The Sweet House

I've spent a chunk of time working on my fine art site the last couple weeks. Not that it's finished yet, by far, but I'm pretty stoked to have gotten a longterm project called 'The Sweet House' presented. It's a multi-media presentation with a slideshow and an accompanying pdf of a short story I wrote with the photographs in mind, and I'd love to present it sometime publicly--reading the story, showing the slides.

I have to give thanks to Daphne Bramham who writes about the polygamist community of Bountiful for the Vancouver Sun; without her articles, I doubt this project would have coalesced. The images were, after all, originally unconnected to this subject matter, and were, in a real sense accidental. I was shooting in a ramshackle old house in New Brunswick, Canada, a house a thousand other photographers have shot in as part of Freeman Patterson and André Gallant's spring workshops. The walls were coming apart at the seams; there was daylight showing through the roof; there was debris everywhere; there were plants growing inside through the windows.

I wanted to photograph a person. I had spent nearly a week shooting my way through landscapes and old cars and running streams, and I longed more than anything to set my lenses on something or someone with a heartbeat. And secondly I craved a ghostly influence in that house of forgotten stories. A sort of half-seen presence flitting from room to room and shot with tons of motion blur so her edges vanished and melded with the background.

Kayla, wearing her auntie's old wedding gown, was an astonishing model; if she lived nearby, I would ask her to pose again and again. She has a sternness of purpose in the photographs that spoke to the issues that would, by mid-summer, be consuming me as I wrote the accompanying piece of short fiction.

In the end, the house represented the ruination of a young girl's childhood.

Cuba

Havana must be the most photogenic spot on earth. The communist politics since the 1959 Revolution that lifted Fidel Castro into power and US embargoes have forced the island city, formerly a US playground, into a weird timewarp. Colourful crumbling Spanish colonial mansions, classic American cars babied along since the 1940s and 50s, Latin and African influences, and a vital people who love to play music and dance--all these combine into a culture that thrums. You can feel the energy of this city like wind on your skin. Havana is a photographers' paradise! And hands down it's the best place in the world to have bridal photographs taken! All these arches and balconies and decaying castles! That's my new dream, now: to have a gorgeous Canadian bride with a willing wedding party and a day free after their wedding just to spend in Havana making awesome, drop dead photographs. Habana Vieja, anyone?

On New Year's Eve, we snuck out of a boring event put on for tourists to roam the Habana Vieja streets. On Calle Aguilar, we followed the irresistable sounds of salsa, and finally found dancers: lithe dancers, old dancers, child dancers the size of peanuts who are better at moving than I could be with a thousand devoted lessons. We passed over our bottle of Havana Club rum and tried to keep up, our bodies hopelessly spastic. Doors led to courtyards leg to rickety, half-gone stairs climbing high only to stop dead in mid-air. Slatted boards shaped balconies so old and decrepit they looked like they'd plummet with the softest footfall. I remembered there were streets around here where everyone walks down the center in case one of the houses collapses.

We wound our way down to Calle Opispo, ordinarily the shopping street (though its wares are limited), where folks on upper balconies tossed buckets of water down on unsuspecting strollers below, to shouts and screams. We dashed from the protection of one balcony to the next laughing as they caught one after the other of us, and made our way out, finally, drenched, to drink overpriced mojitos at Hemingway's pub, la Bodeguita del Medio. It was 2007, and we were a happy family in a happy country.

Junkanoo is postponed!

The weather here in Nassau is delightfully muggy and hardly hot; for Christmas, we feast on a dinner with turkey, port and Cuban cigars sponsored by the Graycliff Hotel, then play games, while every few minutes a horse-driven carriage clops by under our white balcony. Each horse wears a straw chapeau; it's hokey, but still somehow charming. In the past days, I've photographed a wedding, a cigar factory, and some of the fine and old local architecture. But after the work is done, this is a family vacation, with our children here, and we spend a lovely, slow Christmas day opening stockings, playing games, and eating. In the distance, massive cruise ships blow sonourous horns. We stroke lazily through the pool. We sleep intermittently, all keyed to wake at midnight for the Junkanoo Festival set to begin at 2 a.m. It will be the only festival we've attended at night, and the challenges of photographing a parade in low light will be many.

But then, thanks to a storm coming in from Florida, Junkanoo is postponed. After coming all this way and timing everything to catch it, we're frankly disappointed. But it's off to Cuba for us...

Greetings from Small Hope Bay

The school I attended in Calabash Bay on Andros Island in the Bahamas has long since morphed into a fundamentalist church, and the kiwi trees we kids used to sit under for lessons have been backhoed away. Still, the core interior is mostly unchanged, and it's easy to see past the altar to the principal's desk which hulked in middle of the room, punishment strap coiling like a cobra. Grades 1-6 attended here, with no walls between the classrooms. It was all so new for me, a Canadian kid used to snowpeople and sleds and toboggans. We sat on benches and pulled slates thumbtacked to the backs of the benches in front towards us to work our sums; grade four kids had to spell the word "epidermis" which I believed was hopelessly grown up and wonderful. When we sat outside for lessons while yellow chicks pecked the rocks around us, I thought I would expire from delight. It was a time of firsts for me-first sight of the ocean, first choking taste of salt water, first scary hammerhead shark prowling the bow of our rowboat, first sea turtle swimming like a green mirage, first three-speed bike manoeuvered barefoot, first time having my mother all to myself. First kiss, in fact, in the dark on the beach at Small Hope Bay Lodge. The boy, I learn, is now a lawyer in Nassau.

I find my old friend Margo Birch Blackwell again, and the disappointments no longer matter-not the incessant wind, the curtailed dives, or the fact that the Games Room doesn't bring back the deja vu of yesteryear. I adolized Margo when I was a girl, and I find she's grown into a kick-ass woman currently running the Bahamas Environmental Research Center on Andros.

I'm lucky enough to shoot an island legend named Miz Ophelia Marshall up in the island's northern community of Red Bays. She has goiters the size of one of the sponges the fishers pull out of sea corrals. She is 89 on Christmas Eve-born when the last century was new, in 1917. She used to be the community's midwife, but now she makes baskets, some woven so tightly they'll hold water.

We shoot pans in the pine forests, lovely blurred landscapes, and more photos at the Androsia factory where the renowed batik fabrics, the soft blues and pinks and yellows, are fabricated.

On the last morning, quietly, out past the sunbathing solarium, we shake my mother's ashes into her beloved Carribean Sea and watch, tears streaming down our faces, as she joins the green blue waves forever.

Such good news!

I'm delighted to tell everyone that following the launch of our new portrait site at www.janeeatonhamiltonphotography.com/portraits, we have now officially rolled out our new travel site at www.janeeatonhamiltonphotography.com/travel. It'll go live sometime this week. What a bundle of work it was to put together! And now, beyond the showcasing of our favorite travel images, we have added the coolest site for fulfillment.

So all those times I'm overseas and more or less unreachable, you can still go ahead and order the prints or the rights-license you require without even involving the studio. Even if you need a signed giclée, you can go ahead and order it, and the studio will fulfill it when I'm back on terra firma. Make no mistake about who is getting paid here...just as with Pictage, our continuing site for portrait and wedding clients, your funds come right back to us (minus, of course, a cut). Just as with Pictage, we determine our own prices.

The other news is that the studio shut down last Friday December 8 for the holidays. Well, not holidays so much as happy days working in the Bahamas and then in Cuba. We'll be shooting in Nassau for Christmas, and Havana for New Years. Can't beat that with a stick, I say! I can't wait to raise a glass at the Hotel Nacional, and I'll be toasting all of my clients, those I met this year, and those to come next year. You brought me many pleasures, and I appreciate the chance to have come into your lives.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it...we are only doing 15 weddings per year these days, first come, first served, and only working with clients who fall in love with our photography--for whom hiring us is a special dream come true. We're almost filled up for 2007, so if you're in a hurry, do send an email even though we're away; we'll do our best to pick up periodically. If not, check in again mid-January and if your date is still free, we can facilitate getting you finalized. Sorry for the inconvenience.

While we're gone, both the house and studio are being warmed by colleagues and friends, as usual, and we'll be thinking of them huddling around the strobes/fireplace while we throw off clothes 'cause we're too hot. We'll try hard to blog from location (you know, rubbing it in), but reception could be spotty. If not, we're back mid-January and will catch back up then. Happy holidays to everyone, with hopes that 2007 will see some resolution of world conflicts and a big lightening of loads for the burdened.

Jane

The Himba

In 2003, when Karutijambja left her village to fetch water at the Kunene River, a crocodile grabbed her and dragged her under. Her dog attacked, and the croc let Karutijambja go, grabbing the dog instead. Karutijambja was flown out to the hospital by the good folks at the Serra Cafema Lodge, and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale. Part of her right breast is missing, and when her daughter suckles, she can use only the left. The attack has given Karutijambja somewhat of a wild reputation, along with the horrible nickname "Krocodilla" among tourists.

Karutijambja, above, wears a headpiece that signifies that she is a married woman.

The Himba are descendants of the Herrero peoples who live spread across harsh Kaokoland in northern Namibia. Nomadic pastoralits, they are known for having upheld their traditions in the face of pressure to modernize. The women cover their bodies in a paste of red ochre and butterfat, which protects their skin from the sun and desert wind, and from mosquitoes. As well, this scented paste blocks odour; it is often impossible, with only croc-infested waters nearby, to bathe. The Himba women and girls have unique hair and jewellery--pre-pubescent girls wear their hair in two braids spiking forward over the face; pubescent girls wear multiple braids of shorn hair and ash pulled forward and roped back off their faces; married women wear long ochre-bound plaits. The tribe wears few clothes beyond loin cloths; when night begins to fall, they wrap themselves up tight in blankets.

Stay tuned to my upcoming travel site for more. Once it's up, it will feature a slideshow of the Himba people.

International Photography Awards

A cool thing happened on the way to...not winning. This year I was awarded seven honorable mentions.

Wildlife Category: Long-tailed Macaque, Bali
Children: The Child Bride #9
Sunset: Nusa Dua Dawn
Flowers: 3 Flowers, a series
Portrait: The Child Bride #9
Nudes: Nude 4
Landscapes: Mount Batur, BaIi

Above is the entry Long-Tailed Macaque, Bali. I am just now building my travel and fine art web sites and I'll include some of these images there, if I remember. Prod me if I forget. Hope to have at least the travel site up by mid-December, but if not, certainly by the end of January, presuming life doesn't intercede.

Does anyone else feel the way I do about monkeys? I could spend hours and hours and hours observing and photographing them and never tire. I got the best photos of long-tailed macaques both times I was in Bali. They're wild there, but habituated at the temples. They steal people's sunglasses and hats, but sometimes return them in exchange for food or water. They are always so very thirsty, as witness above. It takes them some effort, but eventually they can wrangle off bottle caps from the bottles they thieve, and drink.

When I was young, I vascillated between a career in ethnology, studying the peoples of the world, and primatology. Jane Goodall still makes me gaga. But then, photographing the Himba in Namibia was the most amazing photographic experience I've ever had. Yanking me away from baboons on safari in Africa this September was some hard thing to do. In fact, if you go to fellow photographer Stan Jirman's Tanzania journal you'll see the poor guy was beside himself being stuck in a vehicle with Joy and me, a troop of Chacma baboons just outside the window. Hey, what say we invite him on a baboon-only safari!

As for the rest of the nominees above, all shot on location in Bali or New Brunswick, Canada, except for the nude which was shot in Vancouver, they're indicative of my wild love for travel photography. I leave for the Bahamas and Cuba in a couple weeks and can't wait.

Fun Things Happened in England

I loved, loved, loved going to Kew Gardens when Joy and I were in England last August, since we had, beyond its usual delights, the opportunity to search out the garden photography exhibit called 'Imagine Yesterday...Today." And such a surprisingly sweet thing it was, too. The curators of the Garden Photographers Association 2006 competition had done a wonderful job of hanging 98 masterful garden images; printed and framed and up close, the images fulfilled the promise of their small thumbnails on the contest site. My image, "Agave 1", a shot I made in the private garden of Phoenix Perennials' nursery owner Gary Lewis, and part of my exhibition series of thorny plants called "Hurt Me," won an honourable mention, and it was a lark to watch people enjoy it.