Memory and the sense of numbers

My mum has decided to move into the nearby town, closer to my youngest sister, closer to amenities. She had commited herself to a winter in the old house to see if she could make it. She spent two, but it’s a lot of house and a lot of work for one person.

So I’ve been helping out, running down on weekends to clean out the garage, fix things that need fixing, break things that need breaking. My biggest project was cleaning out the last repository of dad’s memory. The garage that he built from a torn down house across the road. When he built it I made sure there was a room for me in the upstairs. I blocked all the places light could sneak in and made window blinds from garbage bags. It was my darkroom and there I first learned to develop film and print. But it had been abandoned by me years ago, and had become a parking lot for boxes of things that were really garbage but hadn’t faced that reality yet.

Last weekend was the last time I would see the old house. After I finished cleaning out the garage I walked the logging roads I used to explore as a child. They were there, but changed. Other logging roads had cropped up and aged since my excursions years ago. It was the same and different, an alternate reality. Losing that didn’t really affect me. It was like forgetting a dream when you wake up.

The house, well, both parents smoked and I don’t. I grew up in the house but can’t spend a lot of time in it, I get squinty-eyed and raspy. No great loss there in my subconscious.

What struck me was the phone number. For over 30 years the same seven digits were my connection to home, to my parents, then to just my mum. Driving home I realised in another week those numbers, burned into my brain like the menu on an old bank-machine, wouldn’t work any more. There was a brief sense of panic, looming loss. Suddenly it came home to me. There is no going back.

Plagiarism and the sense of smell

This started as a comment to bloglily about a memory (malformed as it turned out) of something written that she had enjoyed. It involved smell and was a powerful memory. I responded with this:

Scent is so evocative, it really dredges up memories. The smell of roses always reminds me of my paternal grandmother’s house, lilac’s of my maternal grandma’s.

I remember noticing when I was in California, hiking up the Devil’s Post Pile (I think that’s what it was called) and thinking how ‘alien’ the place smelled. Like someone opened potpouri in the other room. For me home is the smell of salt air and pine.

As for correctly remembering things from books, some of my more creative work has come from getting something I remembered completely and utterly WRONG! It’s like I have a copper-tube memory that ferments everything put in it. Apple juice in, cider out. Vinegar if I’m having a bad day!

It’s such a fine line sometimes between creativity and ‘copying’. I myself have had a few creative moments that were the result of an attempt to copy something but getting it wrong! I suppose I would be in trouble if I had a better memory .

What does plagiarism, the sense of smell and creativity have in common? If you read the last post, you saw me whining about the uber-academic discourse regarding creativity from the wikipedia entry. One thing struck me though, creativity is all about connections, especially “off-side” ones. The connections come from our conscious and sub-conscious ‘muck’ that is the great holographic mish-mash of memory. Smell is such a powerful trigger for memory and connection, but so difficult to quantifiy that I think it is always at work making those off-side connections. You don’t sit at a coffee-bar with your friends and talk about the smell of the library yesterday (“I found the mold a bit off, and the BO was giving it a tart edge”). But the smell of coffee triggers all sorts of connections with me. Especially in the morning. Especially right now.

Something to smell:

PS: I know it looks like a rose, but it’s actually a closeup of a bud from our geranium.

Creativity

I made the mistake of Googling the word “creativity” just now, my thinking being that the links that come up would encourage the spark that made me choose this subject in the first place.  I clicked the wikipedia definition and encountered a very dry and academic discourse which went on at great lengths to compartmentalise the creative process, from history through to the current research in neurology.

I certainly felt my creativity being sapped just glancing through it.  This is my favourite passage:

Thus, highly-creative individuals may be endowed with brains that are capable of storing extensive specialized knowledge in their temporoparietal cortex, be capable of frontal-mediated divergent thinking, and have a special ability to modulate the frontal lobe-locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) system, such that during creative innovation cerebral levels of norepinephrine diminish, leading to the discovery of novel orderly relations.

Here is my contribution to the theory of creativity.

Exhibitionist

What is it that makes us want to parade our thoughts or images or writing out into the big bad world? I’m not a “people” person, but I’ve got a streak of exhibitionism. I like to put my stuff out and get reactions. I prefer the good ones but even the bad ones mean I’ve engaged someone. Drawn them out of their 9-to-5 world and made them think, or pissed them off, or excited them, or shown them something mysterious that tweaks the imagination.

But why bother? Are we looking for validation from others? Is the malfunctioning social part of the brain still trying to engage in whatever way possible (short of, you know, going out and meeting people)?

Sometimes I question the sanity of spending time each night working on an image and posting it to see the reaction of friends and strangers. I mean, yeah it’s like having your own free focus-group and gives you insight into what people might like if you frame it up and exhibit it. But does it get me any closer to what I want to be as a photographer?

This feels too much like one of those conversations a super-hero has with himself in a comic book, as he’s fighting the bad guy. The bad guy is a distraction to the important work of self-analysis, but who is he? Where’s my bad guy?

Anyway, here’s a picture. One of my favourites from the pond last winter.

drifting….

The storm took away the mast, sails, punctured the hull and filled her with water. The hapless photographer stuck with his craft until the end, then launched the life raft. Now the only land for hundreds of miles (and not shown on his charts, of course) is just visible in the setting sun. The currents are taking him away from it, where else can he go? Time to paddle!

Details: Well, the basic background was generated on the computer. Sea, islands and gloomy sky. On that I layered a seascape I took off of Prospect, Nova Scotia and modified its perspective to match the computer generated one. I played with the opacity and used “multiply” to join them. The sky I took from here in Debert and joined that layer to the computer generated one using “burn”.
I had a lot of fun when I was creating this series on epz. For that matter it’s never actually ended, since I started with the last shot and am still working my way towards it. There is a certain freedom knowing how it ends. The fun really is in the journey there!

What am I doing?

This month is a busy one. I have pieces in four different galleries in our town, so there isn’t a stitch left in the house. Walls covered with little nail heads and thumbtacks!

In the process of trying to put down an artist’s statement so I could drum up some publicity I went from writer’s block to “Run Martha the dams a-breaking!”. So I thought I’d share one excerpt from it with you lot. I’m pretty sure there are other artists out there that sympathise. Drop me a line!

I’ve started a series I’ve variously called “lost worlds” or “dark and blurry” (depending on how I feel about it that day). It is a revolution against the perfection of my camera lens. Not that my lens or camera are particularly advanced. The average photographer has far more sophisticated gear than I do. But the camera companies, in their quest for optical perfection, make gear that, to me, is just too good!

I feel the camera and its lens contributes as much to the image as the light falling on the scene. The interaction of all these parts make the whole, but the camera and lens have become almost ‘transparent’ to the scene. Not that it’s a bad thing. I’m sure there are more people out there who would rather get sharp images than blurry ones, but there can be real magic in those wonky accidents from less-than-perfect gear. The $30 Holga camera is a perfect example. Professional photographers gladly dish out the cost of a good meal to have a badly made film camera that vignette’s the image, leaks light on the film and has poor optical quality, because of the amazing images they can create.

The LensBaby is another great example. A tool for making your photo’s sharp at a spot and blurry everywhere else. But it is a wonderfully creative tool! So if you’re part of ‘the revolution’ then drop a comment and link to your ‘lost worlds’!

Storm Tonight

Jumping ahead a few days, our Hapless Photographer just heard the forecast on the shortwave. Big storm tonight. He’s not worried though, he’s got a sturdy boat and he’s an experienced sailor…. Moo ha ha ha ha!

Details: This shot is a combination of a computer generated seascape with stormy skies from about 3 of my images. The seagull was brought all the way from Indian Brook beach in Florida. I suppose to be “realistic” I should have made the seagull more of a silhouette, but part of the fun is having these little jarring notes in the image to make you think something isn’t quite right…

I used a wonky gradient filter to give the patchy coloured look to the sky, then used my graphics tablet to handwrite the caption.

Stormy Weather!

He’s being lulled into a false sense of confidence. His solo sail on the ocean has started off well. He isn’t even clear of land and he’s seeing whales off his starboard bow! Little does he know what awaits him…. dum dum dum daaaaa….

The details: There are 3 photo’s combined here, the sky and sea are separate (the original sea didn’t have a stormy sky, the original sky didn’t have a sea…), and the orca I parachuted in from a shot I took at Seaworld. I desaturated the final shot in keeping with the somewhat monotone feel of the series.

The Hapless Photographer

A couple of posts ago I promised to put up my "Hapless Photographer" series here. I got caught up in other things, but always it was there in the back of my mind (the back of my mind is a very large place, and seems to hold an awful lot of stuff!).

This all started because of the photo above. Ok, it's not going to make the cover of "National Geographic". but there was something about it I liked. So I thought about why I liked it. I realised it wasn't so much the photograph, it was the story it implied!
Picture a photographer, lost, trapped on a deserted island. This is the last picture he takes before his final breath, the gulls circling and the tropical sun beating down on him.

Sounded like a great idea for a series! How do you make such a thing even believable? There aren't any photo printers or drugstores on deserted islands… Ok, what if he had a Polaroid camera? And a marker to write a caption? At this point I had a series in my mind and a "look" for it. So the shot became this:

I also realised that it wouldn't be much of a series if this was it. So the first shot became the last shot. I had my ending, now I just needed a beginning and a middle.

Liquid Nitrogen

The members of the club that attended the liquid nitrogen night all brought objects to photograph. Three green cups become mysterious monoliths in the fog.

A flower was included in the mix. Placing it in the tray with the water produced a dreamy landscape. A very static yet interesting mix that contrasts greatly with the next one, where the liquid nitrogen was blown over a mirror holding the flower.