Last year I was photographing November. I had 30 or so sheets of 4×5 film and a month to do it. Vertical landscapes.
But not really just landscapes, no, I wanted the photographs to represent how November feels. Psychological. And for those of you not from here, here November is a grey, bitter month. Foreboding.
Camera porn, au naturel.
But November light and skies are something else. On the right day they encapsulate more than just November. Some primal thing . . . the end of the world, or maybe some new beginning. I reckoned this would be a kind of a riff on my last project, After the Fact.
November 10th last year . . .
And then, November sixteenth last year, there was a huge snowfall. Overnight everything turned pretty. Damn. I didn’t want pretty.
A different road, six days after the previous photo . . .
Well, I was bummed. How are you supposed to photograph bleak and grey when there’s a soft white layer covering everything? So I abandoned the project and began to think about other things.
And then what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Another November happened. That’s what. Turns out there’s one every year.
So I loaded up some film and went out to feel the biting wind on my face and the waning sun on my back. Once again I was in my glory, out in the world feeling . . .
And then it happened again. Snow. Lots of snow. This is what the short walk to the street in front of my house looked like on November 12th . . .
But in the meantime I’ve managed to cobble together ten images that seem to get the job done. (Ten or twelve final photographs was my aim for this project). If you want to see them big click on this. (Best seen on a large monitor for all the 4×5 goodness.)
I might revisit this again next November. I might not. We’ll see . . .
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OTTAWA NOTES
FIGUREWORKS
For those of you who like the competitive aspects of the art world, Figureworks Prize announces the big winner of their local portrait contest. Wednesday, November 10th at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, six to ten. Some photography is involved.
OPAL Issue Nº 3: launch
Local photo publication The OPAL Community launches Issue Nº 3. Featuring photography from all over. Thursday November 21st, five thirty to nine at House of Common, 11B Fairmont Avenue (around the back).
