Adrian Blackwell Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) Gord Anderson's Studio 2000

In 2000, Adrian Blackwell documented a series of studios at 9 Hanna Avenue, just before everyone was evicted.  9 Hanna had once been a munitions factory: huge steel-mullioned industrial windows, inexpensive, voluminous.  As with all studio buildings, they happen only when there isn't a more lucrative use for the building, a day that inevitably comes along, in this case the first of May, 2000.  Blackwell's thirteen Cibachrome contacts (20" x 24") were printed from the film lining a pinhole camera which was fixed to the ceiling of each studio.  Each camera was scaled to the proportions of the room below, and lined with film on the four sides and back of the box, thus recording the entire space.  

They are up right now at EyeLevel, an exhibition at Pith Gallery in Calgary.  One sees a row of fat cruciforms, filled with such warm complexity that they glow like icons.  Because pinhole camera exposures can be long, people often appear to be drifting through the spaces photographed as if they were phantoms, which of course, shortly after the photo and then the eviction, they became.  

The pinhole camera is the lowest of photographic technology.  Once the image is captured, much can be done with it at increasingly sophisticated levels, but the original light on film is photography at its very essence.

When I registered with Corbis to use a photograph of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after a US bombing raid for the last issue of On Site, they sent a little gift: plans for a pinhole camera you download, cut out and fold together.  Now that everyone has a digital camera, there is a rise in the use of the pinhole camera.  Very curious.

Stephen Gill. A Street in Hackney. photograph.With the ubiquity of digital cameras that take fool-proof images, and lots of them, it is interesting to see how many photographers persist in using film, but are doing something else with it. 
Just as photography originally freed the making of images in paint from a kind of graphic fidelity, so too does the digital camera free photography from the faithful recording of what the eye supposedly sees. The speed and clarity of digital imagery allows film photography to become something other than its resolution and depth of field.
Stephen Gill puts things found on the street, where he took this photograph, into the camera as he loads his film.  Although he can control what is aligned in the viewfinder and what is sitting on the film, he has little control over how the image turns out.  It is something like catching things out of the corner of your eye as well as what the eye is taking in straight ahead. 
I suppose he also controls which images he chooses to show – this one is particularly beautiful: a boring terrace in Hackney made mysterious somewhere deep in the camera.

1906 staged example of a dunce cap

Was this ever real? or was it seen in a cartoon and taken for fact.  Whatever, it is appropriate for a week spent not being able to get things off ftp sites, not being able to understand pieces of impenetrable text wanting to be articles for the next issue of On Site.  There is something about academic writing: when you are doing it, and I certainly have done my fair share of it, the mind is so full of theory, concepts and ideas that this strange kind of prose siimply unravels of the end of the pen, with its own syntax, vocabulary and density.  A year later and you yourself cannot even understand it. 

I always wondered if foolscap, that archaic size of paper we used in school when I was in the little grades, was the kind of paper used to make fool's caps, but evidently not.  Totally different etymology and something to do with a jester's cap watermark on the original paper.

Odd how the head is the place where so many signifiers are placed.  Perhaps not so odd, we are our visage, and hats and haircuts top off that visage, telling everyone you are not just a pretty face, but a rich pretty face, or a silly pretty face, or a rich not-so-pretty face.   god, life is exhausting.   

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

A Fascinator, ready to wear.

There is a kind of English hat called a fascinator, generally worn on the side of the head.  There is no hat part, usually just a little disc or a comb with strange feathers attached.  
Camilla wore one for her wedding to Prince Charles. By Philip Treacy, it was an aureole of feathers trimmed close to the quill so it looked like a halo of wheat.  A mystical sort of crown to say 'take that!' to everyone who doesn't want her to be Queen Camilla.
I find this kind of hat as bizarre as the makaraba, but not as much fun.  It really does smack of 'society' and general uselessness, part of an ethnic dress code that means much to those who wear them.   Sarah Ferguson wore one to Diana's funeral – black, gay, defiant; Sarah the renegade princess who escaped. Her fascinator was a little black box with thin black feathers shooting out of it, worn over her ear.

It is all seriously  frivolous, and as we here generally only wear hats when it is freezing out — thick, woolly things – I do wonder where it is that Canadian society allows frivolity.  Certainly not in its dress.  Hats have traditionally been indicators of social status, the best hat being the crown.  Indeed, the top of a hat is still called the crown.  In Canada, and in the US, supposedly we do not have a rigid social hierarchy revealed through sartorial codes so perhaps the hat as a defining moment is no longer readable.   Something must have replaced it, I don't believe there is such a thing as a non-hierarchical society.   Just can't think what it would be right now.