Why you should sell your camera
Some thoughts on mentorship
Before you read a few of my thoughts on mentorship down below, I have a small request: would you please share this time sensitive event information with your book-loving friends in/around Toronto! A week from today the
is hosting a live podcast recording with celebrated Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue…And that’s not all: we’re making a movie based on one of her short stories!
This event will be a chance for us to share about that upcoming project, for the audience to hear all about Emma’s work (including her books-turned-films with big Hollywood stars like Florence Pugh and Brie Larson) AND hang out! Not a bad way to spent a couple of hours on a Sunday evening.
Co-hosted with the Canada Ireland Foundation at the Ontario Heritage Centre on June 8th. Hope to see you there!
Why you should sell your camera: Some thoughts on Mentorship
My father is an art lover. A minister and amateur photographer whose most recent book cover is a collage of his own pictures—a combination of four images he’s taken of a tree that stands near our family home in Prince Edward County. Dad took pictures of it in all four seasons and his publisher suggested combining them. Dead branches, orange leaves and green arms have all been collaged into one.
More than a decade ago, I used a photo of my own to help me tell a story. Part of my doctoral project was a collage compiled with items I had recovered from the youth detention centre where I taught in my early days as a teacher.
The image that anchors the bottom of my shadowbox frame isn’t beautiful. Dad’s tree is part of the natural world while an image of kids in jail is anything but. Yet I keep Dad’s book and my collage on the same shelf. They are both reminders to keep doing the work I guess. Sitting in conversation with each other, side by side.
On a recent trip to the AGO Dad,
and I spent time at a photography exhibition called “Recuerdo,” a curated selection of Latin American Photography. I was taken with the photos of Tina Modotti.
Placed next to her work was that of Manuel Alvarez Bravo. I loved their very different images of similar subject matter — laundry.
It turns out Modotti was Bravo’s mentor. They had traveled together, she modelling what would for him become a career shaped by her eye. Because of her activist work in Mexico Modotti was deported but managed to sell him her camera before she was forced to leave. The legacy of her mentorship lived on through her camera in his hands.
Mentorship is strangely amorphous. More easily defined (I teach a whole course on it!) but not so easily lived out. In my ongoing search for visual metaphors, I see their laundry images as relational bridges — connecting a mentor and mentee through the very mundane act of living. Laundry is part of the day to day. There’s nothing glamorous or life changing about its necessary act, but without the doing there would be consequences. That is perhaps one of the truest definitions of mentorship that I’ve found.
And looking beyond the content of the photographs, there’s the even bigger act of selling the camera. What does it mean to sell the camera in my own mentoring? I ask this as a mentor (both to younger loved ones and to collegial connections) and as a mentee myself. Making space for, and then getting out of the way of, someone else’s growth is mentoring in action. Maybe the photographs taken down the road won’t align as closely as Modetti’s and Bravo’s laundry images, but if the camera is being used with care in the hands of someone whose life you’ve touched, the work continues.
I’ve been mulling this post over for weeks. It’s been harder than usual to describe the link I see between the exhibit at the AGO and mentorship. It’s been a thought wasp buzzing about in my head for a while. Is there a mentoring metaphor that resonates for you?
