Saskatchewan

Everett Baker. Joe Murray Family, 10 July 1954. Shaunavon, Saskatchewan

The Saskatchewan Communications Network (SCN) has been axed by the Saskatchewan's Wall government, saving $5 million a year.  SCN is one of a little clutch of provincial arts networks that comes with the basic package on Canadian satellite tv services: Knowledge Network in BC, TVOntario in Ontario and SCN.  Once there was Access in Alberta, radio and tv, but the Klein government divested themselves of cultural programming in the 1990s.  Access TV now is just a feeder for a lot of American programming via Global.  CKUA the radio part when independent, and survives still as an alternative music station. 

It seems today that with Saskatchewan entering a new era of huge prosperity through its oil revenues that $5 million a year is a very small sum to support such a good station.  I don't live in Saskatchewan, but I watch SCN a lot.  It has the kind of programming one used to hear about in the Netherlands, where little one-minute to five-minute gaps between programs are filled with shorts about poetry, about craft, about native grannies telling stories, about wind blowing across wheat fields. 

One of the first things I saw on it, years ago, was the photographs of Everett Baker, who, in his job with Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, travelled all over the province and took thousands of Kodachrome slides of all the people he came across between 1937 and the 1970s.  They are presented without voice-over, just as the images with music and run once or twice a week, always different, always fresh.  It is the Saskatchewan we knew about where all the older men looked like Tommy Douglas and mothers wore odd glasses.  Today it is all terribly poignant, given the changes Saskatchewan has seen over the last thirty years.  The grain elevators are gone, most of the towns, farms have been consolidated and they have a hard-line government in the Klein/Harper mode. 

SCN isn't all nostalgia and harvest suppers.  It also runs Rabbit Falls, a powerful drama series about contemporary reserve life, quite a bit on the RCMP and how they train, and a lot about Saskatchewan's contribution to Canada's military.  Oh, and it also showcased, for many years, Landscape as Muse, about the relationship between Canadian artists and Canadian land.  This is now running on Knowledge. 

If a subsidised communications network does not exist to show such material, where will it be shown?  Look at the once-vital Access Network in Alberta.  You can watch any amount of American garbage on it, but nothing about the history of Alberta, or cultural producers in Alberta or First Nations life.  Subsidy vs market is an old and tired argument, not worth revisiting one would think.  But it is an argument still current in provincial legislatures where they can give culture the chop with no warning, no foresight and no regret.  

Everett Baker. Gillie Thorarinson's Homes, 7 September 1950. Climax, Saskatchewan,

on being amused

Gabriel Pazzini. Orion suitcase for Hermès, 2010there was a thing on the radio yesterday, in anticipation of today, about jokes and how there were only basically 7 jokes; someone else said there were only two.  One kind of joke always deals with the gap between reality and aspiration, or concept and reality.  Hilarious I guess, although in my experience I rarely find that gap funny until about 40 year later, if then.

I get various press releases about art and design from all sorts of odd places.  One is Duende Studio in Paris who sent a new Hermès suitcase today.  Well, not the suitcase unfortunately, just the pictures. 

It states:
Orion suitcase in aluminium and natural cowhide by Hermès
. 'Created by Gabriele Pezzini, Hermès Design Director, this extremely ergonomic travelling companion has exceptional functional and aesthetic qualities. Its brushed anodised aluminium shell, the interior surface of which is reinforced with carbon and Kevlar, provide unparalleled resistance to wear and tear.
'The luggage is subtly highlighted with two natural cowhide handles - an unmistakable reference to the Hermès travel world. The bag's technical allure elegantly contrasts with the sensuality of its interior, cased entirely in leather. Its two handles allow for it to be carried horizontally or vertically, whilst its multidirectional wheels make for incredible ease of use.'

It is, no doubt, a beautiful thing.  The leather on the outside is a bit odd: a sign that this is really a classy piece, in case anyone thought the suitcase was just full of camera equipment.  The inside is constructed like several very old leather suitcases I have from the 1910s with horizontal dividers, envelopes and leather straps to keep everything in place.  Not sure about the wheels, they look quite ordinary, but maybe this is the humorous bit, the gap between the concept in aluminum, kevlar and leather handles and the reality of four nasty little functional wheels on the bottom.

Gabriele Pezzini's website is a masterpiece of non-information.  Perhaps this too is meant to be very funny.   But according to my new tool of analysis about jokes I don't get it.  The concept is very cool, the reality is very cool but actually quite boring.  The gap isn't wide enough perhaps.  Clearly I lack a sense of humour. 


pocket books

Victorian books were often very small, soft-covered and portable.  The original pocket books, for the pocket.  I once read that Leslie Stephen sometimes walked 40 miles in a day, books in his pockets, reading while he walked.  I had a grandfather who would walk out with gun, dog and book across the prairie from the last street in Calgary, 18A SW, where he lived.  He was born in 1875, came to Canada in 1908 bringing with him his violin, his patent-leather dance slippers, his school blazer and his Hardy fishing rod.  Things were different then.

Books were one's companions in one's solitary pursuits.  Books of poetry were high on the list, perhaps because poems then often had a walking rhythm, were episodic, compressed, gave one lots to think about.  Wilfred Owen took his Keats to the Front in WWI.

We resist, today, being left alone with our thoughts – there is certainly a lot of stuff that rushes into the void, sort of as if we don't have any thoughts of our own really.   Maybe we don't, but if my head is an empty desert I would prefer it be filled with Yeats or Heaney or Hughes.  personally.  Unfortunately I hardly have the time to stroll about, book in hand.

the lower case reading room

the lower case reading room. 3934 Main Street, Vancouver BCThe Regional Assembly of Text is a stationery story in Vancouver with a one-person at a time zine library and reading room in the back. 

We have an article about it by Grey Hernandez for the next issue of On Site: small things.  In his proposal he said: The 'smallness' is not just the space itself, is also the relationship between zine culture and the emphasis on the individual.  Making zines, reading them, distributing them, blogging about them and now housing them are all done at the scale of the single person. 

the lower case reading room is run by Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Dolen, Emily Car graduates who used the 3 square metre space previously as an art gallery.  If one considers reading, looking at art, being human as an individual act, then small spaces are completely logical.  If one considers reading as a group activity (can't image who does this), looking at art as a social event, being human as a collectivity, then yes, we would need large spaces for everything, which is what we have. 

Perhaps we have a surfeit of space that forces everyone into group activities.  Spaces too small to contain 60 diners used to be considered too small to make a viable restaurant: was that based on some sort of profit margin worked out in an economist's office somewhere?  Where one finds such small venues, such cabines, is increasingly in the marginal spaces of gentrifying areas where preciousness is a commodity.  It doesn't last for long, this attachment to small things, this relationship between having little money but large ideas, this desire to colonise the uninhabitable with something interesting. 

Quality of life is not dependent on money, it is dependent on being creative.

Karen Wirth

Karen Wirth. Staircase at the Open Book Center, Minneapolis, in conjunction with MSR ArchitectsThe Open Book is a Minneapolis centre for reading, writing and book arts, founded by three independent non-profits – the Loft Literary Centre, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Milkweed Editions.  What a neat thing this must be.  Minneapolis is a city of about 400,000 with a catchment area of 3.5 million.

The Open Book has a staircase designed by Karen Wirth, who is doing a workshop this week at the Alberta College of Art and Design.  The press release includes this lovely statement:  
How is a staircase like a book or a wall like a page? Karen Wirth explores the relationships between books and architecture through artist’s books, sculpture and public art. Through analogy, she examines space and experience, presence and absence, revelation and concealment, public and private.

Sounds good.  How is a wall like a page?  It is the difference between a trade paperback, printed as inexpensively as possible with stingy margins, and an art book.  or an artists' book.  Between industrial production and craft.  One too boring to consider aesthetically, and one too precious to take seriously.  

As designers haven't we always striven to produce the illusion of careful craft using industrial materials and techniques?  This after all was what the Eames house set out to prove.  Maybe I just live in a backwater city of a mere million people with a catchment area of a few thousand more, but I simply do not see any evidence of the craft of architecture, either in intent or in fact.  It pains me.  We don't have a book centre either.

Rage Against the Machine. 1991The first Rage Against the Machine album cover has a famous 1960s photograph of a burning monk in Vietnam.  This album included Killing in the Name, an anthem against racism, US police force members who were also in the Klan, and the military-industrial complex, that curious phrase introduced after WWII by Eisenhower to represent the alliance of the military and corporations that raised its ugly head again during the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. RATM played together from 1991 to 2000 and then reformed in 2007 performing at various anti-Bush and workers rallies.  It used to be the winsome Pete Seeger and Joan Baez who sang social activism, now it is RATM's metal rap funk.  It is all very much angrier now.

RATM's Zack De la Rocha and Tom Morello are articulate critics of the war in Iraq, presidents and their methods, an equally articulate supporter of the Zapatistas in Chiapis – the current version of US interference in Central America that had a parallel roster of protest singers during the 1970s.  Michael Moore directed an RATM video, they protest against the use of music in torture, the ongoing presence of Guantanamo, sweatshops, neo-nazis.  They come from Los Angeles, their success is international. 

smsteele is a poet who spent 6 months on and off at CFB Wainwrightistan in Alberta and then Kandahar as an official war poet.  She says the morning alarm clock is Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up —part of the lyrics:

Movements come and movements go
Leaders speak, movements cease
When their heads are flown
'Cause all these punks
Got bullets in their heads
Departments of police, the judges, the feds
Networks at work, keepin' people calm
You know they went after King
When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot
...
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow

Is it the beat that gets everyone pumped for patrols where they could lose their lives?  or does the beat simply deliver an enraged poem about being in a system that is a conflicting mixture of idealism and exploitation.  Rage is latent, it is like an unexploded IED.

war poets

A later use of Richard Jobson's Into the Valley.  Young men go to war, young men listen to punk, rap and metal.  Jobson has claimed an affinity with the British war poets, however, war poetry is not only Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but continues to this day.  There is work coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan by our poets and probably a huge amount written by Iraqis and Afghanis to which we have little access.
 
Now that everyone can write and be read, bypassing print publishers, record companies, editors and agents, I wonder if there will be a return to the inherent rigours of poetry, the honing of phrases and words, the close expression.  Poetry is the most powerful of all the writing arts, whether attached to music or not.  Perhaps desperate times ask for this kind of precision.  

Into The Valley

So here's some unreconstructed 1979 Scottish punk for you.  It all looks terribly neat today.  This song is now the anthem for Dunfermline FC – valleys are valleys, and Dumferline's stadium is called The Valley.  However, Into the Valley, written by Richard Jobson, the lead singer of the Skids, wrote it about young Scots recruited into the British Army, who were then sent to Northern Island.

Into the valley
Betrothed and divine
Realisations no virtue
But who can define
Why soldiers go marching
Those masses a line
This disease is catching
From victory to stone
Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky
Ahoy! Ahoy! Boy, man and soldier
Ahoy! Ahoy! Deceived and then punctured
Ahoy! Ahoy! Long may they die

Armies are very attractive to regions mired in poverty, as Scotland continues to be.  Newfoundlanders and Maritimers have long been over-represented in the Canadian Forces.  The situation in Northern Ireland was as if they had been pitted against each other. 
We know, because we read a bit of Tennyson yesterday, for the first time in about 40 years, that Into the Valley is also from The Charge of the Light Bridgade.  The futility of the war in Ulster was just one of a long series of military futilities.
 
When last year we did On Site 22: WAR, I received some feedback that other than historical forts and things, war was irrelevant to architecture and design.  We live in peace, etc, etc.  Well, we might, personally, but we do not globally.  If a punk band can get it together to write a song about war that has become so anthemic it is still played thirty years later, so can we all, here in the luxury of safe everyday lives, write about war using the tools of our trade.  So many Paralympic athletes now are war amps – ex-soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They bring the war home.


the Charge of the Light Brigade

William Simpson. The Charge of the Light Brigade. 1855

Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

and onward for a great number of verses.  It is about the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War where the Light Brigade, a British cavalry unit met Russian forces during the siege of Sebastapol, a Russian naval base on the Black Sea. 
Against the Russian Empire were the British, French and Ottoman Empires: the Ottoman Empire was in decline and the war was over who would get its territories.  It is said that it paved the way for WWI, it was the first modern war, it introduced new military technology and, because it was Empires fighting Empires, rather than mere nations fighting nations, it was a war fought on many fronts and at many scales.

The war was triggered over control of the Middle East, driven by the difference between the Roman and Greek Orthodox Catholic Churches and the Russian Orthodox Church, each claiming authority over the holy sites of Christianity.  In the end all of Europe was involved, ending with the Treaty of Paris of 1856, which disarmed the Black Sea.  Territories were re-drawn, countries joined together and others split, seeds sown in the Balkans, Turkey and the newly formed Austro-Hungarian Empire for WWI, WWII, the break up of the former Yugoslavia, the autocratic division of the Middle East in the 1920s which has led to the current Palestine/Israel impasse, Russia's ongoing problems with its satellite republics.  We will never be free of it.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster, as was the ambush at Fish Creek during the Riel Rebellion.  There are so many sieges and battles that were horrific massacres for both sides, little territory gained or lost.  One really does wonder if war is the natural state of man.  

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

Ludens. Mobile LibraryIvan Hernandez Quintela is a Mexican architect who regularly publishes small urban guerilla projects in On Site.  He has a new web journal, interferencia: notas informales de ludens, which shows photos of inexplicable, ambiguous, enigmatic urban findings.   The pictures are like old polaroids used to be, square and soft.  His one line commentaries are enchanting – he turns a snap of a broken park bench into a note on who has expectations of comfort in the public realm.  It is a small observation, but an important one.  He takes the environment as he finds it seriously.

On his website he says 'i am not looking for conclusive answers but for a series of possibilities'.

This will do.

Elemental in Santa Catarina

Alejandro Aravena. Elemental. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor and a two storey apartment above. The empty slot between the white cores are meantto be built into, shown here in a yellow example. Elemental, the Chilean architectural practice of Alejandro Aravena, has just won an award for a 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico.  Using government funding the expensive part of each house is built first: bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, party walls and roof.  This is the first half.  The second half is eventually built into the space between these cores.  Visual cohesion comes from a continuous roof over each set of units, and the placement and rhythm of the first halves.  There are 70 units on .6 ha; the area is middle class, not a slum, and half the project will be self-built.
 
Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people.  It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build  a safe structure, a kitchen and bathroom, and then connect them to the utilities infrastructure.  Elemental SA is in a partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company to design projects with social impact through 'the development of complex initiatives'.  To get projects such as these in place requires more than a brilliant idea, it requires partners at all levels of urban development.  The city is their workshop.  

Formally built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention.  Elemental's model allows the best from both: safe building standards and people's participation in their own dwellings. 

MEND, New Zealand

Rob Buchanan, founder and director of MEND: Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the DisabledA couple of years ago one of the World Challenge entries was by MEND which had set up small workshops in very isolated villages in Nepal to make artificial limbs out of aluminum cans and discarded plastic.  The mandate of MEND – Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the Disabled, is 'to help disabled children and adults become mobile, independent and trained in skills that can lead to employment, and so achieve dignity in their communities'.
Imported prostheses are  too expensive and too rare, generally children in remote areas who lose limbs are left just to get on with it.
 
MEND is based in New Zealand and now has workshops and centres in Nepal, India, several African countries and Fiji, all to do with achieving mobility by local initiatives and means.    The brief video on the World Challenge site shows a pile of cans being fed into a mould where they will melt and come out as a leg: lightweight, with attachment points for straps and attachments.  Could it be simpler? yet how much invention and testing went into this process so that it was safe for the people in the workshop.  There is a committment to these low-tech manufacturing processes that are sophisticated beyond anything we make in our wealthy country.   

In this next issue of On Site, which is about small things, we have one article by a young architect, Peter Osborne, who, in building a folding bookshelf/storage unit found himself limited not by his imagination, but by his skill with plywood and saws.  The other is by architect Ron Wickman who, because his father was in a wheelchair, sees all architecture in terms of its accessibility.  He makes the very valid point that in handing out awards for amazing buildings, we never let a ramp get in the way of a grand entrance. 

So, two issues: appropriate technology and human rights.  Is this about architecture?  Absolutely, it is about design.  Our culture medicalises disabilities instead of seeing them as opportunities for useful design thinking.  When I was pushing my elderly aunt up and down hills in her 2-ton wheelchair – it was practically uncontrollable – it occurred to me then that surely there was a better way to do this.  Watching the amazingly designed and engineered chairs and limbs on display in the Paralympics right now, it is evident that there is.  Now this engineering and manufacture has to be made accessible.  

Barefoot College, Tilonia

The Barefoot College was entirely built by Barefoot Architects. The campus spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a guest house, a library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher's training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, STD/ISD call booth, a Craft Shop and Development Centre, an Internet dhaba (cafe), a puppet workshop, an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified. The College serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areasBarefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan trains illiterate or under-educated women and men in practical engineering.  Women do 70% of the domestic and agricultural work in India, however Barefoot College has, since the early 1970s, been training women in what are considered technically challenging men's professions such as solar engineers, handpump mechanics, computer instructors, masons, night school teachers.
 
The College does not prioritise literacy, but rather problem-solving skills such as basic law, making women aware of the Right to Information, minimum wages, violation of human rights.  This, along with their training and employment, give them a way out of the sheer, numbing drudgery of rural life for women in most of the world.
 
Having solar lamps allows night school and less use of kerosene, toxic in closed spaces.  Having rainwater harvesting systems allows women more time to do other things than walk miles each day collecting pots of water, or firewood, or candles.
The mandate of Barefoot College is very much about the empowerment of rural, barely literate women caught in a caste system and rigid social roles.  At the same time it has trained 15,000 women and installed thousands of solar lighting units and rainwater harvesting systems.

Barefoot College does not give out degrees or even certificates that could perhaps become a kind of currency leading to migration. They do not want their trainees to move to the cities, but to stay in place, in their communities.  Plans are to extend Barefoot College to Africa and South America.  Bunker Roy, the founder, says language isn't a problem.  Sign language will do.
 
I suppose that one solders a circuit plate the same way no matter what language is spoken.  This in itself is a revolutionary idea.  We are altogether too logocentric here.

Sudeepas

The Safe Bottle LampThe BBC and Shell World Challenge is calling for nominations for 2010.  This is the most interesting annual project, where small projects from all over the world are sent in, ten are chosen and explained, and then you can vote for the one you think ought to win.  The projects make life better, safer, easier; they employ local people, they are hugely innovative, they have already started up without a lot of cash and now are asking for the World Challenge prize to take their project a step further. 

Last year's winner was Dr Godakumbura of Sri Lanka who designed a safe kerosene lamp in response to the unsafe use of ordinary bottles full of kerosene with a wick.  These look remarkably like Molotov cocktails, with similar results.
 
The Safe Bottle lamp is still a bottle, full of kerosene, with a wick.  The bottles however, are locally blown with thick glass, cooled slowly so they are unbreakable and have flattened sides so they don't roll if they are knocked over.  They have a screw-on metal lid that fixes the wick securely.  They are made for about a quarter. 
Money goes a long way in some parts of the world. 

Redesigning something that is already in use, just making it safer, more efficient, more ecologically aware, more local seems to be an intelligent use of design skills.   It is less about invention that it is about refinement.  There is both a humility and an anger in redesigning a lamp made from easily found discarded drinks bottles that works after a fashion, is free, and which sets people on fire.

I hope it is different now, but when I was at school we were taught to invent, from scratch, everything, then refine one's own precious idea to aesthetic perfection and then dream about imposing it on the world.    This is not useful.   The safe bottle lamp is. 

sidewalk photographs

Calgary 1945. There used to be sidewalk photographers with big box cameras on tripods that would take pictures of people walking towards them.  They'd take the picture and then leap out at you with a little chit that the next day you took to whatever photographer's studio or camera store it was to pick up the print.  I remember them in Victoria when I was very little.  We never picked up the pictures, but the previous generation did, especially during the war.

I think they are wonderful and wish it still happened.  One holds one's face and body differently out shopping with your mother than you do standing still posing for a picture taken by your brother, or husband, or sister.  This one, Calgary 1945, shows a gaily defiant hat, lovely open-toed shoes despite it being winter, great coats, gloves carried elegantly in one hand, a slight aversion to being photographed on the left, a pleased-to-be-caught look on the right. 

This was a time when people dressed up to go downtown, the street was a stage, as it still is on European pavements.  These photographs show a situation where the subjects aren't entirely in control of when the photo will be taken, but they are half-prepared.  I think that today no one really feels that anyone is looking at them, so it is okay to dash about in jeans and sweaters and running shoes.  Streets here are a kind of zone of anonymity where not much matters.  Certainly no one will  invade your privacy by taking a photo of you.  Our loss I think.

Lomos and Holgas

image from a Diana-mini Lomo camera

A couple of years ago Lomo  cameras were very very cool.  Extremely cheap, made in Russia, plastic with multiple lenses, they took ghastly uncontrollable photographs with light flares, strange colour and much accidental focussing.  The multiple lens version took four photos a fraction of a second apart in the same frame -- the photos are brilliant, everything is marginal.

The Holga was first made in 1982 in Hong Kong and uses 120 film.  You can move the film back and forth manually a bit at a time, getting multiple and overlapping exposures.   

The name LOMO comes from a former USSR optics manufacturer that made clear plastic lenses and inexpensive cameras. In 1991 the Lomo was picked up by an Austrian photographic company, and Lomos are now made in China: the fall of the Soviet Union, the privatisation of optical technology and outsourcing to China in a brief few years.  Holga is an acronym cobbled together from Hong Kong and something else.  Couldn't really understand it. 

Everyone can mess around with images in Photoshop, but that's no fun.  It's like pretending to make art.  Perhaps our delight in accidental photos, whether made by a Lomo or found on the street is precisely because we didn't do them.  Our only act is to choose the ones we find provocative. 

a Holga panorama made by advancing and rewinding the film manuallyThe downside is that the film has to be processed and it is increasingly difficult to find shops with the quick turnaround we all once took for granted.  My last roll of Kodachrome had to be sent to some place in Kansas – Ed's Photos or some such unprepossessing name – the only Kodachrome processor in North America.  No wonder it's history.  I suppose we could all dig out our old trays and enlargers and manuals on how to develop film, scrape around to find a source of the chemicals, build new darkrooms and get on with it.  Then it would get serious.

James Peters

Captain James Peters. Two cannons fire on Batoche during the shelling that began the battle. 1885

This photograph appeared in the Globe & Mail a couple of weekends back – a notice about Michael Barnholden's newly published Circumstances Alter Photographs: Captain James Peters'  Reports from the War of 1885.

Peters was in the Royal Canadian Artillery in Quebec City and was sent to what is now known as the North-West Rebellion, where traditional British army practice met the guerilla war strategies of the Métis in now southwest Manitoba.  When Louis Riel formed a provisional Métis government to manage their lands which were being stripped of buffalo by the Hudson's Bay Company, John A Macdonald sent 5,500 troops to deal with him.  This might be compared to the 2,500 Canadian troops currently in Afghanistan.

It was a slaughter on both sides, Louis Riel was captured and hung for treason. Meanwhile, Captain Peters had brought with him a Marion Academy twin-lens reflex camera with a fast shutter speed and from his horse shot pictures of the ambush he led his troops into at Fish Creek.  One might think he ought to have been otherwise occupied, but hey, he was a keen photographer and so we have these images.  

There is a dog in the middle of the battlefield, of course.  Dogs see all, tell nothing.  

Adrian Blackwell

Adrian Blackwell Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) Gord Anderson's Studio 2000

In 2000, Adrian Blackwell documented a series of studios at 9 Hanna Avenue, just before everyone was evicted.  9 Hanna had once been a munitions factory: huge steel-mullioned industrial windows, inexpensive, voluminous.  As with all studio buildings, they happen only when there isn't a more lucrative use for the building, a day that inevitably comes along, in this case the first of May, 2000.  Blackwell's thirteen Cibachrome contacts (20" x 24") were printed from the film lining a pinhole camera which was fixed to the ceiling of each studio.  Each camera was scaled to the proportions of the room below, and lined with film on the four sides and back of the box, thus recording the entire space.  

They are up right now at EyeLevel, an exhibition at Pith Gallery in Calgary.  One sees a row of fat cruciforms, filled with such warm complexity that they glow like icons.  Because pinhole camera exposures can be long, people often appear to be drifting through the spaces photographed as if they were phantoms, which of course, shortly after the photo and then the eviction, they became.  

The pinhole camera is the lowest of photographic technology.  Once the image is captured, much can be done with it at increasingly sophisticated levels, but the original light on film is photography at its very essence.

When I registered with Corbis to use a photograph of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after a US bombing raid for the last issue of On Site, they sent a little gift: plans for a pinhole camera you download, cut out and fold together.  Now that everyone has a digital camera, there is a rise in the use of the pinhole camera.  Very curious.

Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill. A Street in Hackney. photograph.With the ubiquity of digital cameras that take fool-proof images, and lots of them, it is interesting to see how many photographers persist in using film, but are doing something else with it. 
Just as photography originally freed the making of images in paint from a kind of graphic fidelity, so too does the digital camera free photography from the faithful recording of what the eye supposedly sees. The speed and clarity of digital imagery allows film photography to become something other than its resolution and depth of field.
Stephen Gill puts things found on the street, where he took this photograph, into the camera as he loads his film.  Although he can control what is aligned in the viewfinder and what is sitting on the film, he has little control over how the image turns out.  It is something like catching things out of the corner of your eye as well as what the eye is taking in straight ahead. 
I suppose he also controls which images he chooses to show – this one is particularly beautiful: a boring terrace in Hackney made mysterious somewhere deep in the camera.

dunce caps

1906 staged example of a dunce cap

Was this ever real? or was it seen in a cartoon and taken for fact.  Whatever, it is appropriate for a week spent not being able to get things off ftp sites, not being able to understand pieces of impenetrable text wanting to be articles for the next issue of On Site.  There is something about academic writing: when you are doing it, and I certainly have done my fair share of it, the mind is so full of theory, concepts and ideas that this strange kind of prose siimply unravels of the end of the pen, with its own syntax, vocabulary and density.  A year later and you yourself cannot even understand it. 

I always wondered if foolscap, that archaic size of paper we used in school when I was in the little grades, was the kind of paper used to make fool's caps, but evidently not.  Totally different etymology and something to do with a jester's cap watermark on the original paper.

Odd how the head is the place where so many signifiers are placed.  Perhaps not so odd, we are our visage, and hats and haircuts top off that visage, telling everyone you are not just a pretty face, but a rich pretty face, or a silly pretty face, or a rich not-so-pretty face.   god, life is exhausting.