don't trip on the baggage

"the world is, after all, an endless battle of contrasting memories." - murakami, 1Q84

i'm grateful for the thoughts you shared on my language post last week. both in the comments and via email. the post was some initial thinking about some situations i've found myself in of late and all of your ideas have helped me sort out a bit further what i'm feeling about this issue. it is to an extent, as jessica suggested, a question of whether you feel you belong or not. and the ever-present (if you're me), resistance to belonging fully.

in one of the settings, i've made an active decision not to belong anymore and tonight will be the last time i put myself through what has become a nearly painful evening. the decision to withdraw from that group has more to do with pony abuse, tho' it's also connected to language abuse, than with not feeling like myself. mostly, i think tho', it's a clash of values - or perhaps culture. in my model of the world, it matters more to do all you can than to righteously follow arbitrary rules. i also value good arguments and "that's how we've always done it" is simply not a good argument. once i've lost respect for a person or a group, it's over for me. quite probably my own shortcoming, but nonetheless true. i just hope that i can hold my tongue tonight.

with the other group, i hold back because i'm new and i'm getting the lay of the land. i can also see that my purpose for being involved is different than what the group is currently preoccupied with. but i think it will be ok, as there's room for both my purpose and their preoccupations. but i definitely do hold myself back because it's all in danish in a way that i wouldn't if i could speak english in that context. however, that's not all bad.  it's a good lesson for me to learn. and a bit like taking your husband's last name when you get married, it's a way of starting with a fresh, clean slate. and life doesn't present us with that many chances to do that.

but back to language and the way it constructs us. how we articulate, the words we choose, the history and weight behind those words (both our own and linguistically) - it all matters. we use language to include and to exclude - think of the way doctors speak so that patients can't understand or how when you join a new company and don't yet know all of the acronyms - language is both a way of marking who belongs and perhaps more importantly, who doesn't.

but things do get interesting when the intersections of language involve other languages and other histories and other memories and other baggage. or maybe i'm just preoccupied with all of this because reading murakami makes me even more introspective than usual.

out of tension comes meaning

it seems my little ditty yesterday about documentary photography struck a cord with some (thank you all for your comments). and thanks to your comments, i've had a chance to think some more on the half-thought thoughts i threw out there.

i want to start by saying that i, in no way, was saying (or even thinking) that my iPhone photo of a photo in a museum was in the least bit an example of documentary photography. what i like about it (and the one above), is seeing my own reflection in the photo. it underlines for me the way in which i feel i participate in an exhibition (or really, most things) by placing myself somehow there. participating. active. part of it. that i chose these documentary photos of russian women to take my iPhone photo in underlines another interesting thing (for me, anyway) - that the ones i wanted to identify with were the photos of russians, not of norwegians or gypsies or rwandans (which were also represented in the exhibition). i guess it was these to which i could most relate. either that or the reflection was best there and i could see myself most clearly. which is also a potentially interesting statement.

ASIDE: can i say that I DESPISE blogging from a PC and IE6? who is still using IE6, you ask? morons. why is this stupid thing hopping up to the top all the time? ARRGH! deep breath. and now back to the regularly scheduled blog...

and to a huge extent, i agree with bill that many of the photos on blogs, while documenting everyday life in many instances, are not documentary photography. and it has to do with what he said about there not really being that much of the less-than-perfect. i know that aside from iPhone photos, i don't really share with all of you the ones that didn't turn out or which were from the wrong angle or where i had the settings all wrong. we try to show our best here in the blogosphere. and that's not really that real. documentary photography is raw and almost painful in its realness.

i guess what i was wondering about blog photos and frankly blogs in general, is whether they will be data worthy of study by future historians and sociologists, in the way that walker evans' photos evoke the depression like no one else can. i saw the photo of allie mae burroughs that redhead riter mentioned and i have to admit i was transported instantly into a steinbeck novel. i suspect what we're doing out here is more ephemeral, less dense with meaning (yet i continue to try to find meaning in it, like some obsessed maniac).

and the debate made me think about a whole style of photos on blogs that has arisen out of the 3191 project. a sort of naturally-lit, slightly lonesome but rather poetic and a bit wistful photography of mundane breakfast crumbs on a plate. because there's a lot of that out there. and i'm guilty of it myself. but honestly, i don't think it will last. not like walker evans. but i do think it captures the ennui of this present moment and that's something. i don't think that in the diptychs there's enough tension between the photos to hold greater, lasting meaning. because true meaning needs tension of some sort, doesn't it?

of course, a growing disdain for such diptych projects hasn't stopped me from wanting one myself. so we started across ø/öresund, which i share with kristina, where we do photos of life in denmark and life in sweden (and which i love and look forward to and enjoy collaborating on).  i'm not sure we are always beyond wistful breakfast crumbs (i do adore a good macro, after all), but i'd like to think that over time it will show that we have captured something of the contrasts and similarities of the two countries in which we reside, so near and yet so far from one another. and for the first time, i think that i'm willing to watch and let something develop and only later see what it really is. and that's something, at least for me personally. and speaking of kristina, i would say that of the blog photographers i know, some of her photos come closest to a documentary photography spirit.

my own photos probably never will mostly because i have a hard time letting them speak for themselves. that's why i've pushed myself to do wordless wednesdays, in an effort to try to let the photos speak and not try to pile words and meaning onto absolutely everything. that and i really don't like taking pictures of people all that much. rocks and leaves just sit still so much better and they never get impatient with you and tell you to hurry up and snap it already or yell at you for taking their picture without their permission.

but, i thank you all for your thoughts and for the polemic. it provoked a whole lot more thinking on my part and it's less a half-thought thought now and more of a two-thirds thought thought. but, as i said, out of tension comes meaning.

edited: sorry for all the stupid errors that were in this one...but on that stupid PC, it kept jumping back to the top and i clearly lost my place several times...sigh. another reason to love macs. and safari. but that's a whole 'nother post, isn't it?

documentary photography

i learned something yesterday on my usual wednesday afternoon trip to the henie onstad art center (i'm going to miss that place). they had a new exhibition up of contemporary norwegian documentary photography. the photos were all recent ones by norwegian photographers. mentioned in the notes on several of the photos were that they harkened to the traditions of american documentary photographer walker evans (1903-1975) and german august sander (1876-1964) and i intend to look into their work a bit and learn more. i suppose another name for documentary photography is journalistic photography, but it's about depicting snapshots of life as it is. and i suppose it's where the notion that a picture is worth 1000 words came from.

most of the photographers in the exhibition had little interaction with their subjects, they just tried to capture moments without interference, but there were several where they had posed the subjects. one of those is above, where a russian woman is posed on a train (the trans-siberian railroad, to be exact), tho' she is, in a sense, posed in her natural habitat. i had to snap it with my iPhone and i love how my own reflection is visible in the photo, which for me, further underlines the documentary nature of the piece...me documenting myself seeing the documentary photograph. that strikes me as powerful on some level, tho' i'm not sure that at the moment i can explain it. it somehow shows how the things we see, especially something like an exhibition, which is intentional on every level, creep into our own topography and become part of us in what we take away.

i think blogging goes well with documentary photography and many of us are amateur documentary photographers, showing our daily lives and the topographies (there's that word again, but it's on my mind of late) of our lives. maybe contours would have been better, but i love the notion of mapping inherent in the word topography. i wonder if blogs will be future source material for sociologists or historians looking at historical moments? or are they so ephemeral, they will just fade away? interesting thoughts to ponder on a grey and dark northern day.

when i can't sleep

i'm thinking of topographies. maps. cosmologies. is it possible to map a life? to create a topography? is that what blogging is? or is becoming? a topography of a life? is it even possible to come close to even a faint outline of a life? can you preserve the topography of a life in cloth? felt? stitches? fibers? are we able to read the map of that life even if the person who created it and left it behind is gone? do the memories and even more so, the meaning remain and can it be read? do they penetrate the fibers and can we access them? can i make a topography of sabin's baby and toddler life using the clothes she wore then? and will it retain its meaning for years to come? these are the things i'm pondering when i can't sleep at 4 a.m.

what do you ponder when you can't sleep?

today's story people story of the day is so appropriate for this post.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?