A snapshot of our lives in St. Catharines

It has been awhile since I highlighted one of the downtown St. Catharines businesses or entities in this space, so tonight I will do just that with great pleasure.  It involves a project my far better half and I participated in about this time last year, and is organized by our creative neighbour, Sandy Middleton.

Sandy is a local artist and photographer who has had her work on display at several local venues, including City Hall and NAC, among others.  She also has a small photographic and art studio on James Street in the Odd Fellows Hall building.  Her photography in particular is exceptional:  last year she took some truly magnificent promotional pictures of our house and believe me, they prove not everyone can naturally take a great picture.

But on the subject of pictures, what do you do with yours?  If you are like most people today, you take countless pictures of far too many things and life events than you will ever need, and they either sit on your computer drive or mobile device until you delete them to make more space for...more pictures.

I recall several years ago talking to someone who had added several 1TB external hard drives to his system just to store all his photos.  Not everyone is that fanatical, thankfully, but generally speaking we do take a lot of pictures.

Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all took photographs too, but since they were on actual film you had to get developed, they tended to be a little more careful what they took pictures of.  Let's face it, so-called selfies are a product of the digital age and would be rare in previous generations.  I refuse to subscribe to the usefulness of selfies, by the way, and have yet to take even one.

Okay, so how does all this relate to my neighbour Sandy Middleton?  Sandy is also very aware of the disposable nature of digital images today, and wants to do something about it.  Specifically, she wants to continue the tradition of maintaining a photographic record of our current generation.

To that end, she began what she calls the St. Catharines Legacy Project last year, and on set days would take appointments at her James Street studio to take proper black and white photographs of people who live in the city, at no charge.  The idea is to create a photographic legacy of who lived here in St. Catharines during this 'digital' generation.

The inspiration, Sandy told us, came from American photographer Mike Disarmer, who essentially was a "community photographer" in 1920's Arkansas, recording the lives of those who lived there.  The originals are now worth a lot of money, and provide a glimpse of the history of the area unlike any other.  Sandy figured, "Why not here?"

Why not, indeed.

My wife and I had our photos taken about this time last year and it takes about fifteen to twenty minutes for the photo shoot, wherein you are photographed together and separately and in different poses.  Each person also fills out a survey explaining a little bit about themselves and their family history in the Garden City.

If you think to yourself, "Cool, now I can get this picture and post it to my Facebook page", sorry, that's not going to happen.  Sandy does not print them for the subjects she photographs; rather, she is content to record the lives of individuals in the city in photographs for the future, perhaps even producing an exhibit or book of the collection at some point.

But not now.  Now she just wants to create this legacy project on behalf of all of us who are content to take that quick pic with their phone and not think any more about it until they take another one, likely in a few minutes.

Sandy schedules several sessions a year at her downtown studio, and you can find out more about the project and scheduled photo shoots in the future by going to communityportraitslegacyproject.blogspot.ca.  She also plans to set up at several community events in the future, so you can find out more at her blog as well.

In the near future, Sandy will be taking part in the annual Open Late event at the St. Catharines Museum at the Lock 3 complex next Tuesday evening, August 11th.  The museum asks that you pre-register for the photo-shoot, and you can do that by calling 905-984-8880.

Just think about it:  our forebears were often not entirely comfortable having their picture taken, and often the results would be rather stiff and solemn.  Nowadays we think nothing about getting a picture of some life moment on the fly, and generally speaking people are not that uncomfortable with the notion of a picture anymore.

But have you considered having a picture taken that will stand the test of time, that people generations from now might look at and admire?  That's what this project is really all about:  creating a photographic record of our generation that otherwise might be forgotten, even with all those digital images we are busy taking with our mobile devices every day.

Thanks, Sandy, for doing this project and showing people the value of a great photograph.

Have a great weekend!

August 7th, 2015