What A Difference a Year Makes: What is working in you?

For the past year I have been a full time student!  Yes, a full time student at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) working on my MFA in Photography.  While I have been at SCAD for two years this year I was full time and on sabbatical from Columbia Theological Seminary.  This was the first time in my educational career that I wasn’t working full time and in school full time.  For all of my previous degrees I had to work full time to put myself through school.  I can’t tell you what a privilege it was to be able to dedicate myself to the work of working on my craft and me.  I was able to immerse myself in a visual world and as a resul I see totally different.

What I have found is that it takes giving yourself fully to something if you hope to be transformed.  I had to let go of how I saw the world through the viewfinder and allow the images and the work to find me.  I had to let go of trying to make a picture and let the picture make me.  I spent as much time studying photography as I did making pictures.  These two go together, doing the work and mastering the intellectual and visual history of the field work in tandum. If you don’t give yourself fully to understanding the field you want be involved in you have no base to work from and you need a base. 

As I have followed the transformation of Auburn Avenue I have been transformed.    I finished this year ready for my thesis exhibition, which will be:

Faith in Sweet Auburn: The Next Chapter

Friday, October 16, 2015 @ 7:00 to 9:30 p.m.

Apex Museum

135 Auburn Avenue

Atlanta, GA 30303

(404) 523-2739

http://www.apexmuseum.org

www.faithinsweetauburn.org

This was a lot of work and it was more about me than it was about the images, videos and blogs I produced.  I was transformed by doing the work, letting go and allowing the process of study and making work transform me into a photographer.  While this has been hard work it has been very rewarding.  What is that challenge you need to take on at this point in your journey that has the potential to transform you?  Where is the creator trying to develop you and grow you so that your work at this phase in your life will have a greater impact than your former work?  What is going in you that has the promise of re-inventing you?

You Can Change: Do the Work and the Work Will Create a New YOU!

Ricci de Forest - Curator and Artistic Director, Madame CJ Walker Museum

The journey of a long term project is overly rewarding.  It is rewarding because you see the changes in you and the very thing you are working on.  I have been working on a trans-media project on the revitalization of Auburn Avenue here in Atlanta Georgia for over two years now (it is a ten year project).  I have been a witness to the change that is in process along this street and it has been something to see.  I have also changed over time.  My photography and storytelling has improved along with my growing relationship with the people I am photographing.  To commit to something and stick with it has the power to change your life and perspective.  You can look back and see what you are becoming as you do the work because the work does something in you. I want to encourage you today to find that thing(s) and stick to it.

Life is a longterm project.  We live the lives we create.  We have to take care to nurture the type of life and relationship we want to make sure we spend our days doing those things we enjoy and that we were created to do.  The joy in life is rooted in our living a life that lines up with the gifts the creator put in us.  It is doing the very things that we do well and enjoy doing that will bring us joy.  To do and be that thing you enjoy takes courage and handwork.  I have never worked so hard than I have in the past two years being a student at fifty-three.  I completed my PhD in 1997...that is almost ten years ago and  I have not been a full-time for a long time.  While I have done tons of continuing education stuff none of it was as difficult and demanding as the MFA program at Savannah College of Art and Design.  While this journey has been and is challenging it has been one of the most rewarding times of my career.  I love every minute of it and I am becoming that artist that I know is in me.  It is so worth it!!!!  What is it that you need to work on in your life to be what the Creator wants you to be at this stage in your life?  Are you willing to put the work in to have the joy of doing you each and everyday?  What do you have to do in order to do what you want to do?

You can follow my project at:
http://www.faithinsweetauburn.org

What Does It Mean to Black and Free in America in 2014?

What Does It Mean to Be Free?

What is the question?

This past Saturday I attended a panel discussion at the Auburn Research Library, “The Illusion of Freedom: The Reality of Black Life in America Since the Emancipation Proclamation”.  It was one of those panels that we could sit and engage in meaningful conversation for days, not just hours.  What does it mean to be free in an economic system built on the foundation of capitalism that is inherently unjust and profits off underpaying those it uses to make profits?  Can we find true freedom in a system that is inherently oppressive?  We can argue for African American entrepreneurship and our patronizing these businesses, which I support, but in doing so are we not right back into the trap of capitalism?  I wonder if we can talk about a mitigated freedom in the bowels of capitalism that serves us well in the form of psychological, spiritual and emotional freedom.  While I thoroughly enjoy these types of panels and discussions I always come away wondering if we are asking the right questions.  The brilliance on the panel was amazing and the questions they discussed were moving.  It was important to have this conversation on the sacred ground of Sweet Auburn because it reminded us of the limitations of capitalism and freedom as it relates to history and memory.  When economic wealth is the goal and a key component of how we understand and define freedom we have to then ask the question what does wealth do to memory, relationship, ethics, morals and communal freedom?  How do we connect the dots to define what freedom is and how do we work together collectively to achieve it?

We Are Ready to Talk About IT!

What are they talking about?

Really...I don't have a problem with ...well yes I do....

How Sweet It Is: Pop Up Shops and Sweet Auburn

Let's Ride

This weekend marked the opening of the pop-up shops along Sweet Auburn.  The vibe on the street this Saturday was new and alive but not yet full.  I spent most of my time at Civil Bikes.  Civil Bikes is closest to the historic center of Sweet Auburn and they are trying to hold onto that history as it is a part of the next chapter.  As I walk along the street on Saturday while the shops are spread out you could sense the future, you could see it, smell it and feel it.  The true next chapter of Sweet Auburn is firmly in the oven and the flour is about to become cake.

http://www.atlantadowntown.com/business/pop-up-retail

I Do What I Do Because I Love It: The Vivian Maier Model

Vivian Maier

Why do you do what you do?  What do you do for most of your day?  The answer is probably work.  We spend most our day at our job, doing what we do to make a living.  Our motivation for what we do might be mixed as to why we do what we do.   I have always strived to do what I love and pray that I could make a living doing it.  So far it’s working out for me.

I have never done what I’ve done looking for fortune or fame but rather for fulfillment.  As I approach my 52^nd birthday this month I am once again retooling and retraining myself to do what I love. I love to tell stories via the written word, photography and videography.  My time at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is a time of molding.  I am slowly becoming a photographer and as I am on this quest I want to remind myself that I am doing this because I love it.

One thing I have done at SCAD is search out the artist whose life and work I connect with.  For me it is more than your work it is your life that I also have to connect with.  I have major connection with Vivian Maier.   Vivian Maier shot non-stop her entire adult life.  She shoot not to show her work or sell her work but because she loved her work.  She died in 2009 and there is no record that she showed her work to anyone. Her work was discovered by John Maloof  in 2007 and he brought her work to the  public and began to promote her work (see story below).

When I first saw her street photographs I was hooked.  I was moved by her work.  Every artist has that person, that artist who they connect with and that person becomes their mentor (directly or indirectly).  For me Vivian Maier has become one of my mentors. While I love her work I am even more attracted to what appears to be the motivation behind her work.  I believe she did it because she loved it.  She couldn’t help but shoot pictures, create images, and she did all of her life.  She walked with that Rolleiflex camera around her neck and she created images. 

Vivian Maier

She didn’t shoot to show or to sell but now her prints are selling like hot cakes for hot prices.  Her motivations were pure and the reward still came. Some debate whether she would want her work being shown and sold.  Ms. Maier died in 2009 and by the time John Maloof realized whose work he had discovered all he could find of her was an obituary.  We don’t know how she would feel about her posthumous fame.  What we do know is that her work is being received by the world with rave reviews.  She is inspiring a new breed of street photographers like myself.  Her work has made a difference because I believe she loved what she did, she was good at it, and she worked hard at her craft.

In the end I believe we must do what we love.  We must work hard at it, get the training / education we need and never look back.  We must love what we do so much that if we never made a penny from it we would still do it.  I don’t want to do what I do for the show or the doe but rather for the love.  In the end I do hope that my work will make the world we live in a more loving and just place.  For my work to make the world a more loving and just place I must love the world and the work I do that I commit back to the world in love.  What do you love?  What are you becoming?   How are you preparing yourself to do what you were created to do?   Do you believe that you were created on purpose to make a difference?

Vivian Maier