once there was a boy

No, this is not my little grandson, Henry.

This is the first photograph from a series entitled "Once There Was a Boy" by Zed Nelson. The London based photographer set out to capture the aging process of a baby and his family, photographing them on the same day for twenty years. Check it out here.

About the project, Nelson says:

"I began this project in the summer of 1991. The wife of a friend was nine months pregnant, and I had an idea – based on time-lapse photography – to photograph them together as a couple, then soon after the birth, and then on the same day every year. I planned the photography sessions in a formal, almost scientific way. Each year the picture was made on the same date, against the same backdrop, under the same lighting. Now, nearly 20 years into the project it is beginning to get really interesting. While a boy grows before your very eyes, his parents change in more subtle ways. The body language fascinates me, between the growing boy and his parents. At first the son stays close to his mother, then he gains independence, and then increasingly bonds with and even mimics his father. These aren't quirks of the photographic moment, but cycles of the aging process, clearly played out in the contact sheets."

from a distance

Ah, Sunday morning.

Part of me always thinks to myself, "Time to talk to Mom and Dad!"

That's how it went. Back in the day. Every Sunday morning at 11:00 my parents called. It started when I went away to college. We had a phone date, I guess you could say. Sunday morning at 11:00 CST was our time together. We've not lived in the same city since I trotted off to Madison in 1972, so we had this date for many, many years.

"Don't talk TOO long; it's long distance, remember!"

I found it best if I put together a list of topics I wanted to be sure to cover.

"I got a B on the Journalism paper I wrote; Judy and I saw 'Metropolis' last night"... and then later, "Abbie loves her new teacher and made a new friend at school today."

Of course, we saw my parents fairly frequently. There was lots of travel back and forth. In between visits, there were 4" x 6" pictures exchanged via postal service and there were those VHS video tapes Eddie and I made of our children's first baths, first smiles and first steps. We'd pack the unedited, way-too-long video tapes in our suitcase to show our families next time we went home to visit.

I always thought our video tapes were far superior to the old Super 8 movies my parents used to make. It seemed to me that a lot of time was spent simply waving into the camera. "Look, Freda, the camera is on you now. Wave hello!" My grandmother would squint her eyes, shade them from the sun (or the bright lights my Dad would strap to the camera for indoor shots) with one hand and wave gleefully with the other. We did that, too, in the beginning, "Abbie, look at the lens of the camera and say hi to Pawpaw! That's right, wave hello!" But we got pretty sophisticated after a while and were soon making stop action videos of Max scooting around the living room on his bottom, pretending to drive a red Ferarri. We couldn't wait to share these with Bubbie, Zayde, Neetz and Pawpaw - the grandparents.

So now Eddie and I are the grandparents.


The hi-tech opportunities for long distant grandparents are endless now. We got this photo of Henry's first bath fresh from Abbie's blog, not too long after she had dried the boy off.

And we have Skype! We "skyped" (a new verb?) with six-week-old baby Henry just the other night. He stared at Abbie's computer monitor in New Orleans while Eddie and I made funny faces, held up a dancing teddy bear and well, waved hello from Kansas City.

(I remember trying out the futuristic television/telephones at a World's Fair when I was a little girl, and my mom saying, "these will be fine. just so long as I don't get a call when I have my bath robe on.")

IPhones, Skype, text messages, Facebook, Flip Cameras, YouTube, Twitter and blogs have changed the way we all communicate with one another. Our CNN mentality makes us want the full scoop as soon as anything happens, or more accurately, while it happens.

This is very cool for us long distance grandparents.

It means we can get up-to-the-minute coverage of our grandchild's comings and goings. In stills and in video.

Henry makes his video debut here. Abbie sent this 46 second clip to me the other day via email when I was not feeling well and needed some cheering up. Henry is lying on the floor being a baby. Not much action or dialogue. No special effects.

I have watched it at least twenty-five times now. Best movie I've seen in a long time.

Wait. Did you see that? I think he was trying to wave hello.

"do it yourself" foreign aid

Please read the Nicholas Kristof NYT Magazine article about the "do it yourself" foreign aid revolution. I promise you will feel moved and inspired.

His blog follow-up addresses ways to help. There are so many. Again, very inspiring.

Yay for us... the do it yourselfers!

o.b. shoot

Lunch time at Operation Breakthrough yesterday brought a smile to this cutie pie's face.

jr: giving slums a human face

"It’s not common for important philanthropic prizes to go to people whose work involves criminal trespass and who make statements like the following: 'You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not.'

But the TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011 — awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson — to the Parisian street artist known as J R, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.

For most recipients, the value of the six-year-old award has less to do with the money than with the opportunity it grants the winner to make a 'wish': to devote the funds to a humanitarian project that will almost inevitably draw donations and other help from the organization’s corporate partners and influential supporters. The chef Jamie Oliver, the 2010 prize winner, recently proposed setting up an international effort to further his campaign against obesity; Mr. Clinton’s wish has channeled significant resources toward the creation of a rural health system in Rwanda.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday morning on a bus in Shanghai, where he was headed to work on a largely unauthorized photo-pasting project to draw attention to the city’s demolition of historic neighborhoods, J R said that he had learned of the prize only two weeks ago and that he had not yet had time to think of a wish.


But he said that it would undoubtedly involve his kind of guerrilla art, which he has been creating with the help of volunteers in slums in Brazil, Cambodia and Kenya — where the outsize photographs, printed on waterproof vinyl, doubled as new roofs for ramshackle houses. 'I’m kind of stunned,' he said of the prize. 'I’ve never applied for an award in my life and didn’t know that somebody had nominated me for this.'

At a time when street art is being embraced not only by the art world but also by branding interests, J R, who dislikes being called a street artist, preferring the term 'photograffeur' (graffeur is French for graffiti artist) has become known for rejecting corporate sponsorship offers and other outside help. He said that he reinvested most of the money he makes by selling his art in galleries and at auction — one piece went for more than $35,000 at Sotheby’s in 2009 — into creating more ambitious projects, and that he would use the TED prize money for the same purpose.


'If there’s one thing I’ve always taken care of with my work, it’s that it’s never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it’s about, he said speaking in English. 'I think the TED people knew that that was one of my main concerns, and I feel pretty sure that we can come up with a project that works that way.'

Amy Novogratz, the director of the prize, said that picking an artist like JR — he is 27 and fiercely protective of his anonymity, identifying himself only by his initials — was an unusual choice but that the prize committee felt that his work could 'catalyze the whole TED community' to support an art-centered philanthropic project, which will be announced at the organization’s next conference in March.


'One of my concerns at first was that he wasn’t going to be accessible or available, which could be off-putting when you’re trying to get partners to get excited about a project,' she added. And, in fact, the first time prize officials had a Skype conversation with the artist, he appeared in sunglasses with a hat pulled low over his forehead.

'But then he said, ‘You know, I trust you guys,’ and he took them off,' Ms. Novogratz said, 'and we just had a regular old conversation.'"

-The NYT

Check out a slide show of JR's work here.

change the truth chapter 5 begins

Two months from today Change The Truth Team 4 will arrive in Uganda. Sleeves rolled up, energy high, hearts open.

It will be my fifth trip to east Africa. I can hardly believe it!

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will introduce you to the wonderful volunteers who are the members of Team 4 and will acquaint you the projects that will be undertaken by them at the orphanage. It's a great group with terrific thoughts on how to help the children at St. Mary Kevin's.

Hope you'll stay tuned! It's going to be a fantastic journey.

thoughts on photography

A few weeks ago I received an invitation from Paul Giguere to be interviewed for his podcast series “Thoughts On Photography.” To get ready, I listened to some of his "explorations of what it means to live a photographic life.” Paul is a photographer himself and provides a lot of good insights and advice. Over the course of his podcasts (101 of them so far!) he has also interviewed a bunch of photographers whose work I really admire, including Ken Rosenthal, Angela Bacon-Kidwell, Suzanne Revy, Hiroshi Watanabe, Aline Smithson and Susan Burnstine.

My conversation with Paul is now available. You can give it a listen here, and be sure to check out some of his other podcasts, as well.

robert cornelius award: twins

I learned today that I was awarded one of the "runner up" prizes for the Robert Cornelius Award. I entered the competition quite some time ago, and with all that's been going on in my life, I had forgotten about it. I was pleasantly surprised and happy, of course! Not only had I forgotten about entering, I had absolutely forgotten what I entered. Turns out I had dipped back into the twins work I did in 2004 - 2005, a body a work entitled "The Space Between." The piece the juror, Stephen Perloff, liked is this one.


The funny thing is that lately I've been thinking about revisiting the twins work. There are two ideas floating around in my head. The first is to simply pay another visit to the twins I photographed and do an updated portrait. The other idea, one which would require a lot of research and travel, is to track down and photograph sets of identical twins, one of whom has elected to have facial plastic surgery for whatever reason, and one who has not. There actually was one such set of twins in my original project, and I was so intrigued by this. My thoughts about it have clearly lingered; I'd love to explore it further, both from a visual and emotional point of view.

If you happen to know of a researcher who might be able to help me locate twins who fit this bill, or if you know of any such twins who you think might be willing to be photographed for this project, would you please contact me?

six billion

On this day, October 12th - in 1999 - the proclaimed 6 billionth living human in the world was born.


photo by James Nachtwey

(A water theme park attracts hundreds of people, as a way to cool off during an intense summer heat wave, in the suburbs of Shanghai, China.)

emma

I've been making portraits of Emma since she was three. Now she's in fifth grade. Who knows where the time goes.

sally mann

Having just seen the Art:21 segment featuring Sally Mann and learning of her latest book The Flesh and the Spirit (due in November) I revisited her work from (gulp) 20 years ago. It's mind boggling to think about how many photographers (myself included) she has influenced.

I'm sure many of you know all about Mann, but I'm going to include the bio from her gallery, Gagosian, anyway. I'm also throwing in a couple quotes and some of my favorite pictures. I think most, if not all these images, are from Immediate Family (published in 1992).

"Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has always remained close to her roots. She has photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is perhaps best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South. . Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential, and since her the time of her first solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 1977, she has attracted a wide audience.

Sally Mann explored various genres as she was maturing in the 1970s: she produced landscapes and architectural photography, and she blended still life with elements of portraiture. But she truly found her metier with her second publication, a study of girlhood entitled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). Between 1984 and 1994, she worked on the series, Immediate Family (1992), which focuses on her three children, who were then all aged under ten. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives – playing, sleeping, eating – it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. In her most recent series, Proud Flesh, taken over a six year interval, Mann turns the camera onto her husband, Larry. The resultant photographs are candid and frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moments.

Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and Mother Land. In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembled a five-part study of mortality, one which ranges from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound, to the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She has often experimented with color photography, but she has remained most interested in black and white, especially photography’s antique technology. She has long used an 8x10 bellows camera, and has explored platinum and bromoil printing processes. In the mid 1990s she began using the wet plate collodion process to produce pictures which almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting, and sculpture.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia. A Guggenheim fellow, and a three-times recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named 'America’s Best Photographer' by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2007) which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. She has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art."












"If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic- I just go and I pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them- it’s just that they were there..."








"There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I’m always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did."

bar mitzvah boy

Alec will become a Bar Mitzvah next month. I got to make his portrait in my studio the other day. Such a cherubic face. Or punim... as my in-laws used to say in Yiddush.

matthew goddard-jones

Sometimes you just need to look at work. For inspiration. I recently discovered Australian photographer Goddard-Jones while doing just that. Looking. I really liked what I saw. These are from a few different series.

operation breakthrough kiddos

Guess who I got to photograph one morning last week?

yoga at the orphanage

As you may recall, Change the Truth introduced yoga to the children at St. Mary Kevin Orphanage last December during our Team 3 volunteer trip. Bobbi Newman brought some donated mats with her and set up yoga shop in the one of the classrooms. The children (and some of the teachers and matrons) clamored to attend Bobbi's classes. They fell head over heels in love with yoga and have continued to practice it in the months since our visit. Bobbi will be returning to the the orphanage as a member of Team 4 this December. Needless to say, her yoga students are really looking forward to this!

Melissa talked about the yoga scene at St. Mary Kevin's in her most recent letter to me.

"Yawe Joseph has really taken on yoga as his personal project. It was something that he really connected with during the last CTT trip. Team 3 member Bobbi would be thrilled to see Joseph in action, and Joseph will be very proud to show Bobbi in December how he has continued yoga. She had a very big influence on Joseph (as well as Sam).

Joseph is serious about teaching the different poses. He is patient, calm and encouraging, but also enforces a level of respect for yoga (it is not a time for playing around.) Joseph starts each session talking about Namaste and respect for each other. Typically, sessions are about 30 minutes. He has done yoga throughout the school year, and the children know the typical structure of a yoga lesson. There is a good mix of boys and girls in the sessions.

Rosette also does yoga with some of her fellow students in the dormitory of her boarding school. Bobbi left the kids with a book of yoga poses. Both Rosette and Joseph have used the book for guidance. Joseph is eager to try some new (and more difficult) poses with the children soon.

There are still 13 mats clean and neat (just as Bobbi had left). They are carefully put up in one of the rooms by the office. If additional people want to join the lesson, they use sheets.

Having introduced yoga to the children at SMK (especially Joseph, who has found his confidence and voice through this) has been phenomenal and something Bobbi (and Change the Truth) should be proud of."

(Joseph, Rosette and Sam are three of our sponsored secondary school students.)

sold out!

Nine short hours after the initial offering of Aline Smithson's print on Collect.Give, the edition has sold out. Thank you Aline, Collect.Give and all those who purchased a print for a fantastic contribution to Change the Truth!

aline smithson: collect.give

My amazing, generous and talented friend Aline Smithson has pretty much knocked me out this morning. Please take the time to read the following, which is what appears on her blog today. This is a fantastic opportunity to own one of Aline's gorgeous images and to help the kids at St. Mary Kevin, too. It doesn't get much better than that!

Imagine, Aline Smithson

"I am honored and excited to have my image, Imagine, be the newest offering on the terrific charity site, Collect.Give. Founded in 2009 by photographer Kevin Miyasaki, Collect.Give is a place to collect contemporary photography and donate to worthy causes at the same time. It would mean so much to me to have you join me in this venture. The following is from the Collect.Give website:

'The participating photographers have pledged to donate 100% of the profits from their print sales to their chosen charitable organizations. Neither the photographers nor collect.give have pre-arranged associations with the organizations to which funds are donated. Rather, the photographers will make individual contributions with the funds raised. Purchasing prints on collect.give is not considered tax deductible.'

After much consideration, I decided that I would like to support the amazing organization, Change the Truth founded by photographer Gloria Baker Feinstein. Gloria was in Uganda as a participant in an NGO workshop and spent the majority of her time photographing at AIDS orphanages. Upon her return, she could not shake what she had witnessed and was determined to make a difference . She reached out to her Kansas City community and to friends around the county, and was able to 'adopt' the St. Mary Kevin Orphanage.

St. Mary Kevin Orphanage Motherhood is home to about 190 orphans and disadvantaged children. It provides shelter, food, security, clothing, medicine, love, access to education and training in vocational skills. The orphanage has few resources because of limited government programs and extremely high poverty levels. Children at St. Mary Kevin have come to Uganda from as far away as Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Chad and Niger. They have been abandoned, often abused and mistreated. Many of the children come from northern Uganda, where they have lost their families to war. The way things are, these children have little hope. That's their truth... but with your support, we can change it.

Gloria is a long time friend, and to watch her commitment to these children has been remarkable and inspirational. She represents the best of our community, using her photography to change the world. Each December, Gloria and a team of Change the Truth volunteers travels to Uganda, rolls up sleeves and offers on the ground assistance to the children and staff at the orphanage. You can read a bit about these trips on the NEWS page or, much more extensively, on Gloria's blog. If you are interested in participating, please contact Gloria!

Please consider purchasing an image as all the proceeds will go directly to Change the Truth. I pick up the costs of printing, preparing, and shipping the work as my donation. If I am lucky enough to have the edition sell out, please consider making a donation no matter how large or small which would allow Gloria to bring even more supplies this December. $40 would mean so much to these children, and isn't that what it's all about, changing their truth?"

henry's first foray into the studio

At three weeks old, as he and his mama were in town for the best friend's wedding, Henry came into my studio for the first time. He kind of loved the light, but was a bit startled by its flashing. It was a short foray, needless to say, since neither his mom nor his grandmother wanted to upset him. Here's what we made, though. Abbie, Henry and me. The first of hopefully many photo shoots together!

bring on the next generation!

My daughter's closest friends from high school were in town for a wedding this past weekend. Like Abbie, some of these women have started their own families now. It was fun to see them as parents, after knowing them for so many years and having watched them grow up. I was lucky to get some studio time with a couple of these wonderful young families. Here are Carlyle and Luella, the twin son and daughter of Katrina and TJ, and Claire, the daughter of Ashley and Colin.

sunday fun

a poem for henry

Your mother can’t sleep because she stares at your face and kisses it too.

What’s curled up inside you?

A sweet vibrato,
A trip to the moon,
A wild pony ride?

I see pieces of my past in you:
Levi, Freda, Morris, Anita.

Your tiny fist holds their secrets and their longings,
Their struggles and their tears of joy.

Dark eyes darting, you’ll find your own way now
Using the maps they left behind
For clues.

Take me along.
The possibilities make my head spin
And the hope I feel seems endless.

That tiny fist uncurls into a hand
I plan to hold
Walking through gardens
And more.

Today is the fourth anniversary of my blog. Thank you for sticking with me all this time. You've just discovered something new about me: I am not quite a poet. Writing this blog has given me the courage to try a lot of different things. I trust myself here, mainly because you, my readers, seem to trust me too.

leaving new orleans

Tomorrow my stay in New Orleans will end.

Living in Abbie, Sam and Henry’s house has been slightly different from living in my own.

For one thing, there is no TV. I haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would. Mostly when I’m preparing dinner and wondering what's on the evening news.

They don’t use paper napkins in this house, which is one thing I think I’ll start doing in my own home. Not only is it good for the environment, it reminds me of the way we did things when I was growing up. Everyone in my family had their own personal napkin ring so that we could tell whose napkin was whose.

This family owns only one car, which means frequent use of the streetcar, a bike or two strong legs for walking. They own no landline phone, which means no blaring disruptions during the day.

Organic food, cloth diapers, biodegradable cleaning products, guitar and piano playing, singing, composting, a sewing machine, repurposed clothing and furniture, lots of books and lots of quiet time for reading them…. that’s the home that has been mine for the past two weeks. Even though I’ve been busy cleaning and cooking, shopping and doing laundry, it’s really been a vacation of sorts.

The best parts of the day are talking with Abbie and getting to hold Henry. Yesterday, for the first time, Henry fell asleep on my chest as we were sitting next to Abbie at her computer. I guess I dozed off, too. It was so amazing to wake up and find this small, precious boy breathing lightly on my face, his arm resting on my neck.

It will be awhile before I get to savor something like that again. I think that’s what I’ll miss most.

(Thanks, Eddie, for taking the picture of Henry and me.)

voye'm

Voye'm (which is Haitian Creole for “send me”) is a blog written by Shanley Knox. It is her way of living out a dream that began after living in Haiti in the summer of 2007. Shanley tells “the stories of the people who need a difference to be made for them, and the stories of the people doing it.”

I am honored to be featured currently on Voye’m. Shanley asked some good questions for the interview. Please take a look. It’s possible you may learn some things about Change the Truth that you didn’t already know.

You can read the interview here.