HOSPITALS

Been shooting 2 separate projects in hospitals this week (and next)
with 2 separate agencies. Shooting the Ottawa Hospital annual report
with Donna Darby (Utopia) and a nurses recruitment campaign with
Vernon Lai (ACART).

Let me tell you…..the folks that work in our health care system are
some busy. Scheduling can get all screwed up in the bat of an eye.
I’ve got no problem with that seeing as how the scheduling issues
kind of revolve around life or death, care versus neglect. I’ll take
a back seat any old day when the person I’m supposed to be photo-
graphing is called away to provide comfort.

For instance, we had just finished the first set up of a shot in the
Trauma Room, were just about to start the second option, when a
face peeks around the corner and says: “We just got a call. We need
this room in three minutes”.

So much for our second option. We cleared out and the staff sprung
into action (as if they ever stop).

It’s a pleasure (if that’s the right word) to be around the people who
work in the hospitals. Their humanity and patience are something else.
It’s also kool to be around folks who’s jobs are based on flux, on never
really knowing what’s next. Kind of reminds me of my job. Except I don’t
save lives.

EYES OR BRAIN?

Okay, I’m going to write in broad strokes. Let me dig myself a hole here……

I believe that there are pictures you take with your eyes and there are pictures
you take with your brain.

Of course it’s way more complicated and subtle than that. Both types of imagery
have their time and place. Some eye photos are more interesting than some brain
photos. And vise versa. Plus, how can you separate the eye from the brain? Who’s
brains am I talking about? Who’s eyes? Neither of these categories can exist in a
pure state…..there’s always seepage from one to the other. Eyes to brain. Brain
to eyes.

As well, there are a gazillion different uses for photographs. You’ve got your snapshots
(see the three above), you’ve got your forensic shots, you’ve got your real estate
pictures, ID shots, news photography and so on and so forth. They all have their
place. Some of them, these by-the-way photos, are amazing to look at and to study.

What I’m talking about here, though, are the photographs made by people trying.
Your Flickr types, your JPGmag types. Artists, serious hobbyists, professionals,
students. People who go out with a camera to practice and record.

So, broadly speaking…..

Eye pictures are (for example) raking light striking a weathered stump. Or the
way a bright red safety cone contrasts the gray of pavement. Sunsets. Stuff like
that. Below are some pix I shot last night on my way to rent a video. These are
eye pictures.

Brain pictures, on the other hand, are more about the photographer’s
complicated relationship to the world. The’re an attempt to uncover
something more than the way light strikes an object, the colors of nature,
puppies, etc. They’re an attempt to understand as well as record.

Here’s a shot of my friend’s mother. She has Alzheimer’s.

If you’ll excuse my immodesty, I think that this is a brain picture.

Now, I’m not going to attempt to define these two categories in further
detail. There are way too many vagaries, overlaps, exceptions-to-the-rules,
etc., to go into here. And I’m not picking sides or trying to dictate who should
do what. Each person who wants to practice as a photographer will be drawn to
some particular point on this continuum. That’s the way it is.

But for me, when I study photographs, it’s the brain as well as the eye that
I’m looking for.

(or HEART)

One of the reasons (amongst many) that I write this blog is to find out what I think.
Just after I finished this post I started to wonder about what I’d written. Surely
there must be more, I must be overlooking some other aspect of what photos are.
They can’t just be about eyes and/or the brain. Then it hit me…..a category I’d
forgotten up until now: the heart.

Perhaps one of the best reasons to take pictures.

Here’s a heart photo. Taken by my dad in 1945 after he’d been liberated from a
WW ll POW camp. Back in England. The woman he would marry. My mother.