Author: Jackie Ferrier

When T was young, maybe 5, and into princesses, she wanted her bedroom painted close to the colour of this pink dress she is wearing. I did -everything- to talk her out of it. I thought the colour was… well…a LOT, and maybe she didn’t really understand how overwhelming it would be once her entire room was coloured in it. Maybe a less intense pink would be better? But nope, the girl knew what she wanted, and she loved it for years, even though the second you stepped into the room, you too were the same colour of pink. She loved it until the next phase of childhood when it was no longer princesses but maybe beads and play acting when she wanted blue and then teen T went for an elegant deep grey that she painted herself. But she’s always been someone with a certain amount of intensity that translated into an energy and a drive that’s driven her success in school and propelled her toward the many jobs she’s taken on. It will serve her well even if she can’t quite see it herself yet.

There are moments when time for a mom crawls, like during 500 look-at-me cartwheels. Or when the only moment of respite from having to manage, cajole, and juggle everything was the simple battle of rush hour traffic to or from work; or the five minutes locked in the bathroom with the kids shouting and pounding on the door outside.

But there were those other moments, princess moments, moments in the audience at school to see her get some award of the month or play some instrument in band or act in some play, the tickles and squeals, the excitement of picking out a toy or a craft I knew she’d love and the imagination and intensity of love she poured out.

And then poof, just like that, you realized they’ve changed and it happens so slowly or maybe it was so quickly that you didn’t quite see it; you wouldn’t catch them dead in hot pink. And there is the unsettling realization some things are gone for good.

In its place there are more exciting things and maybe that’s why you didn’t notice the change at first; you catch yourself having mature deep conversations about life with them and they make you think something that was not your thought, your relationship evolves to something you appreciate at a deeper level, they make you genuinely laugh with their stories and you both realize you are more similar than you thought and that’s half the problem, and you catch glimmers of the people they’re going to become that is all purely them and who they are and really nothing about you.

But it can’t be helped. You’re left wondering where the time went, and you think about that princess time, and the chubby little legs and sticky-finger hugs, the endless cartwheels or whatever the equivalent is for you, and I’m left feeling sometimes that I somehow didn’t hold on tight enough to slow it down, I had so much life to scrap with, and I’m annoyed that if I had to go through it again, it would probably be exactly the same because, dammit, that’s the way we are.

Regrets, nostalgia and pride get twisted up into a sort of happy-sad thing we can’t put words to very well. I wish for the millionth time that their dad had been here through it, now to share the adult version of these memories with me, remind each other we did our best, laugh and growl at this or that aggravation. The lonely burden of being responsible for the memories and having no one to appreciate them as I do weighs heavy at times in moments of private. And for the millionth time, too, the follow-up thought it was never meant to be, or it would have been. For whatever reason these are the lives picked out for us. If we could have done something different we would have. I had something to learn. I hoped I learned it.

T finished her exams last week – high school is history. She will officially graduate next week. But between the exams and the graduation, it’s the prom with all it’s glory and drama.

Morgan didn’t get to go through this whole prom thing because of Covid, so it was fun to go dress shopping (when we didn’t get on each other’s nerves). I felt like I was a Mom, going through a Mom rite of passage and though I loved the yellow, and the blue was pretty nice, when she settled on this one, I think we both thought it was perfect.

I believe T picked the colour of her dress in part because she thought no one would have expected her to and it was not going to be like anyone else’s. We might have made a joke about her younger self loving it. And she might have even said she felt like a princess in it. But that was then and this is now.

I will admit after seeing the dress hanging in the living room over a period of several days, I really did have to move it upstairs, because apparently a lot of pink is still too much pink for me, and I didn’t want seeing her in it on the evening to lose any of the effect I knew it would have.

I’m glad I did. I see T’s beautiful grown-up self in that elegant pink dress, vibrantly shining, ready to take on the next exciting phase of her life, and this evening, it’s her, and it’s perfect.

And to me, her mom, who was there day in and day out throughout it all, I can’t help but feel seeing the grownup version of her younger self, that there’s something that has come full circle. If only just for now.

Our team (of 4 players for the finals but 6 for the season plus our captain) won our division in squash singles in the Toronto & District league! This was a big deal for me. Let the record show that my very first year playing competitively in 2018/19 I did not win a single match – just one game (we play best out of 5) (no, I will not give you the link to the records).

In the season after, just before COVID hit, I did a little better. I won 3 out of 16 matches although two of them were against a woman in her 70s who only won one match herself all season. This year I won all my matches except one.

But the real story for me was, as much as I am passionate about playing squash, I almost quit playing singles competitively last year because I could hardly play a competitive singles match without being overwhelmed by performance anxiety. It wasn’t from all the losses although surely that didn’t help as it appeared from day one.

The dread would start up in the afternoon of the day of the match forcing me to continually try to cope or solve the problem until the match was over until the next week and I’d go through it all over again. I was really starting to wonder what I was doing it for and thought if I can’t get a handle on it I should stop. And I couldn’t get a handle on it. I did so much work to figure out what this was.

But to quit would also feel like failing. The competition is what gives purpose and joy to the practice.

I’ve always worked hard to improve my game since I started competing, but this year I’ve done a LOT to work on my mental game, from research and journaling to nutrition and supplements to meditation and visualization, preparation and focusing rituals, ‘controlling the controllables – letting go of the rest’, and more.

It’s a bumpy road. I think it helped to win more but there were matches where I stayed anxious even when I was winning and way up in points. Why? Why does the mind and body have to be so damned… slippery?

But in preparation of the upcoming playoffs as a way to “confidence load”, I made a list of all the things that I had done to prepare myself over time, and wow, it really was a long list. I feel like I can write a book .

I thought to myself: no one has got to be more prepared than I am.

That’s a good state of mind to go into finals with.

From the outside maybe it all seems a bit much for amateur sports, but I think that competing in sports can reflect other areas of your life, teach you a lot about yourself and others and what it means to be human if you let it. Also: self confessed squash addict, so…

You don’t really choose to win because at the end of the day you don’t know what your opponent is going to bring to the table. But I was thinking of a couple of mental hurdles I had to cross yesterday. The forgetting of something that I relied on to keep me calm and focused. Things said earlier that I had to fight to get out of my head. The noise and the crowd all watching. My team so wanting the win. My wanting to prove something to myself. I’ll admit, I did have a moment of why am I doing this?. But for the most part, the nervousness I felt, felt right.

We each play the best of 5 games for a match. My opponent and I were tied up at two games to two. I was down in the 5th, and she only had a few points to go before she’d win the match. I had let the pressure and a lapse in focus get a hold of me and I served a serve way out of bounds. I might be imagining it but I think the crowd groaned. Maybe it was just me. Either way I didn’t want to have given an important point away for free at a such a critical time.

But didn’t panic, didn’t choke. Didn’t tell myself it didn’t matter, or that it did. There wasn’t a bunch of internal chatter, or mental scolding. The frustration from an earlier doubles match in the week was gone. Just focused. I knew what I needed to do. One shot at a time. This is what I have been working on.

And that’s what I’m proud of: the long game of preparation, navigating successes and failures and practice that got me to that final moment that allowed me to win, or at least not lose. The accumulation of moments that made me think about playing up a division next year. Not quitting.

We are all playing the long game at something in our lives in our own way. It can just be so hard to appreciate at times along the way.

I remember talking to my mom who is in her 80s awhile ago and she casually mentioned some self-improvement thing she was working on and I was a little dismayed. I thought: can’t you get to a point in your life where you can just say, this is good enough? I am good enough? But maybe I missed the point. That maybe that is what we are all about. The effort, struggle and joy in growing.

I think just lived my own version of a sport movie.

Of course, after its all over, you don’t leave the theatre and go have dinner. Rather, its like the day after Christmas, you suffer a dopamine drop and you’re bummed out, lol (at least I think so- I’m still feeling good at the moment and still have a houseleague doubles final to play next week), but hey. That’s life too.

Either way, it looks like we are moving up to C division next fall where I can become reacquainted with losing all over again.

I made this (above) with AI, which inspired this:

We would have, had he lived long enough, retired to an airstream and travelled. That was the story anyway. I went along with it because it was as plausible as anything else. More plausible than what actually happened. But retirement was a long way off. We talked about it like you do winning the lottery: with no real thoughts of the reality of it.

But without him, what would that life be? A prison sentence of disconnectedness, loneliness, which the years following his death were, except peppered with the temporary euphoria of interacting with strangers, followed by a desolation of emptiness that strangers cause. As I imagine it, anyway.

In reality it would probably be more like the anxiety of being out in the middle of no where at night, wondering how safe you actually were. Maybe the wind maybe whistling through one of the cracks, something broken I can’t fix. Someone wanting to help. The sidelong glance of a particular type struggling with life who, deciding perhaps, that you’ll do, they’ll try you on for their particular brand of dysfunction without a thought that perhaps they won’t do for you.

My mind goes places then, away from what might have been (since if it never actually was then it never might have been) to more sour places: the traps you find yourself in, because of your own particular dysfunction. Like being afraid to upset people because you are so afraid of what might happen, and there you are, trapped in a state of niceness, of helpfulness, goodness, and you don’t want to be fake, so you stand behind that goodness where there’s no threat. Oh, no, you believe in it. You call it Dignity and Respect and build whole philosophies around it justifying your dysfunction and making it better, making it righteous. Trapped in relationships that you try to pound into a shape of something it can not be.Until you must finally get into that airstream trailer and escape, hoping you’re not tracked down, followed, watched, until you’re off all the socials, you keep to yourself, until maybe you use a different variation of you when you check in to the next site that you can stay awhile. But just a short while.

Because that airstream…why, I’d know it anywhere.

This is an image I made with AI and as I made it this came to mind:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep…

Long before he died he used to quote this line from the poem before I ever knew it. I don’t know why or even what the context was, for at the beginning and for a long time after, I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, whether or not they were quotes or something he referenced, that, perhaps if I was better connected with details I should have known. It seemed not to matter whether I understood them or not, they were like little inside jokes he was happy to share the punchline of for his own entertainment. I was just happy to be in the presence of his joyous company and tolerant of confusion.

Eventually it became mine, that poem, a thing that defines me. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. At the time he liked me for my dark sense of humour which was particularly dark at that time, and, although I couldn’t say if he continued to admire me for it throughout our relationship, because those details skip out on the fog of memory, but I know we certainly amused ourselves darkly prior to his approaching death, laughing at our darkness in a way only the years of shared day-to-day life intimacy allows.

The intimacy of a toothbrush for example. Sitting in a cup on a bathroom counter. Not mine. It’s here. He’s not. Proof he was here. Mute testimony. That phrase has become mine now, too.

In the early days then we also had a ritual of watching the x-files on a Thursday or maybe it was a Friday night. His ritual, rather, one I sidelonged into, those moments you can’t wait for, long days ago, when appointment based watching was a thing and the x-files made a wet Canadian west coast forest night a thing. We were a thing. Until we weren’t.

And I wore his ring until I lost so much weight, all of our mutual weight of shared meals, shared life, the shared children that I grew, lost so much weight that the ring went flying off my finger across the room as I waved my arms in the middle of an animated conversation, a conversation not with him.

I tucked that ring away. Half relieved I had a practical reason to take it off that wasn’t at all about saying goodbye. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.

I made this image with AI. I’ve enjoyed using AI to work out some of those things I am preoccupied. Not that I am preoccupied by dolls – haha – but things that are disturbing. Things you see that you know maybe you shouldn’t get quite so affected by. A kind of.. liminal space somehow.

Well I created this post a long time ago somewhere else. But now that it’s three years alter and since we are on the subject…

Dolls

The doll that was given to me as a child smelled of unpleasant, artificial smells. Plastic, rubber, whatever it was, I didn’t like it. It had reddish hair. I knew I was supposed to like it, that this was a thing given to me, that was to be played with. I didn’t know what to do with it, with that smell. I named it it Baby Ferrier. A distant, non-committal name that I didn’t really like either. I’m sure I must have tried to play with it, placed it in a baby carriage we had around. Put a blanket on it. I had no memories of doing this with the doll, though, only the cat. And yet the memory of that doll remains.

Dolls

My daughter had a doll that she loved as a young child. I don’t think I gave it to her, I don’t think it would have occured to me. It’s eyes moved open and closed depending on whether it was sat up, or laid down. It had plastic forearms and hands, and plastic feet, a plastic head, but the body was a stuffed sort of thing that hid the batteries that worked once upon a time. If you pressed the baby in certain ways it would probably cry or laugh. I think she might have called it Baby.

It went frequently without clothes and went everywhere and acquired the dirt only a thing like that can aquire. My daughter put something like sugar or salt or maybe it was sand in one eye, the way kids do things like this. The eye would get stuck open or closed giving the doll a slightly deranged look. Over time the eyelashes got pulled off one eye from here using the eye lashes to open and close the eye as needed.

My daughter would carry it around absently minded by the foot. Despite all this, I felt a primal visceral alarm seeing the head of it bouncing off each step as she dragged it down the stairs.

It’s January 17th. I’ve missed, let’s see, three personal deadlines to write a blog post for a project I want to do called 52 Truths. The idea was to post every week of the year, whether it be writing and/or images.

Well, I guess the first truth of the year is the creative beast is wilful and sometimes just will not be tamed.

It was not for not having done the work. Oh, I was working. Almost obsessively so. The concept for 52 Truths came to me on Dec 31, 2021. It was based on my growth as an artist to explore what resonates to me using what is available to me, regardless of pressures, insecurities or distractions. Stay true.

But then when it came time to start I got distracted by something that resonated with me a little too much. The very next day after deciding I’d explore truth I uncovered a lie.

I thought: perfect timing. Rather than explore a truth this week, let’s start with a lie and the truth around it.

You kind of want the creative process to just flow uninterrupted. Then you want to take a step back and let it settle before you get to the editing phase. But the way the post flowed, I couldn’t figure out what part to pull out to stand on its own, or what parts to take out to cut it down. I’d try to rewrite bits of it to make it work. Or I’d try to distill it, and more would come up. Stuff I liked. But just like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice mishap, my first little post started to get out of control. The more I tried to reign it in, the more it generated pages and pages, and still more pages.

Well. There is just so much truth about lies, isn’t there?

We’re funny about being lied to. Despite research suggesting humans tell multiple lies a day, other research suggests that we tend to believe what we’re told. But a black or even grey lie thwarts closure, it shifts the circle of a narrative off track and it interferes with our sense of justice. Even when you know the person is a chronic liar, it can be just as hard to let it go as it is to try to close a loop that will never get closed. We’re wired that way.

Eventually I realized it was too soon. Some things just aren’t ready for prime time as much as you are ready to dedicate time to it, or your deadline tries to force it. I was being driven by the wrong thing. But in the working of it, the visual image came to me clear as day.

The image above is not it. No, there is a bit more rabbit holing to do. And the pressure is off now. Maybe I don’t even need to finish it. I’m trying not to make pronouncements these days.

But now that I think of it, I think you can apply this nonlinear, imperfect process to just about everything in our lives. Things never go according to plan, and you never get everything done when you want it. There’s always that human element. Now isn’t that the truth?

I should probably state up front that I am someone who is extremely challenged by the idea of having to kill anything, (mosquitos being the exception). I have put down more than one animal, and it was extremely heartbreaking and difficult. I believed I was doing it for the right reason, but after witnessing a discussion about pet euthanasia with the late documentary filmmaker, Allan King, I can’t be so sure. Who are we to play God, he asked? But people do get killed. So there is that. I talk a little about the impetus for this piece below.

[WARNING: CRIME FICTION]

And with a flash of decision, he thought to drown her then, which was a very unpleasant thought but not nearly as unpleasant as having done it; it was not as if he was cold-hearted at all, he was not a bad man after all.

But when it was done, it was over, that was that, problem solved, put it out of his mind. And he very nearly did. And for a time he was relieved, he was wonderfully free, wonderfully unburdened.

But she did not go down easily, that was the thing, and after a while a little knot of doubt started to grow. The thing played back in his mind again and again whether he liked it or not, like his brain trying to solve a problem. He felt sure the thing was done, it had to have been done. But that feeling, as if she was watching, waiting, what did she want? As if maybe she tricked him, and then it was everything he could do to not have everything crawl up in his throat. Of course it was done! Of course it was! And after a time he just couldn’t quite get a deep enough breath, and after a time he thought maybe just a quick look, just to confirm, just a quick peak, after a while he thought he should go back, just to check, just to make sure, and so into the water he went.

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The concept for the art was inspired by my daughter seeing a “Mermaid” in this shot.
The writing, however, was inspired by two things. One was something I read about mermaids:

“The Rusalki are water nymphs of Slavic mythology. While initially regarded as benevolent spirits of fertility and agriculture, Rusalki gained a more sinister description in the 1800s. They were believed to be the ghosts of women who died violent deaths by drowning. In their anger and sorrow, the Rusalki now lured men and children to their watery graves.”
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-mermaid.

The other was this idea that when we do something we shouldn’t, whether it’s a crime or something as simple as a lie, we’re not so good at imagining what it will really be like after we have done it, when it’s too late, and the deed has already been done and our minds must clean up the mess.

Below is a screengrab of the tank I was creating with Blender.

Part one is here. You’ll see I strayed a ways away from my original concept.

I don’t know if there is anything I have done so far that caused me as much thinking. Of course, there is always the thinking around the concept, and then the thinking around the build, and then the shooting and post-production. And then there was the rebuilding. And the reshooting. And the re-dos in post. But I thought a lot about this. And I procrastinated when couldn’t figure out how to solve its problems.

The image looks so simple, how could it be that complicated?

Simmering in the background were some other things, too, like, am I really shooting another image where the central character is doing nothing?

Part of it had to do with where the motivation/concept came from. I actually went back over my notes and realized that it got muddy pretty much from the start.

There’s no need to read the rest of this ridiculous rambling. Maybe if you are a photographer or filmmaker or artist you’ll find it interesting. Otherwise it’s just a lot of blather…

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Where the gas station gets a new role

You see I have a thing for certain night shots. For a while there I took to prowling around the neighborhood at night to shoot. 2 or 3am would the best time. The town is asleep and everything is very quiet.

But I currently live in a suburb and there isn’t much fog here, and there aren’t many of the structures I was interested in. I talked about the original concept here, but then I discovered that the lighting changed the entire concept. It no longer looked exactly abandoned. It looked modern, futuristic even. Could it even be abandoned with the lights on? What was I thinking? Ok, maybe. But then it’s the wrong lighting.

The first dilemma was a simple one. I liked its lighting, it felt right. It felt gas station-y.

At least the first build did. These images are a result of build number two which I built to get the lighting even better and fix an issue with the poles. And I got very stubborn about sticking to what I had built because I liked it.

So maybe it’s not abandoned. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever. See, I don’t have to overthink things.

Static vs Dynamic

We all like dynamic images, right? Go for the dynamo! When it came time to shooting the self-shots I decided I’d do a variety of different poses. I got the boring old standing-around shot (again?), of course, because that was what I had envisioned, but I did other ones, too. And I came up with one that I really liked. It was dynamic, just complex enough, and so that was going to be the shot I used.

I liked the shot. One problem. Or I thought it was one problem. It just didn’t work.

The Viewer and the Relationship to Stills vs Film

In fact that kind of lonely feeling I thought I was going for wasn’t there as soon as I put the character in. Why? That was the first problem.

It lead me down a long path of musing about the nature of the viewer of a photograph vs a film viewer. See, in a film, you can create a shot with a character in a place that feels lonely. But as soon as I put my person in my image, the place no longer felt lonely.

Take the character out, it feels lonely. Put it in, you no longer feel lonely. I was unsure if it was just my image or all images. So I did a search for “lonely” and sure enough, all those images of lonely people don’t feel lonely, even if you understand the concept of loneliness is being communicated. Why? Because when you put a person into the frame, you are no longer alone anymore.

I mean, you are not necessarily any more unlonely, but loneliness is no longer your focus. If someone is there you are not alone. I wasn’t entirely sure I was understanding the effect of it correctly, but it suggested that the role of the viewer of a photograph is different than it is for a film viewer because you can feel loneliness with a character. Could that be?

I did a bunch of thought experiments which I’ve deleted because who cares.

I eventually concluded that you can’t look at these things in isolation. It had to do with the difference in the storytelling aspect of film and our relationship to the character, When we first meet a character in a film they are a stranger to us (even if we recognize the actor). Over time, hopwever, if the script and director are doing their jobs right, we begin to identify with the character, enabling us to live vicariously through them, feeling their feelings, experiencing their experiences, and experiencing that odd kind of dream-like double-think. We are them, they are us.

A character in a still image, on the other hand, in some ways is forever unknowable to us. They are “other”. So whether or not the character “knows” we’re there by looking back out at us, we remain separate. So seeing a character in an image, separate from us means their’s two of us. So we’re not alone.

So once I had that worked out, I realized that “lonely” was not going to work.

And was lonely even what I was even going for? Maybe isolated? Maybe something? Dammit, just get it done! Self-doubt has a way of creeping in slowing you down.

Get clear on the subject

What is the picture about? I used to read that when I was newly learning about photography and I found it maddening because I just didn’t get it. It’s about the thing. Right there! What are you asking?!

But now that I understand I think maybe it’s not quite the right question to ask.

A better question for me might have been, what am I supposed to be looking at, or what is the feeling of it that made you want to shoot it?

Which brought me to the next problem. I put my chosen pose, the dynamic one, into the shot. A strange thing happened. Suddenly the sense of place no longer seemed to matter as much. The place became a background, an accessory, maybe even a distraction. Sure, it lent to the feeling, I guess, but it wasn’t about the place. It became all about that character. The character upstaged the place.

And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t clear on my subject and hadn’t been from the start. I created a story, but the thing I actually wanted to shoot was the liminal feeling of the place.

And the character. But was I just being stubborn about it? So that is why this image became two. One with, one without.

The Elusive Feeling

Now it was not just the problem of identifying the subject of the image. It was also not clearly identifying the feeling of it. I thought I knew what that was.

What attracts me to the light at night was the eerie, unsettling quiet of it, combined with the man-made electric magic glow. I can’t quite find the words for it, which is why it’s an image. There’s almost an other-world component to the night when no one is around. I cam eot understand a word for it: liminal.

Had I more accurately identified that quality, I would have realized that the character couldn’t be more dynamic. The dynamic aspect of the character in the shot I liked made it unbalanced. The thing that made me like the pose simply drew too much attention. She had to acquiesce to the night. Become part of it with all that she brought to it. Quiet and flat. The night has a presence we all recognize when we are out in it alone and there is no one around. It’s bigger than us.

So, even while my self-doubt was raging over using yet another static-looking person, I knew I couldn’t put the pose I actually liked better in the shot. It just didn’t go. And with that knowledge, and with the understanding that my image was not about the gas station idea, this place of transience, but the quality of the light and the darkness, I left the pumps unfinished. I feel it’s better that way. Is it a gas station? I don’t think it is. Does it matter? It’s no longer about that.

Perspective and the Inverse law

Oh that sounds so mathy, and I feel so smart!

Except I can’t quite figure it out. The other dilemma I had was this feeling that the original image with the rain looked wrong. This is a model and I shot it, and yet as I was working with the image with the rain I had this nagging feeling the perspective was off. I’m like, how is this possible? It’s REAL(ish). Well, the reflections weren’t, but everything else was.

So I go back to the inverse square law. Usually, when you hear a photographer talk about this, they are referring to the light, and you really don’t need to know how to do the math. If anything, you just need to understand that light falls off quicker the closer it is to something. But from what little I understand of it, I think physicists might tell you the inverse square law relates to everything that has a physical quantity. Or something. Let me explain how it relates.

I am looking at that structure, and with my first shots, I’m thinking that maybe you see too much of the underside of the roof. I had initially shot it from a fairly low angle. It sort of worked, but not quite. So I re-shot it. I was happy with that until I started to put the rain and reflections in. Now it was the ground that bothered me. Why it is feeling like it’s coming too far at me instead of down when wet reflections tend to go straight down from my research and they were in the image. There was just something weird about it, and while I sensed it was the perspective, I just couldn’t figure out how the reflections I created could be making me feel that.

And I reshot it yet again this time using a variety of different reflective surfaces. I realized that I had my reflections wrong, but turns out, that really wasn’t the issue either. The nagging thing that was bothering me if anything, got worse. I became convinced it was what I could see of the tops of the base. How that be? It’s reality!

Because really, if I was a certain amount of inches away from the model, and I translate this into feet because i am working at a 1:12 scale, well, does it really even matter where I am shooting it from? It should look right. But what I haven’t quite figured out is how lenses fit into the mix, but we see things rendered differently from all sorts of different lenses. A 90mm is not going to look like a 14mm and we accept that in an image. So should it matter?

There is a math problem here, I just don’t know what it is. I started to suspect it has something to do with the inverse square law, perspective and what you see of the horizontal planes. The farther away something is, the higher it is in a 2d rendering, which means you can’t see on top of it so well, right? Assuming that a 35mm lens best represents the human eye, shouldn’t that be irrelevant? I can’t even imagine a scaled-down 35mm lens – what would a 2.9mm lens would look like? With a tiny little camera sensor?

That way leads to madness.

Finally, I went back to some shots I had taken at night of different structures and found one of the Ajax Library main branch that I had shot on a 14mm lens. I’m looking at that shot, and some others, and I’m thinking, there’s just no way you be able to see the tops the way I had them in the image I was working on and still be able to see that much of the entire structure. Didn’t matter if what I shot is real. Maybe it’s just a matter of camera angle, or maybe it’s not.

I just decided to fix it on intuition. I might not have got it perfectly but it least it’s not making me mental. Not yet anyway.

Maybe someday when I get a budget for a documentary, I’ll talk to a physicist about it. My engineering daughter failed at helping me out. She doesn’t get it either.

I find this shot amusing, both for the rickety nature of it all, and also because of the flash that’s poking its head out from behind the background.

In actual fact, I had already shot the station several days earlier and had actually taken it apart. Because the roof was still intact, I just pinned it back together so that I could get what I needed to shoot the wet surfaces and reflections. I had to carefully balance two battery backs on the top so that it would stand properly.

This image was inspired by an image shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a woman in a mental institute in 1937 (see below). His is better of course. His whole series is a fascinating but of photography.

The article I read said that his photos helped shape perception of mental health as the people in the pictures looked “terribly normal”.

He was quoted as saying, “they (the patients) don’t take me too seriously with my little camera.
“I don’t come as a photographer. I come as a friend.”

There’s a story right there.

In playing the character I thought a lot about what she might be carrying – what I would choose to carry in that place and why. Practically speaking moving back and forth from posing to the camera and back with my bundle of stuff it became clear to me that it was quite inconvenient having your hands full like that. I was constantly dropping stuff and reassembling my package. And it required more stuff to hold then I thought from first looking at the photograph. I concluded she probably remained still a lot of the time. That you are limited by your baggage can be taken both literally and figuratively.

Edit – Feb 2026.

I am revisiting this image. It doesn’t sit right with me, something is wrong with the scale and angles of it. And yet, I still has this bizarre experience of an unlocked memory, even though I did this. In terms of the final build, well, the miniature set was only just barely assembled and shot in peices and stitched together with photoshop. The single 3d printed was duplicated in photoshop, I spent a long time on getting the floor to blend right the lighting to look right. I can’t recall if I made another heater thing (what’s it called?) or used what I had from before.

BUt the thing I got most particular about was the floor and the depth in which the windows are set. I was, as I think I might have written about in my floor moulding post – and ironically, you can’t see it. BUt it’s a strange flashback to a place where I took an art class on Saturdays. I was going for that memory at the time of the build. It’s just particularly weird to have got something about that right and have it feel like an unlocked memory. I couldn’t have been older than 9 at the time. I don’t even know why my parents would have even signed me up for such a thing. My father was literally a professional artist. Just weird.

There is no relation to my experience there to the subject matter of this film, except to say there must have been something about that school that felt particularly cold and institutional. I don’t remember anything about the class at all. But the school. The school I did. The light, the sound, the smell, and the floors of course.