DISPOSSESSION PART 5 of 5: CONSTRUCTING A SINGLE PHOTO - Reflecting on the creative process of my photograph for Kizuna

It probably doesn’t surprise you to read that this isn’t a single exposure from my camera. This single image, which will be hanging in the museum starting September 10, is actually a composite of more than 30 separate photographs, and over 1000 exposures (probably closer to 1500 but I’m not going to count). That’s about the extent of my technique that I’m going to reveal, except to say that in every way, I have never attempted anything like this before. Yes I’ve done photo composites before, but usually a single location, with 1 or 2 people, and 1 or 2 photographs merged into one.

(Repulsion - by Yours Truly. This is the first photo composite I created for exhibition purposes. It's a scene reconstructed from memory (or research), staged with actors and digitally post-produced, an approach inspired by the Jeff Walls, Stan Douglases and Rodney Grahams of the world. There are only two photos in this composite whereas there are more than thirty photos that make up 'Dispossession', the photograph I created specifically for Kizuna.)

I did two earlier this year (not knowing I would use, nay stretch, the technique into this one made up of three locations, 17 people, and 30-plus photos). Cake, right? My computer didn’t think so. Before this project I thought Macs and Photoshop (a legit CS4 version on an 8-month new 27” iMac i7 with 8GB RAM) were fast and stable systems. That is until Photoshop starts saving your files automatically into the “.psb” format (not .psd for those who know what I mean). That means you’ve gone past the maximum file size that .psd can handle into this other realm known as “Large File Format”. It begins to happen around 2GB. When it gets up to 5 or 6GB, that’s when your (my) previously stable system begins to crash and reboots to reduce crashes are the norm. Saving your progress takes 5-10 minutes when you’re working with a 6GB file. Opening a 6GB file takes 5-10 minutes. Then there’s visually inspecting 200 million pixels to make sure there aren’t any defects… and fixing the defects you find (I hope I found them all). Let’s just say it took a whole lot of time to do the post production on this image.

(Quinton, Wendy, Doug, Kasey, Nikolina, Me, Donna, Rachel - only a few of the dedicated bunch who made 'Dispossession' possible!)

Which brings us full circle. Back to the print lab. I’m still here, in my third coffee shop today, blogging this verbose retrospective. The proofs for my print will be ready to view tomorrow, and the mounting material, aluminum, has been ordered. It’ll then take the better part of the remaining 1.5 weeks before the show to print, laminate, mount, and transport (Does your car have room to move a 9.5 foot piece of handle-with-extreme-care metal from Vancouver to Burnaby? Mine doesn’t) the photo by September 9, in time to be installed for the September 10 Opening Party.

Hope you can make it out to see it!

Whew.

DISPOSSESSION PART 4 of 5: A COMMUNITY (AND THE RCMP) RESPONDS! - Reflecting on the creative process of my photograph for Kizuna

At this point, time was not on my side but I’ve never been one to give up a project I believe in. It could be done. It would be done, one way or another. Call me foolishly ambitious. Two things I had going for me: 1. I wasn’t a stranger to the neighbourhood – I had become fairly well connected to the Downtown Eastside and Japanese Canadian communities in the past three years. 2. the Powell Street Festival was days away – surely I could find a “Japanese-looking family” to appear as “ghosts” in the photograph there! The response was initially slow but then it seemed like overnight I had cast the roles of the ghosts and the three present day community representatives. Doug Masuhara, Derek & Sayaka Iwanaka, Kasey Ryne Mazak, Donna Nakamoto, Ty Evans, Sahali Lee Tsang, Tyler Win, Kaylen Win, Sid Chow Tan, Donna Gilkes, Robert Bonner, Wendy Charbonneau… Cast – check!

(Donna, Sayaka, Derek, and Rempel - Rempel styled Donna and Sayaka's hair for the shoot)

The other, very important person I needed to recruit was a Stylist to create the wardrobe for the ghosts. Authenticity was key, so I needed someone who I believed could do the job. Fortunately, my roommate Nikolina Suric is in the biz. She had just finished heading up the costuming department on a TV pilot and was available and interested. Unfortunately, her wardrobe at Capilano University wasn’t accessible until the fall so she would have to purchase and/or make all of the costumes for the shoot, cutting deeper into my production budget. The most difficult costume to find wasn’t a costume at all – we needed a 1942-era RCMP uniform like the one that appears in the JCNM’s photo, leading the families along the tracks.

(Photographing Ty in the elusive RCMP costume. Ty was the first person I cast and the last costume we found.)

I contacted my MP, Libby Davies, for help and they sent me to a local RCMP office. I wrote a letter explaining the project and the context in which the uniform would be used – and then waited… with no response (and still have not received one). In the meantime, just less than a week before the shoot, Nikolina found us the real thing at a movie service company, with King’s Crown badges, brown surge, striped jodhpurs, belt, cross strap, hat - everything! The only problem was – as we discovered after battling Port Moody Bridge construction traffic between Vancouver and Aldergrove - they wouldn’t rent it to us until we had written permission from the RCMP Intellectual Property Office in Ottawa! And there were only 3 days left until the shoot! (The RCMP uniform is trademarked you see, and after some abuse of these rights by commercial clients (and I’m told some Olympic clients), the RCMP was coming down hard on anyone with access to RCMP marks.) I sent all of my correspondence to Ottawa and begged for their permission! To my surprise they were extremely responsive – I was shocked when the Sergeant in charge actually answered his phone on the first ring! But, as I learned after two days of back and forth, their response was no. Permission needed approval from some higher-ups. I lost faith but wrote one more email trying to explain my case further – even if they did approve, there was no way I would get their approval in time for the shoot. An hour later, an email arrived while I was wondering what I would do. It was a yes! They had given me permission to use it for Kizuna! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I happily camped my butt in bumper to bumper traffic on the trip to Aldergrove to get the uniform. Costumes - check!

(An early test shot from location scouting - note the crane is to the EAST of Woodwards - it's a luxury condo development. There is also a trendy new cafe at street level in the building directly to the left of the crane.)

Where to shoot it? Powell Street? Gentrification is marching east but it hadn’t reached Japantown quite yet (it probably will). I needed a place that demonstrated the real-estate steamroller effect on the Downtown Eastside community. The Woodward’s development was an obvious choice but I needed to check some facts first. I met with some community leaders I knew and began to do some fact checking. Woodward’s was ‘ground zero’ for the Woodsquat of 2002, where promises were made that eventually led to the end of the squat. While the community was invited to the table for extensive brainstorming of how the space would look and benefit the Downtown Eastside (most of which was ignored), and while some low income housing was included (75 family units, 125 single person units), the development of commercial and common spaces and over 500 market-rate condominiums (which sold out in hours at an average of $380,000), has proven also to be a vehicle for middle class outsiders, corporate tenants, and real-estate speculators to displace the poor. Today, Woodward’s is seen by Downtown Eastsiders as a literal reminder (two condo towers cast large shadows over the neighbourhood) and an iconic green light for gentrification east of Main. My choice for the location subtly shows the Woodwards building in the background, to the west (left), with community people (and the ghosts) symbolically walking away from it, eastward (right) – the direction which they are actually being displaced, and the direction that Japanese Canadians were also forced to move, 68 years ago. Location 1 of 3 – Check.

(My early concept photograph for 'Dispossession' that decided the march would be "Ghosts" from the past. I also decided to place Woodward's more subtly in the background.)

Initially my plan was that the Japanese Canadians would not appear as ghosts at all – they would be marching in the flesh, in costume right down Hastings with the present day neighbourhood people. That was the way it was going to be - until one day I pieced together a concept photo from my Hastings test shoot and the JCNM original. When I dropped these figures into the background, the idea for ghosts was decided. In addition to the symbolic meaning of something from the past, this approach would solve a number of other logistical and technical issues I was struggling with. I didn’t think I would have an authentic 1942 RCMP uniform and I didn’t know how authentic the other costumes would be (all were quite authentic in the end). I also fretted over the nightmare of arranging 10-15 people to hit their marks simultaneously, not to mention drawing a crowd of passers-by, and perhaps the Vancouver Police Department. On my budget, coordinating this safely and effectively was a major risk. But if I did ghosts… that brings us to location #2: the Greenscreen Shoot. This was easy. On my third call looking for a space, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House offered both to manage traffic at the Day 1 Hastings shoot AND open up their space (AND provide healthy snacks!) for my makeshift greenscreen studio for the Day 2 Shoot. Location 2 of 3 – Check.

(Kaylen and Tyler melting under the lights. It was a very hot day in very warm clothes under very hot lights.)

The third location was the one I was less sure of. Somehow I needed to represent the first, and largest dispossession – that of the Coast Salish First Nations. I initially thought about including old-growth trees in the photo but my second choice was to place First Nations art strategically in the photo. But all of my calls to First Nations artists (Musqueam and Squamish I tried) were coming up empty. Trees it would be. Where are there trees that could represent those that once stood in the area now known as the Downtown Eastside? Stanley Park. Off I went. Location 3 of 3 – Check.

(Wendy Charbonneau, a Squamish Junior Elder, in her regalia. She wore jewelry that was 900 years old!!)

But were trees enough? The main contacts for First Nations leaders were away on vacation. Robert Bonner is Cree, and represents today’s aboriginal population in the Hastings scene, but Cree is not a First Nation of this area. Then, two days before the Greenscreen Shoot, Gary Johnston of the Native Education College returned my call to let me know his sister, Wendy Charbonneau, a Squamish Junior Elder, would be happy to appear in the photograph in full regalia. Wendy was the last piece in this complex puzzle of pre-production.

So three distinct and related communities had responded and were ready to go. Costumes were ready, locations selected. Then came the (relatively) easy part. Actually taking the photograph(s)…

DISPOSSESSION PART 3 of 5: THE IDEA - Reflecting on the creative process of my photograph for Kizuna

(My brother, Dr. Jeff Masuda, at the Vancouver Archives while we were researching the location of our grandparent's confectionery store)

The idea for this photograph was not mine. It was my brother’s. My brother, Dr. Jeff Masuda is a professor of human geography at the University of Manitoba now, but three years ago, we both coincidentally ended up moving to Vancouver within a month of each other.

He was doing a post-doc at UBC, researching the effect of environment on health, specifically in the inner city of Toronto, and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. He brought me onto his project to teach his subjects how to take better photos with disposable cameras. That was my first real exposure to the Downtown Eastside. Another thing we both had in common was our family of course – in the 1920’s our grandparents worked in the confectionery store in New World Hotel across from Oppenheimer Park, right in the heart of Japantown, the Downtown Eastside. My Dad’s family joked that they had to quit that business because the kids were eating all of their profits. The family moved to Shawnigan Lake in the 1930’s where my Dad was born in 1941. In 1942 they were forced to move again, and they chose the Alberta sugar beet fields over internment camps, in order to keep the family from being split 3 ways.

Last year I produced a documentary film about a research project that my brother was supervising and it did fairly well, considering it was my first film. Jeff then suggested a topic for another film we would collaborate on, this time about the history of dispossessed communities in the area of the Downtown Eastside… First Nations, the Japanese Canadians, and the present-day Downtown Eastside.

In the meantime, I had been doing some volunteer work with the JCNM, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House, the Powell Street Festival Society, and PIVOT Legal’s Hope In Shadows. In one project for SPARC BC I was lucky to find myself working with Rika Uto, Donna Nakamoto, and Scott Graham. It was there that I also met Lily Shinde who is on the Human Rights Committee of the Japanese Canadian Citizen’s Association - she and I spoke at length about the importance of remembering the internment, and frankly, until that conversation, I hadn’t thought a lot about it. She inspired me to always remember and to think critically about that period in our history. I filed our conversation near the front of my mind to come back to later…

(Lily Shinde and I at the Greenscreen shoot. Lily is my official community consultant for Kizuna, and a new friend!)

In parallel with Kizuna, I began to do some research at the JCNM for this film. The first photograph I looked at in the collection struck me – the conversation with Lily surfaced - and I began to research more. My brother was visiting from Manitoba for this summer’s Powell Street Festival and I arranged a meeting with him, Lily and myself.

(The photograph from the JCNM collection that inspired me.)

I proposed the idea for the photograph – and they were both enthusiastically on board. That was the green light I needed - I merged my research for the film and the Kizuna photograph and began to plan my August – this was an ambitious photograph - with only one month until the Kizuna show could this possibly be completed in time?

DISPOSSESSION PART 2 of 5: A NEW APPROACH - Reflecting on the creative process of my photograph for Kizuna

I delivered the file to the lab… I should mention that this is no Costco/Superstore/London Drugs lab we’re talking about - this is a pro lab that caters to high end fine art and commercial jobs where they produce prints for some of the most famous photographers in the world… and it’s just a little intimidating when they open your file and ask immediately – “would you like that corrected?” Indeed, and this brings me to my verbosity about one of my inspirations behind the approach I took in the creation of this photo.

Not so long ago, I left the comfort and security of a well-paying glass tower office career to go to film school. Excuse me? Pardon? You did what? Long story short, besides the financial sacrifices that this decision brought, it was a very good one for my soul’s sake. A few months from graduating I was hired onto a documentary production called Vancouver Rising (airs this fall on Bravo and Knowledge), which tells the story of Vancouver’s world famous fine art photographers the likes of Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace, Christos Dikeakos and others.

(Dead Troops Talk - Jeff Wall. An outdoor scene is reconstructed in studio with actors and digital post production)

This job was a dream come true, but I just didn’t know it then. At the time fine art photography was pretty foreign to me and talking about fine art photography went right over my head. All of my work for previous decade had been Cartier-Bresson/documentary/decisive moment inspired, and it was this approach I assumed I would be taking or my Kizuna assignment. As I witnessed these photographers at work, listened to their interviews, attended their exhibitions with them, and was even offered a job on one of their productions (which I had to turn down not once but twice!! Due to prior commitments. Arrrgh!), I began to appreciate their approach. Rather than being the observer in the moment, with a camera in hand, most of their work was pre-visualized, planned, then shot and constructed meticulously over a period of months, sometimes years – for one photograph. It was a film production-like approach in many ways with extensive pre-production and post-production stages. The shooting itself occupies a relatively short amount of time (assuming it’s well-planned and goes smoothly).

(Gastown Riot - Stan Douglas. You can see the real thing in the atrium of the Woodward's building. The scene was recreated, including the buildings, at location outside of Vancouver)

May I bring to your attention the Stan Douglas photo of the Gastown Riots in the atrium of the Woodward’s building as an example (if you can’t find it, just look up). You can also view the work of any of these photographers at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Anyhow, as my idea for my subject finally began to gel only 10 months after being commissioned by the JCNM (with only one month remaining to do it!) it was this meticulously planned and constructed approach in creating a single image that I chose. Next… the idea.

DISPOSSESSION PART 1 of 5: EXERCISING MY INNER GEEK – Reflecting on the creative process of my photograph for Kizuna

It’s been almost a year since Beth Carter of the Japanese Canadian National Museum called me to ask if I would be interested in being a part of this show. Now, as I sit in a Café sipping a coffee, typing on my laptop, waiting for the lab to open so I can deliver my final file to be printed, I finally have a moment to reflect, and contribute to the blog. I’m sorry for not making more contributions – indeed I do enjoy writing but knowing from the experience of having my own blog, intentions and actuals do not always jive – blogging can be a lot of work!

The last week and a day has been superbly, crazily hectic. The actual shoot for this photograph occurred over three days, with several days before that going out for location scouting, test shooting and experimenting. When I wasn’t on a shoot I’ve been hunched over my computer 12-18 hours per day clicking and tapping, blending and masking. I definitely pushed the limits of my ability in this photo not to mention the limits of my equipment – in every way, this is my most ambitious and complex piece ever. I squeezed every pixel out of my 22 megapixel camera (the final photograph’s native resolution is a gnat’s breath over 200 megapixels – well how do you get a 200 Megapixel photo from a 22 Megapixel camera you ask? That’s no big secret but if you want to know you’ll have to come to show and ask me!). That file, at its largest, was pushing 8 Gigabytes (yes that’s 8 Gigabytes with a capital G) and brought my nearly-new i7 Mac to a crawl – THAT has never happened before. Whew. Okay, well thank you for letting me express my inner geek… now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you all of this was cake compared to the real work that happened BEFORE the last week and day, before any of the shooting began… in my next post.

Thank you to our wonderful supporters!

Thank you to our funders for their generous support: Canada Council for the Arts - Conseil des Arts du Canada; National Association of Japanese Canadians; City of Burnaby; Burnaby Arts Council and National Nikkei Museum & Heritage Centre.

My recent path

I have taken a bit of a winding road to arrive at the piece I am making for Kizuna so it seems appropriate that the piece itself will be in the form of a path. But let me start at the beginning.

My work tends to revolve around clothing and how clothing can be interpreted or reformatted, so when I started looking at the collection at JCNM, I was naturally drawn to textiles, clothing, and wearables. My first inclination was to start thinking about patterns in both the literal and metaphoric sense. I was looking at patterns woven into textiles and sewing patterns for example, but i was also interested in the kinds of social patterns that I could see emerging.

When I came across Mary Ohara's display upstairs, I felt an immediate connection to her life. For one thing, we had the same pin cushion. Now, I know this pin cushion is fairly common and it is just a small thing but there were a lot of little things like this that were small but somehow meaningful. I found out later that when she and her sister went back to Japan after WWll, they supported themselves by making western style clothes out of old kimonos that people would bring to them since fabric was so scarce. Mary was the designer and her sister was the seamstress. I felt an affinity to this industriousness since not only do I make a living designing and making clothes but I am also almost finished a one year long project for which I have been wearing only things that i have made myself, everything from shoes to clothing to accessories. I think the connection between Mary's situation at that time and my self-imposed situation has something to do with the immediacy and the necessity of making garments, while still trying to maintain an element of style.

When I finally met Mary we discovered so many other parallels and common interests in our lives. She was very willing to tell me so many things about her life. The most important thing that I learned from our meeting was that everyone has a story and even though our paths are different, they share so many points of intersection. These personal histories are the starting point for my piece.

The work I am making for Kizuna will be a path made from rocks and stones that I have collected and then covered in clothing. The rocks have been collected from all over - my hometown, around my studio here in Vancouver, my sister's home, Gambier island where my boyfriend's family has a cabin, Burnaby where Mary lives and many other places. The clothes and fabric have also been collected from a wide variety of places. In essence I am collecting histories, both my own and shared to make a path that is specific to me but common to many other people in my life. Anyone who walks along the path will briefly intersect and thus become a part of this collective story.

The piece is both an homage to Mary's sometimes difficult but always colourful life and a personal walk through my own past.

Natalie Purschwitz

Mary Ohara in her home in Burnaby

Glass in production

For her exhibit, Miyuki has produced 24 glass jars of different sizes, each topped with a hand blown glass float. Each jar will be filled with items that represent the stories shared by Miki-san - either from her collection or from the museum collection.

Miyuki recently sent this series of photographs from her studio, showing the production of these beautiful glass jars and the large painting that she has produced.

Some of Miyuki's glass is now on sale in the JCNM shop!

Pathways

I'm super excited with the progress being made by all four artists. Natalie came for a visit last week and she has a wonderful plan to build a path through the gallery of fabric covered stones - each piece is embedded with symbolism and ideas - but you'll have to come to the exhibit to get the full picture. Here is a sneak peek!

Many Meetings

Yesterday my aunt Shizu, uncle Ron and I went down to the Japanese Canadian National Museum to peruse the archives, and to speak with Beth Carter, the director. The visit was brief but productive: we had the opportunity to see the "special room" that the sound installation will be housed in, and we began looking through some of the items that are going to serve as inspiration for our contribution to the Kizuna exhibit: mostly photographs and Hanafuda playing cards (such beautiful cards!), but this will expand when I have a chance to have a proper sit-down with the archives next week.

Equally important were two longer sessions today, one with composer Yota Kobayashi, in which the details of the sound installation were more firmly fleshed out. Immediately following this was another get-together with my aunt and uncle: we went through old photo albums that belonged to my grandfather. Grandpa was an avid (if eccentric) photographer, and much of our recent family history has been well-documented thanks to this passion of his. Interestingly, towards the end of his life Grandpa reorganized his photos (of which there are literally thousands) into a seemingly random order (which I'm sure made perfect sense to him), so these albums no longer have any discernible chronological flow. Enter my aunt, whose formidable understanding of the Hayashi family tree could decipher any of my grandfather's anachronisms.

Some of the photos were incredibly old -- at least one (pictured above, of my great, great grandfather and mother) dates from the end of the 19th century. But my mission was to find pictures that spoke of the Seasons: these photos will compliment Yota Kobayashi's sound installation: a new, "Japanese" Four Seasons (see my previous post for a more eloquent explanation). I believe in this regard, we're off to a most promising start: photos abound of season-specific events, such as Christmas and Halloween, but also of more traditional festivals, like Koinobori (Carp Streamer Day), Hinamatsuri (Girls Day), and Shogatsu (Japanese New Years).