I met some Mothers Without Borders volunteers when I was living in Zambia. The only information that I could really ascertain was that they were a religious-based organization who worked to improve the lives of orphans. Sounds great, but it really doesn’t say much about what it is they actually do. Perhaps this presentation can shed some light.

What do you think? Well, I see some Americans unloading some dirt. And some more Americans digging a hole. And look – some more Americans…umm…shovelling some more dirt.

I’ve got no doubt that the Mothers Without Borders have their hearts in the right place, but do you know what Zambia doesn’t need? Americans (or any Westerners for that matter) to come in and construct buildings. There are literally millions of Zambians who would be happy to do that job, and for a lot less than the price of a plane ticket from the US to Lusaka.

Here’s the back-back story: I lived in Zambia for a year and didn’t get sick once. But then when I got home, I started having some dizzy spells and bouts of fatigue. Tests came back negative but my doctor gave me some drugs anyway. The thing is, you can’t enjoy delicious beer, or any alcoholic beverages, while taking these pills (a whole ten days worth!)

And then the back story and the back-back story collided. The exhibition was rocking – it turns out that if you serve free booze in Montreal, lots of people will show up. Everyone was double, triple, even quadruple-fisting the CCA’s tasty wares. Everyone except me because of those accursed drugs.

It was such a traumatic experience that I decided I must create a self-portrait that would encompass the evening.

I started with the following two pictures. The first one is a picture of me washing some dishes while I was in Zambia (I’m not sure why Zambia decided to give me such an inconvenient parting gift. All the same, I blame Zambia for it and wanted it to have some input into this portrait.). The second picture is a tall glass of delicious, lip-smacking beer.

Of course, the most obvious thing to do with these two pictures is to insert myself directly into the beer.

1. I used the Polygonal Lasso Tool to cut myself, including the items in my hands, out of the first picture.

2. I added this as a new layer to the picture of the beer, inserting myself into the glass until the bottom of the picture of me matched up with the top of the beer in the glass.

3. I cut out the very top of the beer glass and made it a new layer. I then reduced its opacity so that it would become translucent and it would look like I’m inside the glass as opposed to in front of it.

4. After having completed step 3, I noticed that it looked like the plate in my hand was also inside of the glass, but I wanted it to be on the outside. I cut the offending portion of the plate, made it a new layer and brought that layer in front of the glass layer so that it looks like it’s on the outside.

What resulted was a picture of me holding a plate and a rag while standing in a glass of beer. That doesn’t really come close to encompassing the experience of the evening. I mean, what in the world am I doing holding a plate and a rag? So I sought out the following two pictures:

5. I cut out the poutine on the left of the first picture, resized it and placed it onto the plate in my left hand in the picture above.

6. I cut out the pill bottle, including a couple of the pills and placed them into the hand holding the rag. I created a new layer for my fingers so that I could bring them to the front to make it look like they’re holding the bottle.

I made the pill bottle extra big to draw attention to it. However, I still felt like it needed added attention.

7. I adjusted the pills to make them glow.

The pills, after all, were the magical force that kept me away from an open bar for an entire evening. And magical things glow.

The reason for the poutine being there is pretty abstract. You see, we went for poutine later that night, so the poutine represents…my eating of poutine. (More on poutine below.)

I still didn’t feel like I was fully capturing everything. The CCA was chaotic. Lights were flashing, music was blaring and I got a pretty nasty headache. I thought this picture did a decent job of capturing the bedlam and my pain.

It was a little bit off, though, so I tweaked it.

7. I made the image grainier and sharpened it to make it a bit more harsh. I think red is a good colour for representing pain, so I increased the picture’s redness.

8. I made this picture my background. I found that it was perhaps a bit too busy and detracted from the rest of the picture so I darkened it until I felt like it was no longer doing so.

And here’s the result:

So there’s me, waist-deep in beer but not actually able to consume it because of the magical glowing pills in my right hand. My head hurts (the red-dominant background) and I’m in a highly chaotic environment (the flashing multicoloured lights in the background.) But still, that doesn’t exactly look like an unhappy fellow, huh? It seems like he’s fairly content, sort of shrugging his shoulders at the nuisances around him. I guess that’s what happens when you surround yourself with good people…and poutine.

I then happened upon a description from Michele McNally, the Chair of the Jury of World Press Photo’s annual photojournalism contest, of what makes a great press photograph:

“I believe it should be historical, defining a particular time, place, and event. It should be sociological, explaining what people do and what people do to each other. It should have a psychological and emotional tone, making the viewer feel something. It should also have an aesthetic component, drawing in the viewer, urging them to learn more about the story the picture is telling. Above all, it should be truthful.” (World Press)

And there I had my explanation, though it didn’t sit right with me. Indeed, each and every photo in the exhibition is sociological, emotional, visually compelling and I’ll even give the photographers the benefit of the doubt and say that they are each truthful.

But what happens when you take the exhibition as a whole? Certainly, the exhibition remains sociological, emotional and visually compelling, but what of truth? The exhibition paints the same dreary picture that we see on the news and the papers every day – only it does so more effectively because of the quality of photography. Is this then a representation of truth, or a perpetuation of the same stories and images that filter their way through Western journalists each and every day? While the photos may all be true on an individually, how can we be receiving the whole truth when every story speaks of tragedy, death and corruption? In fact, the only images that seemed to come with any positive connotation from areas such as the Middle East and Africa were of animals.

Despite the brilliance within, the World Press Photo 2007 exhibition ultimately fails to achieve what its own chair believes to be the most important reason for its being – truth.

“World Press Photo Exhibition – TORONTO.” 18 Sep. 2007 <http://picturesfestival.com/worldpress01.html>

Before attending the World Press Photo exhibition, I took in another at Montreal’s Darling Foundry where I saw a film called Klatsassin by Stan Douglas as part of Montreal “mois de la photo” presentation. You’ll have to excuse me though. You see, I didn’t actually watch the whole thing. As a matter of fact, I would say that it’s highly unlikely that anyone ever has, save for perhaps Mr. Douglas himself. Klatsassin runs an ungodly 70 hours. It tells the story of the same murder in 850 different permutations.

I’m actually OK with that. Clearly this is a film that was never meant to be viewed in its entirety. There is probably a good reason for that – a reason that might even be somewhat intriguing. And I might even be somewhat compelled to find out what that reason is if I didn’t find the ten minutes that I sat through so agonizing.

I’m not going to pull out the Ebert-style review here. Instead, let me simply list the five things I found most annoying about the film, and leave it at that.

5. The accents. I don’t even know what kinds of accents these were supposed to be, but no two sounded even slightly the same. It’s set in 1864, but one guy sounded like he had been hauled straight out of the OC.

4. One of the guys wore sunglasses. It’s freaking 1864!! Are you kidding me?!

3. The sound. Every punch and gun blast is muted and there’s no soundtrack. I guess they blew their budget on editing.

2. Parts of the film are shot in sort of a documentary interview style. The characters sit down and talk directly to the camera as they’re interviewed (Just like in The Office). Only you can’t hear the interviewer. It’s surprisingly disconcerting to hear only one side of an interview. You can see the actors reacting to the interviewer, but we can`t hear it. Why would they do this? Maybe they couldn’t find an interviewer with an appropriate accent.

1. Just look at that mustache. Can you imagine having to stare at that mustache for 10 minutes, let alone 70 hours?

“Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that concern sound and listening as their focus.” (Sound art)

Thanks for nothing, Wiki.

No matter. I did, after all, recently attend an exhibit called espaceSONO where I got to get my sound art feet wet. Unfortunately, I think both espaceSONO and I were a little under-equipped to really make the fullest of the visit. For example, a number of its listening stations were down. It was also unfortunate that the fast-forward features on the media players were disabled. For example, there was one particular piece that was 27 minutes long. Barely audible static filled the first two minutes and that’s as far as my patience would take me. Perhaps this was the coolest piece of sound art ever created by minute fifteen, but I’ll never know but I couldn’t wait the fifteen minutes to get there.

Also, I have virtually no base knowledge in anything sound art (which probably became obvious when I mentioned that I actually wiki-ed the thing.) However, while I didn’t know what I was listening to most of the time, I did find a number of pieces oddly intriguing (was that NWA?).

So who knows – maybe this was the launching pad for a future career in sound art. Or better yet – maybe it was the motivation I needed to successfully push for NWA’s second reunion.

“Sound art – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” 18 Sep. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_art>