of a new Neighbourhood Stories Project co-facilitated by Jen Lafontaine of the Centre for Digital Storytelling Toronto, whom I met in 2008 during the Envisioning workshop. The photos, audio portraits and videos being shown this Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Regent Park [...]
Seven from the week

Seven things I read/watched/noticed/thought about this week: Soul of Athens, the fourth-annual project by grad students in Ohio University’s School of Communications, launched Expression, the first of five sections featuring multimedia and still photography about the people of Athens, Ohio. The next one, Passage, launches June 15. Expression’s main piece is Banks of the Ohio. [...]
Some days you need a pep talk from Ira Glass
I can’t remember when I first watched this, but then Della Rollins, whom I met in a grant-writing workshop, reminded me of it over coffee a month or two ago. Ira Glass on Storytelling is divided into four clips. To see them all in order, start here. I’m partial to #2, on looking for stories, [...]
1,000 images and counting
I’m in Ottawa for Cancer Connections‘ grand finale, which begins at noon at Major’s Hill Park (behind the Chateau Laurier). The other day the Sunday Star ran a double truck of photos from the final show and this article by Antonia Zerbisias. They also ran a photo spread and article when the show had its launch [...]
Project boxes

Last December, photographer Tim Gruber wrote a post on the system he uses to organize himself, or has tried to implement – the project/idea box, inspired by choreographer Twyla Tharp’s use of, as described in her book The Creative Habit, which he quotes. My friend Henry turned me on to Twyla’s book a couple years ago, and, [...]
Notebooks + relaunched blog

First, there was a piece in the Globe and Mail under the headline “Dear Diary: an endangered species in the age of Twitter.” Then I came across Amy Baskin’s article in the May issue of More in which she analyzed her life-long relationship with her journals, stored in a plastic bin in her basement labelled “Amy’s [...]


