I thought that I had ordered Sent a Letter by Dayanita Singh. I was expecting it 21 December when Amazon said it would arrive. It is a seven volume set of photographs that she made when travelling about India and made with specific people in mind.

In my usual detailed oriented state, I went to Addall and after minutes of frustration trying to find a hit for any of the words associated with the book. What arrived was Go Away Closer - a nice title in my penchant for Robert Frank titling.

The size of the envelop when it arrived had me heading back to the internet to see if I had got it right - one volume, thin, about 7x6 inches. It seems that Sent a Letter is yet to be published.

Couldn’t be more pleased with the book, as it gives some sort of validation for my working method. The book is one short of my prime numbered books - 33 - each image significant but in the way that it states something and is quite significant but is strengthened by their arrangement. Some work as diptych-like others lead work as links. They hover between the private and public.

Personally feel better for at the WGAS among exulted tenured, making photographs is rare, making enough photographs to sequence them into a book is unheard of - except for some misplaced E.U. member.

This book is accessible in it manner of production - well not the professionalism in the printing, Steidl is to Lulu is what real artists are to the world of the WGAS - but it wasn’t the mammoth size of Misrach’s The Beach where he seemed to attempted to make the snaps the same mural sized prints that were on the wall.

I did receive the Go Away Closer a bit late as this semester there was a surge of on demand book-making that took place in two classes that also seeped somewhat into the student population in general. It could have been useful in the Field Trip Class that favoured the i-books and mine where to my chagrin I thought Lulu wold be better.

This would was perfect in the idea of an essay which is similar to a writing essay, a complete - but not a closed - thought. The strategy for class - at least my class - for using a print on demand book was that one would have to have a series of photographs, a thought, and a idea of a body. It would mean that work could not so open-ended. The print on demand instead of a crafted “artist” book so that those who cannot work with glue and knives wouldn’t feel left out and the caché of a book that imitates those one spills their double lattès on at Boredoms.

Envy comes as once again it is all down to funds. Steidl make sure that the book is pristine so that one doesn’t trip over the printing on the way to the snaps. I take the blame for thinking and hoping that Lulu could be close when in fact while it is no worse than i-Books it is bad in a completely different way - problems with evenly printed solid colours. Was embarrassed after touting Lulu due tests done before school ended for the summer, hearing how much it sucked. My second attempt proved them right.

Now though there is a whole subset of people researching quality of specific print on demand publishers at the WGAS and I have placed my order for Sent a Letter.

Referencing the priveleging of my practice

Bravo Roberta Smith!
I was at an endless meeting reading horrible statements written by students in the hopes of getting shows the poverty of the statements is due to we the faculty of the WGAS making up for the paucity of shows with a dialect of English barely understood outside white walls.

After seeing ‘investigation’ pop up for the tenth time in eleven applications, I thought of having a call for words or phrases that should be banished from art English. Due to my procrastination - remember in this is a conceptual school, actual carrying through with the idea isn’t really paramount - Roberta Smith beat me to it in to-day’s New York Times.

Here's hoping that in the near future the only subgrouping of the human race that can freely butcher English will be sportcasters.

“On the bottom shelf of the library were twenty volumes of THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, each one clothed in a navy blue cover and bearing a torch of gold. Inside on the frontispiece was a drawing of the globe resting on a bed of clouds and showing the lines of longitude and latitude… the first page of my favourite section, THE BOOK OF WONDER , showed children gazing up at the heavens…
She also wrote down poetry she had memorised and painted an illustration. Tom referred to these random accumulations as the Book of Wander.”
Joan Clark – LATITUDES OF MELT

It was a Pavlovian response, when being offered a show mid-January, I said yes. It is hard wired into us, even those of the conceptually based WGAS, we need them for the CV, for validation.

As soon as I had agreed I wondered why. I never like the outcome, it seems a waste of money. No one actually sees them and the busiest time in a gallery is when booze is being served and then people come to see who else shows up as the work is impossible to see.

Mind you they can be useful, in Pouch Cove I wanted to see if it was possible to make a large space intimate and what size prints would be needed so that one could still feel the personal relationship to the work as one would in a book - wouldn’t have to worry about the crowds. Also there I wanted to sell.

But, as I stated, outside of the creative community, except for a brave bayman’s family, no one from the village dare enter the space. As I have also stated that while I ‘m sure that Carol would prefer that I took up gambling as less money would be wasted and there would be a slight chance of some funds coming from the effort, the money spent putting up a show would keep me in mailings for a good six months.

I am continuing to use the space afforded me at the University of the South as an experiment. - the opposite of what I did in Pouch Cove which looked like I was a rational human being quite in control of what I do - which most people know couldn’t be further than the truth.

This time it is opposite of this summer, the images will be small, different sizes and placed all over as if I were some brown version of Yamamoto - definitely not Tillmans - I won’t distress the images the way that Yamamoto does but will mix format and styles. Based around the books of wander, but exploded, vomited over the walls in a form of loose exquisite corpses. This means, gelatine silver prints, and archival pigmented prints, black and white and colour. I am going against my evil twin’s suggestion of less is more.

Liking Allen’s hanging at the MCA where she used magnets, and not wanting to use neither frames nor have the hanging devices show, am going to try to do the same as I want the images to float out from the wall somewhat flat but not as if they were on fome core. Everything is a balance here as I don’t want them to overly curl as some fibre based paper does but don’t know how dry the room will be.

Not knowing the space but reckoning that it would have four walls, thought of using the major points on the compass as a basis for the hanging. Also panicked as I have to not only figure out what images I want to use but what will determine the size. Think of being contrary here by making what would seem to be important small and those images with little to see larger.

I had planned to start all of this - 18 December - yeah right - so that I could plan the days and not have a race at the end. There was a moment of maturity with the show last summer when I did start working on it in February and stuck more or less to the plan. I hold no hope for this sot of working method this time - holidays. I also thought/hope that this will keep my mind off the fact that I am not in Pouch Cove this winter. That I shall be so busy that January will pass without thinking of where I could have been. The snow and seeing how people handle it here doesn’t help at all.

Having seen the floor plans, I have been calmed a bit, a manageable amount of running space. Only two walls three spaces. Ok I can breathe.

That is until I wrote the Tanzanian of the South only to find out that I have both galleries.

Breathe. Breathe.

Ok so plans change as the space becomes grander, I’ll become more schizophrenic. The first room will still show my manic confusion but the second, going against what I had said this summer, will be six to eight large archival pigmented prints showing some control.

Now all I have to do is start.

I found myself uploading Creative Suites 3 in its entirety one Saturday. I had planned on uploading it, then going on to make some post cards and catch up on the backlog of books.

It seems that spending the morning getting it on the laptop then cleaning it up and finally finding that it took up too much space became peeved.

Peeved because I wasted a morning. Peeved because I really didn’t need CS3. I am quite happy with CS2 but something in me said that I had to have the latest.

I also noticed recently that I have been spending more time upgrading than actually making work. it started with the death of the 2200 but also went through the seemingly never ending task of backing up what I have done. I have backed up so much it takes me more time to find the most recent version than it did to make it.

I find that the digital world has now supplanted the analogue one in yet another facet. This time those losers who would come into camera shops drooling over the Leitax Orgasmoflex 5EX knowing full well that with one their images will be better and a MacArthur Grant will surely follow are now looking down their noses at those with last quarter’s operating system or application.

I fell for it. Everything was running swimmingly but there is was. The newest upgrade and well.

This wouldn’t have happened in the analogue world. In the analogue world – at least the one that I inhabit – passé is de-rigueur. To have something up to date, the latest incarnation seems so…gauche as it is well known that those older tools add a cache – ok enough of the French.

I know that in my position teaching I will have to know and use the latest upgrade but that doesn’t mean that I have to slavishly do the same in my own work. Sitting in front of this for everything has become less and less fulfilling and worse I don’t find that I really have anymore control here than I do in the darkroom. I also find that this brave new digital world is bankrupting me and while there are places where keeping the image making process perfectly dry that can be done in a lit room, means being able to work in more places – been secretly subtly turning Martin and Gabrielle’s place into a imaging place and thought until the week-end of frustration, that the next time they were there it would be more or less complete with a new scanner.

Sunday, I went into the 12C basement to make gelatine silver prints. I turned off the lights, found the negs, made a few test strips – but less than what I make on the computer, and lived by that old work ethic of a faculty member at Columbia College – enter with a full box of paper, leave with an empty one.

It was cathartic. I had to focus on one thing. The time rocking the dish allowed me to think and actually edit as I went along. I was less frantic.

The laptop did come in handy though. With the screen black, I could catch up on all podcasts of Ideas and Outfront that had been piling up.

one track mind...

these pictures, it seems,
need more than a thousand words
WGAS crits

skidding unploughed roads
my elegy to winter
is hard to recall

Looking at all the faculty searches somehow leaves me cold – unintended but foreshadowing pun – I see position in New Mexico, Georgia, and Southern California and cannot see myself living in any of them.

At first I think that it has to do with the lack of sizeable bodies of water, Mountains are fine but deserts - even though I hear Albuquerque is nice. I cannot place myself there.

Then the day before Yanksgiving, there is the first panic of the year. The weatherman predicts measurable snow. Most panic. It is only going to be an inch but even here in the upper Midwest people are worrying about travel, accidents and the other anchors remark that they cannot wait until spring.

Strangely I cannot wait. Flying back from Charm City, I found it strange that the autumn colours had just started as I looked down form the plane. I catch Jacinta Wall when she reads the temperature

-Labrador City minus 6
-Happy Valley – Goose Bay mtininus10
-St. Anthony zero
-and here on the Avalon 6 degrees.

I check to see what would test my endurance. I welcome seasons. It seems that the people that I get along most with welcome them also. They are the ones out and about in winter and not hibernating waiting for March – or around here April. Maybe it is because the cold keeps the riffraff off the streets and I can wander not worrying about fair weather dilettantes.

Everyone is “freezing” now – although we have had only one day below 0C. It furthers my theory that most people don’t like to be outdoors and winter gives them a better excuse than summer.

Am at the WGAS in a talk where a photographer is showing his work. Large format from coast to coast to coast and one of the first things that I notice is snow.

Not National Geographic snow not the whiteness celebrated but snow common half melted, rutted snow remnant that one finds in most urban areas north of the Mason Dixon Line. That snow that stays until spring the way that weeds stay until autumn.

I found that remarkable as it not only meant that he was outside in winter but also didn’t let winter impinge on his work, He had taken the snow and thus winter for granted.

Which is not true I don’t take winter nor the cold for granted I am fully aware of it and prepare for it but don’t hide from it.

I had this discussion with a minor CBC presenter about here in below the 49th mythic space is the West, above it, it is the North. I drool at the idea of seeing Labrador – but even I am not sure of those temperatures, I keep applying to the KIAC so that I can make that drive north and seeing everything fall away. I am sort of envious of that same presenter as he plans to drive the ice roads this winter as soon as he finds a satellite radio.

This was the change. This was where I could distinguish the hibernators from the celebrators. On the train through the richer northern suburbs – backyard hockey rinks being flooded, Baseball diamonds turning into skating rinks.

I think of January and how I’d like to be at Martin and Gabrielle’s – even more so now that they have a stove again. To be around people who are out as much in winter. Henry heading down to Bruce’s for his coffee and Canadian, Russ and his morning walks this time across the ponds behind Pouch Cove, Jonathan always doing something but making sure it is outside. Mulley out in the shed, as is Ted.

There is pond hockey which I have been trying to photograph for the past eight years – blame global warming.

With the cold and the snow the lethary has lifted as it means either warmish mauzy days or cold clear days where shadows are as tangible as the objects that cast them. Cannot wait to get out.