Making Use...

RECAP: Positive Reception at Haverford College

On Tuesday evening, November 18, Haverford College hosted Ugandan writer Glaydah Namukasa at the Multi-Cultural Center and followed her reading with a reception for Positive: HIV/AIDS in Uganda, an exhibition of photographs by Jenna Mulhall-Brereton and myself.  My mom, representin', gamely traveled to Haverford with me.  We drove up 95 that day through the intermingling patches of dark, swirling snow showers and bright sunshine.  

This show marked the first time Jenna and I had ever seen each others work since we both shot film in Africa and brought it home to the States for processing.  I so enjoyed walking around the room, seeing a new Uganda--though one that I recognized easily--through her eyes.    

Rosemary, my best friend from college, now lives with her husband in Narberth, PA,* just down the road from Haverford.  Rose was my one fan that night, besides my mom, which made me love her even more than usual!

Jenna and I reunited that night for the first time since parting ways in Heathrow airport three years ago.  We look a lot fancier here than we ever did in Africa.  After the reception, Jenna gathered a big group for a festive and celebratory after-party at an Irish pub nearby.  

Glaydah read to a full house and there was quite a crowd coming and going during our reception, thanks in large part to Jenna's local contacts.  People shared interesting commentary as they viewed the photographs and asked thoughtful questions about what they were seeing.  It felt really good to finally get the work out there in the world and to talk about the faces and places in the images.  That is what it is all about, I think. 

Many thanks to Haverford College, the John B. Hurford Humanities Center, Matthew Seamus Callinan, and Ms. Jenna Mulhall Brereton for making this exhibition possible.  

*Narberth is also home to my favorite college-era bar: the Greeks, where the beer is cold, where the cheesesteaks are hot, where waitresses make careers, where my boyfriend used to go to watch the game (any game, really) as a graduate student at UPenn. Rose lives within walking distance... 

Around the Web...

1.  Photographs from  LOOK3 2008 are now online.  Planning for 2009 is well underway and although my lips are zipped for a few more months before we release all the details, please put June 11-13 on your calendar today!

2.  Positive: HIV/AIDS in Uganda, my upcoming show with Jenna Brereton, opens next week at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.  Information and a gallery of selected images are online here.  The reception for the exhibition is not until November 18.  It would really make my day if you'd attend.  

Assignment: Uganda

In October 2005, while working at the Maine Photographic Workshops, I managed to take off for three weeks to participate in Assignment: Uganda, a workshop about photographing the relief efforts of non-governmental organizations in Africa.  I took a bus from Portland, Maine to Boston, then flew through London to Entebbe, Uganda.  At the airport in Entebbe, waiting for a ride into Kampala, the participating photographers found each other.  We introduced ourselves.  That's when I met Jenna Brereton.  I think the conversation went something like this:

Jenna: "I live in the Philly area."

Me: "Oh, really?  I went to Bryn Mawr."

Jenna:  "Seriously?  I went to Bryn Mawr too!"

Not a particularly remarkable conversation except for the fact that only about 325 undergraduate women graduate from Bryn Mawr College each year.  So running into another Mawrtyr at an airport in East Africa is not exactly something you expect to do (or maybe it is...)!

Jenna and I hit it off during our weeks in Uganda.   We photographed for different organizations during the day and had other roommates at our hotel, but we both ventured south to the Rakai region to photograph in a village there.  She was with me in Kampala on the evening I was mugged near the taxi park, and we traveled back to Entebbe together to spend our last night at a swanky hotel on the edge of Lake Victoria.  She convinced me that my underwear made a fetching bikini and we laid out by a pool with wealthy European and African tourists, reading National Geographic and reflecting on the stark differences between the work we'd been doing in slums and rural villages and the setting of that last night.  

Sometime during these adventures and discussions, we decided we should try to show our photographs together at Bryn Mawr.  

This summer Jenna really took charge of making this idea a reality and though Bryn Mawr doesn't have an appropriate exhibition space for us this year, Haverford College, a mile down Lancaster Avenue, does. 

Bryn Mawr and Haverford have a Bi-College Consortium, meaning that students at either school can take classes and even declare a major at the other. For example, while at Bryn Mawr, I took "Art And Social Activism" and a beginner piano class at Haverford.  The Bi-Co Newspaper serves both communities and a Bi-Co baby is the offspring of a Bryn Mawr mother and Haverford father.  For real.  The Bi-Co Consortium is kind of a unique collegiate situation...

Our exhibit will be sponsored by the John B. Hurford Humanities Center in conjunction with the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.  It actually works out perfectly for us to be showing work from Uganda this fall at Haverford because they are hosting Glaydah Namukasa, a Ugandan midwife and an award-winning writer, in November.  Our opening reception will coincide with Namukasa's reception.  

So, with this exciting opportunity coming up, it was time to get crackin' in the darkroom.  Last Sunday night I flew to Maine to spend four days final printing my photographs from Uganda.  The trip was pretty much all business because I had a lot of work to accomplish on a tight schedule.  Though I love to visit Maine, I took my work seriously: I didn't socialize outside of the Workshops; I didn't pop into my favorite bar for a beer, I didn't even drive along the coast with the roof down on my rented convertible*.  My daily pleasure, aside from crossing prints off my list, was my afternoon coffee and a cookie from the Market Basket.  My 17 images are now printed and toned and ready to be matted and framed.  Phew.

Jenna and I will have our show, Positive: HIV/AIDS in Uganda, on display at Haverford College from Thursday, October 23-Sunday, November 23rd.  We're really excited to share our work and to bring attention to issues (poverty, public safety, child welfare) that affect Uganda and much of Africa as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  I'll post some scans of my prints when I have them made.  More news on the show as it approaches...

* (For some reason, whenever I rent a car, the rental people always want to give me something flashy.  I don't really care what I drive; I just want it to be subtle!  Don't know why but it makes me really uncomfortable to stand out on the road.  Last fall I got a red Chevy Cobalt and the bright cherry color alone made me uneasy!  This week I got a Chrystler Sebring convertible.  The woman at the Budget counter at the airport seemed really excited to give it to me so I smiled and pretended to think it was awesome.  But as I drove away in my rented convertible with Pat Benetar's "We Belong" on the radio (seriously), I felt really cheesy. 

One afternoon in Rockport, in a moment of sheer curiosity, I hit the "eject" button, the one that makes the roof open up and fold back.  I wasn't thinking, though, and I pressed the button at a stop light.  Just as the mechanism started humming and clicking and detaching, with the roof opening up to the sunshine, the light turned green.  I drove slowly across the intersection with the roof frozen in mid-swing, sticking waaaay up in the air, half open and catching the wind.  I felt so completely exposed in my idiocy.  It was like those awful, long seconds, with your arms caught over your head, waiting for the shop girl to come into the fitting room and unzip the dress that is stuck on your shoulders.  I pulled over as soon as I could and put the roof back down where it belonged.  So much for being subtle).

International Hospital for Children

Last month I drove down to RIchmond for another photo session with some children in town with the International Hospital for Children.  

The three children I photographed have since returned in good health to their home countries, which is fantastic considering that they arrived in Richmond many weeks before with debilitating and life-threatening conditions.  The medical teams here in Virginia, once again, did amazing work.  You'd never guess that the smiling kids in these pictures were just a few weeks into their recovery from procedures like open heart surgery and cataract surgery. 

Ariel Skelley, a Richmond-based photographer who has given lots of time and talent to IHC over the years, very generously opened her home to us for the afternoon.  The kids and their families enjoyed pizza and relaxing around the backyard while I set up a make-shift studio in the living room.  Ariel's home is spacious and light-filled and made for a perfect setting for the portraits.

  

The "studio" was just a wall of windows, a chair, and BIG reflector.  A perfect room for photography!

The very wonderful Ariel Skelley, and Charlie, the boy next door.

Happy Little Surprises

It is not every day that I flip through People magazine and exclaim, "I know that person! I know that person too!" But that is what happened recently when I opened the December 17, 2007 issue to an article about Sarah Nantaayi and Stephen Shames.

I met Steve in October 2005 when I traveled to Uganda for a workshop he organized about photographing for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian agencies. At that time, Stephen directed Outside the Dream (now the Stephen Shames Foundation, www.stephenshames.org), an NGO he started to provide education and other support to promising children in desperate situations, such as those orphaned by disease or rehabilitated child soldiers.

In Sarah's case, she was orphaned as an infant, when her farmer parents died of AIDS. Sarah's oldest sibling became head of the household at 12-years old. (Child-headed households are not uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa, where disease and violence regularly devastate families). Steve's organization "adopted" Sarah and her siblings and placed them with a network of mothers in the capital city, Kampala, where the children attend top-ranked boarding schools and receive the love, attention, and care that were lacking in their lives.

During my three weeks in Kampala, I met a lot of the children and mothers involved with Outside the Dream. I remember Sarah in particular because her spunk and outspokenness. I don't recall any particular conversation with her, but I do have a vivid picture in my mind of Sarah munching on french fries and chattering away during one of our many group dinners.

I was thrilled to see Sarah, Steve, and the Stephen Shames Foundation getting much-deserved attention in such a widely-distributed publication. But what really struck me was the small black and white picture in the corner of the front spread. The photograph is from 2000 and shows two village women bathing infant Sarah after the death of her mother. One of the woman is Nzera, whose family I photographed for three days.

Nzera is an AIDS widow and mother to at least six children, though it was never fully clear to me how many of the young people in her home had been carried in her body or simply accepted into the household by her generous heart. She and her family live in a village in the Rakai region, which is several hours south of Kampala by bus. Rakai sits just above the southern border of Uganda and just below the invisible line of the equator. The hills beyond Nzera's house look toward Tanzania, and the earth that her family farms yields yams, bananas, coffee, and other tropical plants that sustain them.

Photographs from my three days with Nzera and her family will be on my webite (www.meredithmontague.com) real, real soon, but until then, here is a portrait of Nzera, standing outside the house as one of her son's looks on.

(For more of the article, find a copy of People magazine with a bikini-clad Jennifer Love Hewitt and the words, "STOP CALLING ME FAT!" on the cover).

International Hospital for Children

This fall I've had the pleasure of photographing for the International Hospital for Children, which is based in Richmond and provides life-changing (and sometimes life-saving) medical care to children from 6 countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean. Teams of doctors from the U.S. travel to these countries a couple of times per year to treat patients locally and identify cases that require transport to the U.S for more advanced care.

Once here, the children undergo surgeries and other procedures and receive follow-up treatments. Some cases require that the kids stay in the U.S. for a couple of months between surgeries or appointments. They stay at the Ronald McDonald House or the Hospital Hospitality House, which is located in downtown Richmond, just next to the Coliseum.

IHC likes to have a professional portrait of all the children they serve so I first photographed each child alone and then each with their guardian, who is usually a parent. There were five families available for photographs that day, and after the shoot, which we did in the little park space between the Hospitality House and the Coliseum, I went back inside with the kids to see where they hang out and spend their downtime.

I find it a little heartbreaking to see such young people dealing with health concerns as serious as those that some of these children face, but it is inspiring to know that there are organizations like IHC in our communities that make a point of identifying need and bringing change to lives of these children and their families. My next goal is to travel to one of the project countries to photograph one child through their whole experience with IHC, from diagnosis at home to recovery in Virginia to back home again. We'll see about that...

In the meantime, I recently received a newsletter from the organization that featured one of my photographs! Please check them out online at www.healachild.org.

Serendipity?

I have neglected this site for weeks now. Not good! I have so many photographs to post from a wedding, a baby photo shoot, the Festival of the Photograph, Maine, etc... But I haven't figured out how to post full-size pictures rather than thumbnails. A simple fix, I'm sure, but one that requires a little time on my part. And THAT I do not have right now!

Here is one picture, though. I chose this image, which I photographed at Kids In Need, a home for street children in Kampala, Uganda, for the YourSpace exhibit at the Festival of the Photograph last month. The theme for the exhibit was "Serendipity" and I struggled with it for a while. Finally, I chose this image for reasons that I'll keep to myself. It's not the most serendipitous photograph, but it definitely works. I think.