Orkney Futures: a handbook

A small piece by me is included in the recently published  ’Orkney Futures: a handbook‘:

A new collection describing what may lie ahead for Orkney. From Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney to Orkney poet Robert Rendall, OIC Convenor Stephen Hagan to Orcadian, Big Brother celebrity Cameron Stout, 49 views of the future to inspire and encourage.

‘Orkney Futures… is a handbook like no other. For a small book, it tackles ambitious themes.’ Ron Ferguson

‘Such books, or public-actions, bridge art and social thinking – a gentler and therefore more penetrating form of thinking seems to emerge, when we look to the future in this designated non-designated space…’ Alec Finlay

Thanks to editors Alistair Peebles & Laura Watts for the honor of including me in this work.

Today, flu-bound and bored, feeling sorry for myself and full of the blahs, I started trawling for this other me. I found one comment on the APUG forum which stated that I no longer make platinum-palladium prints. And another that was both complimentary and expressed another commentator’s ire about my work.

I manifest here as me. And my work.

References made during the talk:

“The truth that matters to people is not factual truth but moral truth; not a narrative that tells what happened but a narrative that explains why it happened and who is responsible… The idea that reconciliation depends on shared truth about the past is possible. But truth is related to identity. What you believe to be true depends, in some measure on who you believe yourself to be. And who you believe yourself to be is mostly defined in terms of who you are not.” - Michael Ignatieff, reprint from “Articles of Faith” published in the May, 1996 issue of the Index on Censorship [I think this quote is at the heart of a rather tragic and heated argument between Ignatieff and other Human Rights academics - read more on this]

“The artist is like a tree – he knows how to find his way in this bewildering world, well enough to bring some order into the stream of impressions and experiences impinging on him. This orientation among the phenomena of nature and human life, this order in all its ramifications, that is like the root part of our tree. From there the artist – who is the trunk part of the tree – receives the sap that flows through him and through his eye.
Under pressure of this mighty flow, he transmits what he has seen to his work. His work then, is like the crown of the tree, spreading in time and space for all to see.”- Paul Klee, Jena Lecture, 1924. 

“I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ — each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.” - Isiah Berlin, ‘The First and the Last’, New York review of Books, 14 May 1988

“The message is not one of simple pessimism. We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.” - John Glover, “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,”

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.” - from an interview with Steve Johnson by David Sims and Rael Dornfest, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference  – 2/22/2002

Madame Yolande Lafontant, Mr. Bossuet Sainvillus, Ms. Gillen Warn and Pere Fritz Lafontant meeting with Sewanee students for breakfast this morning
8:42 AM CST 

Sewanee students and community watching a live-cast of President Barack Obama being sworn in, 11:04 AM CST.

Today, within a space of two hours, I went from having breakfast with Pere Fritz Lafontant, director of Zanmi Lasante, Haiti…. to watching Barack Obama being sworn in as the 44th president of the U.S.A. Two people who inspire hope. The former has already made that hope manifest by transforming thousands of lives. The latter carries the best wishes of millions towards fulfilling his (and our) aspirations. My wish for the day – that Pere Lafontant gets to spend a day with Barack Obama. 

“There is no such thing as a miserable situation – only a situation that is miserably accepted” – Pere Fritz Lafontant

This is the citation I wrote for (Dr.) Pere Fritz Lafontant’s honorary doctorate, which was bestowed upon him by Sewanee: 

For over forty-five years, Father Fritz Lafontant and his wife, Yolande, have worked in Haiti, bringing attention to the plight of those displaced by an ill-considered hydro-electric project, Father Lafontant has created long-term solutions to environmental degradation, malnutrition, infectious disease and mortality. 

Despite being faced with infant and child mortality rates of over 25% in 1962, he and Yolande established a school in Cange. From there, Father Lafontant’s vision for a healthier, better educated and environmentally harmonious community began to become a reality. Working with local and US partners, he guided Dr. Paul Farmer in 1982 to form an organization that is now famously known as Partners in Health, or Zanmi Lasante. Today, under the directorship of Father Lafontant, Zanmi Lasante provides care for up to a million people, and has a maternal health and pediatric program, a state-of-the-art STD clinic, and a tuberculosis and infectious disease center. This institution teaches local residents to become midwives, nurses, health workers and counselors. The work of Zanmi Lasante includes building schools, homes and communal water systems and providing employment for area residents.

Father Lafontant’s influence has extended across the world, and we are fortunate to have been touched by it on this mountain of ours. For his ability to preserve and sustain life and the environment, for his generosity of spirit, his selflessness and his vision, and for helping the University’s mission, as students travel from this mountain to the mountains of Cange, the University is honored to bestow upon Father Fritz Lafontant the degree of Doctor of Religion, honoris causa.

Pere Fritz Lafontant. Haiti, 2007. From the series ‘Looking at God‘
22×22 inches. Archival pigment print 

Been a bit quiet on the blog and site – just dealing with the busy-ness of a new semester, and this historic week. Along with big MLK celebrations, tomorrow, Sewanee is giving an honorary degree to one of my heroes, Pere Fritz Lafontant, director of Zanmi Lasante in Cange, Haiti. And then there is Tuesday…

Imogen Cunningham: Magnolia Blossom, 1926

Imogen Cunningham’s work, along with Bernice Abbott’s , is showing at Lumiere Gallery in Atlanta. A must see.

Expiration II – from series ‘Campsite for the Non-Citizen‘
Archival pigment print, 32 x 24 inches from 11×14 negative

Some of my work, including the image above, is on show for a few more days at the Royal Scottish Academy. It is part of the ‘Kaleidoscope‘ exhibition, which “showcases a selection of seventy of the finest photographs and prints acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland over the past few years, through purchase, gift and bequest.

The works on show range in period from the Italian Renaissance to contemporary Scotland. They are arranged both to reveal some striking contrasts, and highlight the extraordinary diversity of these acquisitions.” Please send me a photo of the install if you happen to visit!

going

2008