In-Different Light: The Story

When I was a kid sporting my new brownie box camera, I believed there were tiny people hard at work within its "black chamber" — little beings who were wordlessly etching away at each negative I'd caught inside with just the click of my camera. They were always there, hidden behind the blankness, toiling like ants, inscribing each grain into a grand design — it was a negative surface that none of them could fully see. They scratched away on it like blind men (their busy hands on different parts of the elephant), except that these miniature creatures hadn't a care in the world — they had no comprehending vision to speak of — only my imaginary task.

In my 1950's childhood, I had never heard of Louis Daguerre, much less known of his excitement in 1838 with his innovation of saving the spontaneous image within "la chambre noir...". By the time I was a kid, photography had long been ordinary and I wasn't awed by the magic of each frozen image — instead I was awed by those clairvoyant people — only slightly bigger than pixels — as they unstintingly rescued the dark from the light, the shadow from the shining surface. In my imagination, my tireless camera dwellers wore suspenders, and duck-billed caps that obscured their individual faces.

I never once wondered who did their laundry.

Looking back, as I have meandered through my media-rich adulthood, through various visual careers, through ways of seeing the frame — and framing the seldom-seen — what has led me most, in Susan Sontag's words, is being "a botanist of the sidewalk."

And if this whole, long lifetime we get to walk through (and frame in our minds) is a storyline, then my tourist's ambling is a short essay at best — a series of split-second glimpses, a riff on an idea, a flaneur's found-object of singular time.

But what of the photographs framed while the story unfolds? I think they give us ways to recognize what we might not have otherwise noticed — often because it's too distant, or sometimes because it's too close. Or simply because we might not have given it a name. We are all taught how to select the recognizable hallmarks of our worlds — often in very gendered terms — and, in a similar habit of seeing, we often are encouraged to overlook the unidentified, yet familiar, parts of the picture, like a new moon. Even when it's most constant.

So while on a sabbatical in Northern India, I entered into a photographic pact with myself (and with those digital offspring of the tiny inhabitants in my camera). The only shots I would take had to include the shadowy slopes and highlighted folds of daily laundry. As a documentary filmmaker, writer, and video artist, for the past three decades I have attempted to help bring recognition to the anonymous places that women occupy in their societies and in the home. In this project, I wanted to identify the spaces that women mark out in a patriarchal system — to redefine those durable (yet temporary) edifices that women, throughout history's illustrious conquests, have made with their labors. Laundry's diaphanous threads turn history-worn spaces into peaceful terrains. As I see it, in every country and culture, their laundry is always the common language spoken that repeats the call for human dignity.

And I wandered through the sidewalks and sideways of India, through architectural time and traditional hours, and through the repetitive efforts of people making their private worlds new again, day after day, sun after indifferent sun, dream after unrecognizable daydream, doing laundry. I hope these resulting digital images take you into an unexpected, gendered background that laundry occupies, as they offer possibilities for discovering new, enduring landscapes.

When the art of photography offered the modern world a novel way to capture distinctions — between the solid and sheer, between sharp and fuzzy — this new way also presented us with a new method to confound traditional boundaries. Not the distinctions between war and peace, nor good and evil. But instead, our reliable, trustworthy cameras became instruments to blur the parallel lines between the natural and the forced, between the real thing and the trite, between what is spontaneous and what is a posed performance.

Yet isn't the soft glow of originality so often found in that hypnotic blur between fact and art? And isn't it always among these ambiguities where our everyday lives are most fully lived?





In-Different Light: The Story
	When I was a kid sporting my new brownie box camera, I believed there were tiny people hard at work within its "black chamber" — little beings who were wordlessly etching away at each negative I'd caught inside with just the click of my camera. They were always there, hidden behind the blankness, toiling like ants, inscribing each grain into a grand design — it was a negative surface that none of them could fully see. They scratched away on it like blind men (their busy hands on different parts of the elephant), except that these miniature creatures hadn't a care in the world — they had no comprehending vision to speak of — only my imaginary task. In my 1950's childhood, I had never heard of Louis Daguerre, much less known of his excitement in 1838 with his innovation of saving the spontaneous image within "la chambre noir...". By the time I was a kid, photography had long been ordinary and I wasn't awed by the magic of each frozen image — instead I was awed by those clairvoyant people — only slightly bigger than pixels — as they unstintingly rescued the dark from the light, the shadow from the shining surface. In my imagination, my tireless camera dwellers wore suspenders, and duck-billed caps that obscured their individual faces. I never once wondered who did their laundry. Looking back, as I have meandered through my media-rich adulthood, through various visual careers, through ways of seeing the frame — and framing the seldom-seen — what has led me most, in Susan Sontag's words, is being "a botanist of the sidewalk." And if this whole, long lifetime we get to walk through (and frame in our minds) is a storyline, then my tourist's ambling is a short essay at best — a series of split-second glimpses, a riff on an idea, a flaneur's found-object of singular time. But what of the photographs framed while the story unfolds? I think they give us ways to recognize what we might not have otherwise noticed — often because it's too distant, or sometimes because it's too close. Or simply because we might not have given it a name. We are all taught how to select the recognizable hallmarks of our worlds — often in very gendered terms — and, in a similar habit of seeing, we often are encouraged to overlook the unidentified, yet familiar, parts of the picture, like a new moon. Even when it's most constant. So while on a sabbatical in Northern India, I entered into a photographic pact with myself (and with those digital offspring of the tiny inhabitants in my camera). The only shots I would take had to include the shadowy slopes and highlighted folds of daily laundry. As a documentary filmmaker, writer, and video artist, for the past three decades I have attempted to help bring recognition to the anonymous places that women occupy in their societies and in the home. In this project, I wanted to identify the spaces that women mark out in a patriarchal system — to redefine those durable (yet temporary) edifices that women, throughout history's illustrious conquests, have made with their labors. Laundry's diaphanous threads turn history-worn spaces into peaceful terrains. As I see it, in every country and culture, their laundry is always the common language spoken that repeats the call for human dignity. And I wandered through the sidewalks and sideways of India, through architectural time and traditional hours, and through the repetitive efforts of people making their private worlds new again, day after day, sun after indifferent sun, dream after unrecognizable daydream, doing laundry. I hope these resulting digital images take you into an unexpected, gendered background that laundry occupies, as they offer possibilities for discovering new, enduring landscapes. When the art of photography offered the modern world a novel way to capture distinctions — between the solid and sheer, between sharp and fuzzy — this new way also presented us with a new method to confound traditional boundaries. Not the distinctions between war and peace, nor good and evil. But instead, our reliable, trustworthy cameras became instruments to blur the parallel lines between the natural and the forced, between the real thing and the trite, between what is spontaneous and what is a posed performance. Yet isn't the soft glow of originality so often found in that hypnotic blur between fact and art? And isn't it always among these ambiguities where our everyday lives are most fully lived?