Shoot what you know.

I’ve been photographing my roller derby league.

I began preparing to try out to play roller derby last summer, and started training officially in the fall. I was “teamed” this past spring and now skate for New Hampshire Roller Derby — one of the best and most exciting things to happen to me in a long time.  Even though I typically document everything around me, I spent the majority of that time so focused on training, trying out, and “making it” (plus carrying around a gym bag full of skates, helmet and other protective gear — no safe place for a camera), that I didn’t take a single photo of derby until recently when I began covering the bouts for other teams in my league. I’m no sports photographer, so this was something really new to me — a very different way of shooting. But among the action and promo shots of athletic ability I’ve started to come across images that are turning into something else entirely — bodies in awkward positions on the track, my teammates with their children, facial expressions mid-fall, etc. When I first began training I had a hard time explaining to others what an intense and serious process it was to play this sport. Derby women are a dedicated, passionate, and possibly masochistic bunch. I’ve finally started being able to tell these stories through images. It’s just the beginning, but it makes me happy to realize it’s happening.

I like a slow start to any project. I like them to develop out of my passions, curiosities, experiences, interests… I’m not the kind of photographer who steps back very far to just observe. I tend to get involved, unapologetically. I like when a subject pops far enough info my life that I catch myself lingering longer on those particular photos, and start making more just to see what they do together. Unfortunately the necessities of making a living and paying bills work counter to this process. It seems like I’ve come to this a bit late, but for me, the sudden realization that I’ve found my new subject (which I’m already enmeshed in) seems completely fair. If I’d forced it before now, I probably wouldn’t have been telling the right story.

Documentary group show at DSI

I have one image in a group show right now at the gallery at Digital Silver Imaging in Belmont, MA, called VRW: Through Their Eyes (more info on the Griffin Museum’s website). The show was curated by Paula Tognarelli of the Griffin Museum and is a mix of work produced in the Visual Reportage workshops run by Michael Hintlian and Glen Cooper. My print is an image from my series This Family of La Antigua.

I’ll be at the opening reception this Thursday night, April 7, and am looking forward to seeing the other photographers in the show (some who I went to Guatemala with) and talking with others. I’m also curious to see the prints in the show, all of which were made by Digital Silver Imaging — they printed our digital files as silver gelatin prints on fiber-based paper. As someone who shoots both film and digitally (and who generally always makes my own prints), it’s really interesting to see my work printed in this way.

Check out the artist statement here.

Visual Reportage Retrospective

Come out if you can on Thursday to see the opening of Visual Reportage’s retrospective from the last few years. There are over 100 photos from over 20 photographers, and the opening will have food and drinks plus most of the photographers present, including myself. I’m also gallery-sitting on Friday, the 22nd from 6-8pm, so feel free to come by then as well!

Group show

I’m going to have 5 photos in a massive group show at the Gallery at the Piano Factory this month. Visual Reportage, the organization run by Glen Cooper and Michael Hintlian that holds documentary photo workshops in various locations in the world, is having a retrospective from the last few years. I went to Guatemala with them in 2008, and a few of my images from This Family of La Antigua will be shown along with the work of 20+ other photographers (and 100+ photos).

The opening event will be on Thursday, October 14th at 7pm. Most of the photographers will be present, myself included. It’ll be BIG! I’m looking forward to it.

Featured on Lenscratch

As you might have noticed, I’ve taken another hiatus from posting here. In my day job I work in the admissions department at a photography school and right now we’re in major crunch time as the latest incoming class enrolls. I’ve been working late nearly every day for the last couple months and last week I even lost my voice a few different times from all the talking I’ve had to do. In October I’ll be able to get back to writing and also keeping up with all my favorite blogs. Most importantly I’ll have some free time again to shoot new stuff that’s on hold, since my personal work has suffered a bit while I’ve been unable to make enough time for it.

Here’s a teaser from one recent project, which I’ve been reluctant to show anyone yet since I consider it a long-term project and it still feels very immature. This is from Route 1 near Salisbury, MA.

In the good news category, my work was featured on Lenscratch back on September 10th. I think Aline Smithson is fantastic and I enjoy her blog so, so much. She features an excellent variety of photography with such generous emphasis on the work, and without regurgitating the same themes and highlights that other blogs seem to go in circles around. Really, if I could only read a handful of blogs, Lenscratch would definitely be one, because among many other reasons (which include enabling my laziness in having to personally scour the world for great work to see), her choices of features are just so very thoughtful. She also recently featured Greg Miller, whose large format portraits I’ve been swooning over lately.

OK, enough gushing. I’m excited that she included my series Twist of Fate, which nobody has ever featured or really taken much notice to before.

Although I’ve been incredibly busy with the day job, I have been reading a lot (it’s what I do daily on public transportation) and something recently brought me back to my years of photo-theory-nerdness. Hopefully I’ll have some more in-depth posts for you soon after I untangle my overly-excited brain.

PS. Caleb’s show at Gallery Kayafas is fantastic and I can’t think of a more thought-provoking and interesting pairing than with Rania Matar’s new work. Go see it.

Working it out.

Well, we have clearly been busy around here and not blogging! It happens.

I was promoted at my day job and have taken on a bit of extra work for a while. No complaints though — I feel lucky that when I’m not making photos I get to work at a photography school I really love and believe in, and be around other photographers all day. I’m currently the Director of Admissions and Recruitment Coordinator at NESOP. I get to talk with future photogs every day about how they can actually make their dream come true. It’s exciting! This has been taking up a lot of my time but I did just begin a new personal project which I hope to work on for the long haul. It’s a little slow-going for now since it involves traveling to another state, and as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I am car-less. More on that later.

Recently I (finally – everyone else is doing it) made a Facebook page for my work. So now you can “like” me, if you’re into that kind of thing. And I did something I almost never, ever do. I took a self-portrait.

There’s a moth in my whiskey, © Steph Plourde-Simard

My first grant and a short update

I am so honored and psyched to have received my first grant award to help me fund a project. I was nominated and recommended for the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award by another artist I’ve worked for over the last 2 years. I found out last week that I am one of the recipients of the $2,500 award. So here’s a big THANK YOU to my friend/employer/colleague who nominated me, and to the St. Botolph Club and judges! I’m really excited that this will help me get rid of some of the financial barriers to making more of my work. I can’t wait to get started and I’m already preparing.

In other news, I’ve been working a lot at my day jobs. While nearly everything I do is in the field  — I work at the New England School of Photography (NESOP) and for some other artists/photographers — and I enjoy it all, it’s been difficult to make time to continue my own work. I spend time on it regularly, but it often gets overshadowed and postponed by the other work that pays the bills, or I run into this problem where I find plenty of time to shoot but not nearly enough time to really examine what I’ve done, edit, print, etc. This is changing though, as of this week. Maybe it’s the season change, maybe it’s the encouragement and relief that comes from receiving a grant, or maybe it was attending the NESOP class of 2010′s graduation this weekend and feeling re-inspired after being in that position just 2 short years ago. Either way, good things are in the works for me. I hope to have better updates soon.

Getting out

“When a child picks up a camera and pushes the button that simple spontaneous image is a Street Photograph, it is, first of all, a raw reaction to the scene in front of it, a person, a car, a color. That primitive urge to react, to make a picture is at the heart of Street Photography beyond any other area of picture making, it comes before any other agenda.” – Nick Turpin

Thanks to la pura vida for the quote.

One major challenge I’ve been working on lately is getting out of my own head. I am  over-educated and I tend to both over-think and over-explain in many areas of my life. I need to detach myself from all theory right now — my own and that of others. Recently I’ve been doing a lot more wandering than usual, trying out my “Henry Wessel approach” (basically, if it catches my eye for a split second, I shoot it). I’m working to trust that my own vision and reactions are informed by many things, and then to forget those things every time I pick up my camera. There is almost nothing more exciting to me these days than the incredibly random stuff coming out of my camera.

Sometimes I miss being the 8-year-old with the hand-me-down Kodak Pocket Instamatic and no skill.

Grants

I’ve been nominated for the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Emerging Photographers grant. This is fantastic because a) I’m obviously honored, and b) I’ve recently switched gears from submitting work to publications and shows, to focusing on grants instead.

I’ve reached a point where I’m anxious about making new work. I am currently making new work — all kinds. But since I’m a long-term project kind of photographer, I haven’t produced a new completed portfolio in quite a while, even though I shoot every week. This means I haven’t had a reason to put new work on my website or have additional meetings with curators to show them what I’ve done since the last time. I’ve decided to focus lately just on creating. Of course I love shooting and editing new stuff better than any other part of what I do, so I’m in a great space and I’m excited about what I’m doing.

But this definitely means that grants are on the top of my list right now, over any other form of submissions. I need to remove some financial blockades from making and having time to edit some of this new work. I also need to remind myself once in a while when I see others around me constantly pound out new series after series, that I have to judge my work based on my own abilities, and that some people have the means to create all the time while others don’t. It’s OK that I work full-time in addition to making my own photography. I accept that every process is going to be slow, from finding the time to finish a project to having the space to really think about and complete an edit. This actually works out well for me right now, since I’m a big believer that the more time I spend with or sit on my images, the stronger my finished projects will be.

Covering Photography

I’ve recently been introduced to Covering Photography, a project by Karl Baden that catalogs book covers that are based on, ripped off of, or heavily influenced by famous photographs. It’s fascinating and I can’t stop looking through it.

While this site focuses specifically on book publishing, I think it’s a great entry into a larger discussion of imagery, mainly how we consume and re-consume it, how socially we’ve grown to think so similarly about general ideas, how we cling on to certain single photographs because in some way they speak to so many or are assumed to represent so much, and the idea that most everything creative has already been done before. In fact, I did a little research before writing this to see who it was who said that everything has already been created, and it turns out about 5 different famous people or artists have said it. Well… case and point. Even the idea that everything’s already been done has been done over and over.

Regarding the project’s website itself, it’s fantastic and really well put together. You can search the collection by book designer, photographer, publisher, author, etc. I literally could do this for hours, mostly amusing myself with the variety of seemingly irrelevant book topics the photos have been interpreted to represent or sell.

You can read a bit more about Covering Photography and Baden’s work on it in the article Because I Said So by Nicholas A. Basbanes.

OK fine, I’ll show you some newer stuff.

I have to think of everything

It’s one thing to comment to someone that they have “quite a name”. It’s another thing to suggest entirely that they shorten or abbreviate their email address, domain name, blog or Twitter handle, business name, etc, so people will remember it easier. To those who have suggested this to me — and there have been surprisingly more than I ever imagined — I have this to say:

I made my web domain and email address out to be my name specifically so people would be forced to learn how to spell it. Yes, I took business classes. We talked all about this in class. I know a thing or two about marketing. I know being easy to find is key. But being found easily online and then having to explain my name later basically just pushes that part to a later time. It still usually comes up. I think a bit of easy and proactive education on my part is pretty worth it. It’s not even a hard name, it’s just French. If you can say h’or d’oeuvres then you can say Plourde-Simard. Which phonetically only has a two letter difference from the actual spelling (plord si-mard).

So I understand fully well that I may “lose a few” viewers who can’t manage to find my website (pretty doubtful considering if you know who I am in the first place then you can probably just copy & paste or click something). But on the plus side, I have never had anyone spell my name wrong for a show announcement or anything else I’ve participated in. People who know how to spell my last name without asking are usually people I’ve communicated with electronically. That’s great! I can’t say it’s 100% because I force people to learn my name in order to reach me, but that little bit of training definitely can’t hurt, right? So yes, I am absolutely considering all of this when I make you exhaustingly type out stephplourdesimard dot com. I’m educating you. That’s the whole idea.

And now, a relevant story: this is one of my favorite family photos. When my innovative carpenter great-grandfather Adolphe Plourde of Lewiston, Maine, couldn’t afford the land to build a summer camp on nearby Sebago Lake, he built one on a dock and set it afloat. Genius!

Cyanotype workshop with Jesseca Ferguson

I’ve happily worked as a studio assistant for Jesseca Ferguson for almost two years now. She’s fantastic, incredibly knowledgeable, and a great teacher. The Griffin Museum is holding a Cyanotype demonstration in Jesseca’s studio, which you definitely want to see. Details are below. Sign up!

Cyanotype Demonstration and Studio Visit
with Jesseca Ferguson
Fort Point Studios, Boston

As photography becomes increasingly digital, many photographers are turning to techniques and processes from the dawn of the medium to reinvent their image making. Jesseca Ferguson has been working with so-called “antiquarian” photo processes since 1990. In this demonstration, Ferguson prints images from her large format pinhole negatives on artists’ paper using cyanotype, an iron-based, hand-applied photo process invented in 1842. Handouts provide further information for those photographers interested in pursing cyanotype on their own.

Ferguson’s pinhole photographs and collaged “photo objects” have been exhibited in the United States and Europe and are in a number of public collections, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark; and Muzeum Historii Fotografii in Poland. Ferguson teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The workshop is limited to 10 people. Fee is $30
The address of the studio will be sent with enrollment. Please RSVP to the Griffin, 781-729-1158.