“I am I because my little dog knows me.” The words are Gertrude Stein’s; the dog in this picture knew my parents and lived with them before I was born, and they celebrated its existence in a pair of studio portraits. The other shows the dog looking straight at the lens with its paws on the back of a bentwood chair. I prefer the more formal one, with the lady’s wrist watch raffishly slung around the dog’s neck.
We were trying to find a cover image among a stack of Tom Abrahamson's photographs, which we were passing around the editorial table. A lot of intense looking went on, and very little talk, until Eve said: you know, if we want a strong cover, there's really only one choice.
These photographs depict a performance by William Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins outside the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in September 2002. The tableau vivant consisted of three ten-minute poses loosely based on the 1928 René Magritte painting entitled The Lovers.
Lennah Nanke Mothimit, age thirty-eight, visits with her sister Anna in the resettlement camp at D’Kar, Botswana. Nanke contracted aids in 1999 when she was raped. She is one of the few women in D’Kar who is open about her HIV status.
One of the first pleasures of taking pictures is finding out what something looks like when it gets into a photograph. This is often what motivates young photographers, who are always surprised (sometimes delighted and sometimes horrified) by what they discover when their film is developed.
When my friend Barbara heard a description of this photograph of a friend’s aunt taken when the aunt was nine years old, sometime in the early 1950s near the town of Barrington, Nova Scotia, she was put strongly in mind of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish when she was a girl.
In Belgrade twenty years ago (while Yugoslavia was under Communist rule), one of the first privately owned shops to open for business was Magna Carta, a book and art supply store, where this photograph was taken in May 1987. The photographer was a young man working for Stav, a youth magazine whose title translates as “Attitude.”
Decades before there was a “Vancouver school” of photography (also known as photo-conceptualism), there was a Photography of Vancouver, as invented or discovered by Fred Herzog in the early 1950s, when he began taking pictures in a city that had barely entered the photographic record (at that time defined largely by the streets of Paris, New York, Chicago, et al.).
I had just been back to Canada to help my mother move from our old house, the house that I was born in, and that I had called home for almost fifty years. For weeks my dreams had been filled with images of my home, that faraway place I left long ago.
