Four years at Emily Carr is coming to a close. Sometimes I think it’s coming to a close way too quickly, but most of the time it’s not coming fast enough. I’ve stopped believing everyday that I really have something to say as an artmaker. Actually, I can say that I stopped believing myself to be an artmaker sometime ago. I started to think of myself as a photographer. When I finished my silkscreen class, I decided to bail on taking courses outside of photography, and concentrate on making myself the best photographer I can be.
And for a good while I started to believe I was getting somewhere. Studio photography in the first semester of third year was the first time since I left Toronto School of Art and printing (through TSA’s program) at Gallery 44 that I felt I was learning something truly useful (I suppose in a very technical way) about photography. I actually felt myself improving technically, and it felt really good. I started taking skate photos with electronic light, I started in the Spring semester to take portraits of people for the first time. It was scary to look at my friends through the lens like that, but I thought I was pushing myself to do something new, and I felt like I (mostly) succeeded with what I shot over the reading week at home in Toronto. I still have all the prints of my friends on my wall at the Duchess house, and I’m planning them on being some of the first things I put up in my room when I move to Balaclava Street with Graham.
I also started shooting larger formats. I started to point those at skateboarding and skateparks. I started to experiment (through a class with Randy Bradley) with alternative processes. This class (although I had started to resist digital processes already) made me really start to consider what image making with photography can mean when you choose a media. That is, analog and digital processes.
I started to believe in making photographs in a real way. Making images that don’t need the translation of the computer and screen to understand. Images that work with chemicals, light, and eyes. Things our bodies are able to inherently understand, without decoding, drawings with light. I actually became morally opposed to making images in a digital process, so much so, that I tattooed “SILVER BASED” inside an banner across my forearms. Red slits show that the process is in me, part of my way of making.
After working a Summer as a courier, the first summer since I started school that I didn’t work construction for 3T. Probably actually the best Summer I’ve had in a long time. I biked everyday for over eight hours, became the most physically fit I’ve ever been, and felt really good about proving that I didn’t need a motor vehicle to survive in a city like this. I skated probably 3-4 days out of every week. I set out for the Summer trying to learn certain key things to make me a better skateboarder, and I actually accomplished them, when I never really thought I would. I actively hung out with only a handful of friends, most of my Vancouver kids being out of town for Summer, and the rest of my time was at the skatepark.
Anyways, after that Summer I came back to school. I was excited to get back printing in the darkroom, and making photographs. I wanted to work on my grad project. Which I had decided was going to be the large format skateparks. I was still skating a few times a week, and even better I was taking more skate photos, and still thinking that I was progressing. I actually felt like I was part of a skate crew for the first time ever too, getting phone calls for secret night sessions, keeping the lights on the bowl sometimes until past eleven oclock.
I went home for Katie‘s wedding at the end of September. I even brought the 8×10 to continue working on photographing skateparks at home in Ontario. I skated new lines in parks I had been to in summers previous, and still felt like I was learning. I skated with my pal Beth who I had met skating over the summer in Vancouver, since she’s now at school in Ontario. I took one photograph each of my parents, my brother and his wife Megan, select cousins, aunts and uncles present at Thanksgiving dinner, and took one family portrait of everyone together.
Coming back to Vancouver and processing the film I began to think more and more about photography. I thought again about the significance of traditional processes, of their inherent value versus the disposable nature of digital mediums. I thought I had maybe made the most meaningful photographs I’ve ever made of my family. I almost cried when I was printing the photographs of my parents and Patrick and Megan. Being a photographer spending close to two weeks at home, I only took a singular photograph of each couple. And it was possibly the most beautiful photograph I’d ever taken of either. And now that I’m thinking of it, they are possibly the only photographs I’ve consciously taken of either.
A few weeks later on Remembrance Day some friends and I went on a road trip to Hope. The photographs I took on this one day resulted in 29/45 images being printed, and consequently myself thinking much more about memory and the photograph. Once again relating to the digital process, but also thinking about the implied history, and story telling of the photograph. I started to think about how personal photographs really are. These photographs were (in my opinion) beautiful to look at, and they spoke of history and memory to me.
While this was a welcome exercise in thinking about my work, it also made me start to think about what I was trying to accomplish within my photographic “practice”. The word practice is important, because acknowledging myself as a photographer with a practice, acknowledges myself as an image maker, and I return to the idea of artmaking.
And this is where I’ve started to go wrong. When I started to look at myself as a photographer I was able to make myself progress for the sake of self-progress, progress can be measured in technical prowess easily. Now I’m beginning to look at myself as an artmaker again, and therefore I’m looking at what I think I have to say as a photographic-artmaker. I started to really consider why no one ever had anything to say about the images of skateparks I was showing in classes, the photographs of skateboarding. I started to think that maybe it just wasn’t the right venue for the images. Art school is for looking at Art. Art school is not skateboarders, how are they supposed to look at skateboarding. Well skilled to look at one, but not trained in looking at the symbols of another.
I started to think that maybe the languages I am trying to look at are too blurred, I kept writing “This is not for you, this is for us” in my notebooks. I decided yes, I should keep doing this because it’s not meant for the artists (though I wish they saw what I see), it’s meant for the skaters. It’s meant for skateboarding to understand skateboarding.
And I think, I think I’ve started to realize that what I’m doing here in this school. In this image making. Is just that. I’m just making images. Maybe the reason my images have had trouble generating response is because they don’t mean anything to anyone else. I’m not trying to belittle the meaning I’ve found in my images, I wouldn’t keep making them if I didn’t think that was present. I am realizing though that my photographic practice may be more of a photographic hobby-ist.
I’ve been saying since Fall semester of this academic year, that if it were twenty years in the past, I would be perfectly content to be a printmaker. Someone who just produces custom prints, and I could pursue the images I want to make in my own time. And I’ve been thinking that maybe this is it. Maybe the reason I’m so frustrated with my work not saying anything to anyone else, is because it isn’t. Images are still memories, and they still harbour that for me. They aren’t for you, they are for me. And I think I need to start to accept that reality.
I love the act of making prints. I love being in the darkroom. I love being able to dork out on exposures, and I love imagining prints as I shoot photographs. I love looking at negatives, and imagining how I can make the print look. I fetishize the photograph. I enjoy looking at photographs that are really well made and I strive to do that in my own prints. But these are all things to do with image producing rather than image making. I am production rather than creator. I make but I don’t define. I am a labourer. I’ve written in notebooks about this too.
The Summers of construction, working as a bike courier. I was content to a degree with this lifestyle (much more so with couriering). And I’m trying to figure out if I’ll ever be more than that as an image maker. I’m not sure if I need to be. Which is how I arrived at being a hobbyist. I wrote in that notebook that “I am not image maker but image labourer”. I’ve wondered if this is it. If I’m content just working, just keeping myself busy. That first semester this year, I was printing in the darkroom, and at school working on things 40 hours a week, if not more.
And even then, it’s easy to feel accepted as a labourer. I can help someone make a print better in the darkroom purely out of having more experience printing than they. I can perform the labour. I can feel good as a courier because I’ve achieved my goal. I delivered an envelope, I am rewarded for achieving thus. With photography, I’ve never sold a single print. I’ve never been rewarded for something I’ve created. The closest is actually in doing the labour of making some prints somebody else shot.
So what I’m coming to, is that if I want to keep photographing, if I want to keep my love of photography alive, I need to give up on being artist and image maker. I need to keep doing the things I love with photography, and I need to stop expecting my images to mean things to other people. My images are my history, and my interaction with the people and the space around me. They are the personal, they are my love; and I shouldn’t expect them to be more than that. I need to be satisfied with that.
And I think that is where I need to be. If I am only to succeed at being a labour machine, that is what I will need to do to feel good about myself. I need a reward for my efforts at some point. The shift in photography is to be happy with making beautiful things for myself, my friends and family. I am acknowledging that my histories, memories and marks I make aren’t for other people. They are not for you, they are for us.
