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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Cancer Connections
I’m doing some more work for PhotoSensitive‘s Cancer Connections project, a partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society. The exhibit and web gallery of photos of people who have been touched by cancer has two more stops before its June finale in Ottawa, and we’re hoping to reach our goal of 1,000 photos. The deadline to [...]
Envisioning
This morning I received an email announcing the launch of www.envisioningnewmeanings.ca, the website for “Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference.” I was still working at the Toronto Star as a copy editor when my friend Lorna Renooy asked me if I wanted to participate in the initiative’s first workshops, which put photo and storytelling [...]
My second MIM
(Click the photo above to watch the MIM on the Magnum site.) When Mark Power was in Toronto last May he, like the other Magnum photographers in town for the CONTACT workshops, gave a talk about his work. Much of what I remembered from that night was about how about geography and imagination inspired him. [...]
James and Linda
This summer, I took up a new sport: rowing. Well, more acurately, I enrolled in a four-week learn-to-row program at the Argonaut Rowing Club in Toronto. Something, aside from the desire to be on the water, was calling me starboard. It was during the first couple of weeks that I heard about Linda and James. [...]
Contemplating Three
Book cover of Three, by Ed Kashi. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Ed Kashi’s Three at the ICP bookstore. Bit by bit I’ve been poking through it, delighting in the pages that in some cases fold out to present the photos in each triptych side by side on individual pages. [...]
Oaxaca exhibit
July 2008 – The three amigos, Eva, Sandra and Fredi, at Escuela Creer Down, a school for children and adults with Down syndrome, in Oaxaca, Mexico. (Photo by Tanya Workman) On Friday I learned that one of the photos I took during a July 2008 workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, will be included in a forthcoming [...]
