jan gates' photostream  

Please note that all images are ©. Please contact me if you would like to use one of my photographs.

Photo Blog: iliedowninthegrass.blogspot.com/

i once lived in Italy for part of each year for a long while ... in Firenze restoring paintings and frescoes and taking photographs ... now i live most all of my days in Canada ... in Vancouver ... where it seems i am working, always working, which is what happens when you spend too much time in Italy.

I began posting photographs on Flickr as a result of an archeological dig in my far too cluttered apartment filled with books and art and photographs in boxes ... it was an ongoing project scanning many of these photographs and sharing them here. And for me to actually relive the memories of the places i have been and many moments that i chose to commit to some sort of photographic memory in between ...

The photographs from the 1970s were shot using either an unpredictable Topcon, a Canon AV-1 (before it was stolen) and one of several Canon A-1 cameras.

Many of the photographs from travels and life in Italy were shot using my very faithful Canon EOS that could itself tell a few stories. Many of the B & W images were processed and developed by hand in the darkroom, either here in Canada or while living in Firenze.

Earlier digital photographs were shot using a Minolta Konica Dimage 7, a cheap used camera which had a voracious appetite for batteries. I've been having fun with my new Holga and Diana cameras, but truth be told, the Holga has my heart.

A few years ago, I received a wonderful birthday present of a Nikon D3000 from someone very dear to me, which was compact enough for carrying around day-to-day ... the camera has been a wonderful companion in my travels since then.

My training and background is in the visual arts and although I believe an understanding of the technical aspects of photography is essential -- there is also something magical in the possibilities of photography in seeing the world not so much as it is, but as we might wish it to be, in bending the rules, blurring the edges, and coloring outside of the lines. i see photography as being more soulful and slippery, than static and scientific.

my photographs are © Jan Gates

please contact me for permission if you wish to use any of my images.

"The photograph is always more than an image: it is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope." Giorgio Agamben in Profanations

"There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers." Andrei Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.
John Berger