I am thrilled to announce that Mercy Corps has created a solo exhibit of my black & white images from Ethiopia. The show will run from March 1 – 28 in the Action Center Gallery at 45 SW Ankeny in Portland, Oregon.
I will be giving a lecture on Thursday night March 14 at 7pm at the same location.
Entry is free, and kids are welcome!
UPDATE:
The lecture was well attended and the kiddos had the BEST questions!
(Lecture photos by Bill Purcell)
I just completed a series of portrait images for Portland Monthly magazine depicting a whole assembly of Portlander’s who are doing great things for the world.
Music, nutrition, university fees and more are topics the subjects are addressing in this feature magazine article.
Julia Plowman (pictured below), the founder of The Girl Effect, is one of the subjects featured, relaying her newest entrepreneurial path.
I spent an hour in my studio with Gus Van Sant, and as one might imagine, it was a highly interesting evening!
He talked about how he gets ideas for his films and a bit about his history. But the most fascinating things he spoke about were of the mundane. He is incredibly aware of his surroundings and I loved the endless questions he had regarding minutia found in my studio.
Read more about him in the latest issue of 1859 Magazine.
Love this man.
She steps into the darkness of her hut and emerges with a small white container and thrusts it toward me. I look at it and see that it is coconut oil, the type that is used to smooth and condition hair in Ethiopia. It might seem like a simple gesture, one without meaning back home, but this jar represents the world to Kuye, a high school student living in a small village near Konso, Ethiopia.
Kuye is one of very few girls who get to attend high school in this southern area of Ethiopia. This is not due to a lack of desire, they simply have too many duties to perform at home and the costs to attend school are outside of most families’ reach. Within Kuye’s class, there are 42 students and only four of them are girls. (Hear students at Konso High School)
Kuye’s mother, Taiko, notices other girls at the market who are educated and wants the same for her daughter.
Taiko was able to obtain a scholarship and academic support via a program developed by Mercy Corps. Kuye is flying down the path toward her education goals. Her favorite subject is social science, which includes computer programming, and she wants to become an engineer. She has seen women in other countries work in this field, and she believes it is time for Ethiopia to have more female engineers.
Kuye knows that she is a pioneer of sorts. There are people in her village who still think a girl “is not a good girl if she goes outside of her house” to do things outside of her traditional activities. To some, this might seem patriarchal and dismissive of women. But it is more complex than this simple conclusion. Girls are highly regarded in Ethiopia and they are cherished to the point of believing they will (and knowing they can) be stolen, and therefore they are highly protected.
Most women who are not educated end up living a life full of extreme physical burden. They fetch water and firewood, carrying bundles of heavy loads for miles, sometimes days, to help provide for their family. They suffer during child birth, often losing their baby and living with resulting injuries obtained during days of laboring. Life indeed can be hard in the rural areas of Ethiopia, for both men and women.
Kuye wants to alter this path, and show the world how capable a woman in Ethiopia can be. I give her my camera, and she quickly learns how to operate it, snapping a photo of her mama Taiko and gleefully turning to all of us with excitement about the beautiful image she just captured.
She is a quick study, smart as a tack.
Her hope for her future is to “finish school, get a good test result and go to university, then return” to help her village. I can only imagine what she would do if she attains this goal.
She cites gender inequality as being an issue in Ethiopia, but she has a simple reason for its existence. She points to the fact that boys, at an early age, begin to carry heavier loads than she can carry. They appear stronger and and more powerful, just because they can pick up heavier objects. Kuye believes that gender equality begins at home, with each parent treating boys and girls equally, and instilling within a young boy’s mind that his sister is as strong as he is.
I ask her where she studies when she is home, and she shows me her bed made of mud and clay. To the left of the bed is a small shelf made from hay and mud and I notice again the coconut oil. This is a prized possession, as it makes her feel beautiful and a part of the group of students in her class. Like any 18 year old student, she wants to fit in.
And she wants to feel like a girl, all pretty and smelling wonderful as she faces her new world and emerges as a strong and educated woman.
I will cheer her on. all the way through her university years.
One coconut oil jar at a time.
(Photo of Taiko above by Kuye Orkaydo)
(All images for Mercy Corps)
She brushes past the crowd of worn out people waiting for their tables, her blonde hair preceding her real self, and her bling blinds us all. Cowboys tip their hats, women take deep breaths and straighten their spines, their eyes burning into their men.
Miss Terri, owner of “Terri’s Dirty Blonde Salon”, is in the house.
I first met her last year at the Canby Rodeo while I was photographing rodeo riders with my Speed Graphic 4X5 film camera. As I fumbled with the low light conditions, I reached for my dark cloth, and instead almost plunged my hand into her ample and adorned-with-a-huge-shiny-necklace cleavage.
Hi, I’m Terri!
She proceeded to rattle off cowboy names and stats, peppering the conversation with a bit of rumor here and there just to make sure I was listening. Her passion for the rodeo was unlike any sideline sports fan I had ever met. And yes, it extended past the “I want a sexy cowboy” quest.
We met several other times at other rodeos (imagine her glee when I got us press passes for the dressing room at the Mollala Bull Riding Competition) and throughout the year she kept me informed via text messages about champion rides, marriages and divorces, broken legs and even the death of one of her favorite riders who was her dear friend.
Her heart is big and unbound. She brings her scissors to each rodeo and cuts the riders’ hair when they need it, feeds them chips and salsa, gives them a soft place to pass out in her trailer after a night of too much whiskey. She’s a good girl.
And a sexy mother hen to boot! At home, she cares for her beautiful thirteen year old daughter and her erratic and loving autistic son. Sparkly and girly and bold and strong as a man, she drives a monster truck and hitches her trailer by herself, thank you very much. And she can shoot a gun like a bandit.
This week we are at the Pendleton Round-Up, the Mother Lode of Rodeos. After finishing our plate of bad Mexican food, we head over to her usual evening starting point, The Hut. We meet up with her cowboys and they take turns feeling her breasts, betting whether they are real or not. They have to check a few times to make sure their previous conclusion was correct. Oh, Terri.
Before I finish my Pendleton Whiskey on the rocks, she grabs my arm and swings me toward the door. Time to go downtown. I pony up to walk a mile in my cowboy boots, when I see a bull rider run into the street and stop a flat bed truck. On we pile, and away we go. This is how the cowboys get their rides downtown! (A few days later I try this technique on my own, and it doesn’t work. I had to resort to hitting up people in trucks waiting in line at the Taco Bell where they were trapped and had to listen to my sorry begging for a ride.)
We make it downtown, and one exceptionally sturdy cowboy who had seen my attempt trying to jump up on the flat bed fail miserably lifts me onto his shoulder like he would a heifer, and in a jiffy I am on solid ground again.
We make our way straight to Crabby’s where Terri tinkerbells her way around the room. Boy, Man, Girl, Woman….everyone watches Terri as she sashays her way to the bar to the dance floor and back to the bar.
I learn to dance the Cowboy Swing, taking home arm bruises to prove that I lost my battle to try to lead these bull riders.
And I vow one thing before the night is over: tomorrow I will bring my stick horsie with me and get these rowdy boys to ride THAT.
I think Terri would approve.
(This account was written about Day 1 of the workshop I taught at the Pendleton Round-Up. I was sworn to secrecy about Day 2, 3 & 4.)
(Last photo courtesy of Terri Nicol)
One of my favorite images, “Abera”, was selected by Steve McCurry in his list of “special mentions by the juror” category and will be included in the curated exhibit opening at the Borges Cultural Center in December in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This image is dear to me because while I was deep in a remote area of Ethiopia photographing a midwife, I turned around and saw this young boy looking at me with the most intense expression. I had seconds to react, obtain his ok to permit me to photograph him, and not lose that moment where he seems to be looking into my soul.
My focus was off. I usually focus on the eyes, and in this image the center of focus is on his hands. But had I taken longer to compose the shot to my liking, I would have captured an entirely different portrait.
I look at this image almost every day to remind me of the level of humanity that is found in the spirit of the Ethiopian people.
(Funds from any sales of prints are returned to projects in Ethiopia.)
In the last several years, I have been asked to perform portfolios reviews, consult one-on-one with individual photographers, and judge various photography competitions. In each case, I feel honored to provide this service.
And while I try to make some adjustments for each situation, I can’t help but uphold a standard of criteria when I look at photographic work. Sometimes this upsets people greatly, and they defend their work ferociously, even within an entry level photography classroom. This is fine. Others express gratitude for an honest assessment and helping them move into another phase of the development of their work.
I don’t pretend to know everything about photography. I am only one person, with one opinion. However, there are several themes that do seem apparent to me: Photography has no rules, never tells the entire truth, is bastardized frequently, and love is in the eye of the beholder. I have seen weak work garner stellar awards, and strong work pushed aside.
The truth seems to be that there is more to the picture than the picture.
This month, I am in the process of pre-screening 756 of this year’s Critical Mass entries. Each entry includes ten images and an artist’s statement. I am halfway finished, and after viewing 387 entries, I am starting to see a pattern regarding how I “judged” the entries. And often, very often, I wish that the artist is sitting right here next to me so I could ask them some questions.
Here are some of those questions. I hope this helps when editing your entries for any competition. As I reflect upon these questions, I realize many things about my own work and how I can alter my approach.
What were you thinking when you came up with this concept? Did you clearly state this in your artist statement?
If you’ve seen it before, are these images similar?
Does your work look strikingly like (blatantly derivative of) someone else’s work that you admire?
What are you really trying to tell your audience?
Do all photos form a song?
Do any of the images feel insincere?
Who is more prominently in focus: your content or your self?
How are these photos surprising?
Is your artist statement descriptive, and not overbearing or self-righteous?
How is your point of view different from others we have seen?
Did you take risks with the subject matter, execution of imagery, post processing?
Does one weak image take the others down?
Even though you captured important subject matter (cancer, crime, death), are the images interesting and different?
Have you gone too far just to be considered “different”?
Is the group of images cohesive?
Is the group of images repetitive?
Have you told anyone to blankly stare into the lens?
Are you trying too hard to solicit emotions from the viewer?
Were you engaged with your subject matter? How so?
Are you trying to please someone?
Have you taken a photo of a photo (or painting, or design) and if so, how have you made this your own image?
Do the images tell us something without having to read the artist statement?
Again, there are no right and wrong answers when creating a body of photographic work. It is yours, and should reflect your voice. But if we present the portfolio to others, especially within a competition, there seems to be another layer of pondering that might be useful in presenting something that is unique and therefore more aptly noticed.
One of the most gratifying assignments I have had in 2012 is the series of images I created for the “Yoga For The Larger Woman” calendar and video, commissioned by The Yoga Project.
In a country where the beauty norm is often associated with ultra thin bodies, it is inspiring to see these women transcend stereotypes and show the world how they honor their bodies and minds within the practice of yoga.
Many thanks to Lloyd Lemmermann who captured sound, and Nina Johnson who was on hand to offer technical assistance and digital file management. Their support and energy toward the project was profoundly appreciated.
Contact The Yoga Project to order a calendar. Your support and nod of encouragement means the world to these women who have lowered their blood pressure, discontinued anti-depressants, stopped needing insulin and have enjoyed a variety of other health benefits via their practice of yoga.
An added bonus: Angela Farmer wrote a poem specifically for this project.
View news story here.
Mercy Corps International asked me to teach a photography and storytelling class to 22 students from the Middle East. Seven countries were represented, and the class was highly energetic and inquisitive.
I was amazed at how quickly the students incorporated various lighting, composition and subject approach techniques into their imagery in such a short period of time.
(Photos by Brynn Opsahl)
I just took a peek at 1859 Magazine’s Summer 2012 issue and it is a beauty! I had great fun working on the Dive Bar assignment, as well as capturing images of Mike McMenamin, founder and owner of all of the McMenamin breweries, restaurants and hotels.
They also ran a story about rodeos, from buckaroos to clowns to cowpokes. I love shooting at rodeos, and have a great collection of images from various events. 1859 Magazine included some of my shots from the 2011 the Pendleton Round-Up. And here is an opportunity for you! During this year’s PRU, I will be conducting a photography workshop. Sign up, and buckle up for a wild ride!
