From Cape Cod this past August.

Happy Holidays! I am signing off for 2010. I hope you all get some time off for rest, relaxation and good cheer. I've been saving up my film for the past few months and finally brought it to the lab this week so I will have lots of new images to show you in 2011!

From the November issue of Canadian Living Magazine. Frances Paris with husband Alain and friends in their backyard. For a story about how to make friends when moving to a new town.

Me with Evergon santa! Check out Chris and Zoe's funny versions.

OK, enough whining for now, (I just needed to get it off my chest) back to the photographs! Above are some more Habs fans from the spring 2010 playoff season, these ones sporting sun glasses. All of this series was taken outside the Montreal Canadiens arena (the Bell Center) before playoff home games. Hockey is big in this city and when the Habs (what we call The Canadiens, for Habitants, the original French colonizers of Quebec) are in the playoffs everyone gets excited and happy and the city is electric with anticipation. Growing up I was never really connected to this hockey fever. Since my parents are both from Dublin they weren't that interested in hockey and me and my sisters took figure skating lessons. I did play club hockey in University but that wasn't in Montreal. Then Chris and I moved back to Montreal together and in the past few years Chris has had half season's tickets to see the Habs. He gets hockey fever big time, and now I am finally joining in and enjoy watching hockey too (yesterday we went to a local bar to watch the game and ended up chatting with a guy who was scalping tickets before the game, he was giving us the low down on how it works). So that's why I started taking these photos, I finally felt like I was connecting to hockey fever in Montreal, and becoming a real Habs fan and I wanted to show all these different people that are so dedicated to their team.

My hand. Kind of a symbolic image for a subject that I propose for discussion. That is the cost of entering photo competitions. Here are some costly contests that interest me, a few of which I have entered in the past:

Magenta $50
Identities Now $50 for 1-3 images, $100 4-10 images
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 22 Pounds per photograph
Hey Hot Shot! $80
Critical Mass $75 first round, $200 second round

When you hear that the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize had more than 6000 entries, and that they chose an image of a young red headed girl as the winner (a re-occurring theme and somewhat of a fetish of the Portrait Prize), you wonder if there is any use entering, and if the prizes are in fact made for the benefit of the photographers or for the financial gains of the institutions involved. So are we giving them a hand out or are we the photographers too easily tempted by a potential win?

I will make my comments section active again so that you can chime in. Would love to hear what people think!

Cool cars from Cape Cod.

Last night I went to the Sobey Art Awards Gala. Lots of artists, curators, friends, and wine = good times! Congrats to Daniel Barrow.

The dock.

Cloud and Dandelions, intervention images that I made a year or two ago.

Recently I bought Lay Flat 02: Meta. It's a beautiful little book and the images and essays included are both very strong. I would suggest two things though. One: that the essays failed to mention what is often the unmentionable these days, and that is that much of this reflection on the medium of photography recently done by photographers may be brought on by the fact that we are at a crossroads, in that place where film meets digital, and that this change on the ground, and the need to learn new tools, and the transition that photographers are going through in their working process has lead them to reflect back on the materiality of the medium itself. And two: that although the artists included were interesting and quite a good representation of the work out there I would suggest that including these additional artists would have made it stronger: Michael Love's "Self Portrait with Rifle", Michael Flomen, Chris McCaw, John Cyr, and Curtis Mann. Also if you are interested in this kind of thing you may want to check out the Victoria and Albert's exhibit (in London, England) on till February: "Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography".

Montreal's team is doing really well this year so to celebrate here are some more Habs Fans from the 2010 playoff season (+ a ghostly one for Halloween).

This year The Grange Prize is Canada vs. The USA, and it is a stiff competition. Go vote before Sunday!

My very talented husband Chris designed these books for this year's line of Snare books.

Both the colour and B&W images were taken at the same location in Howth, Ireland. The B&Ws were taken in the summer of 2000 and the colour version ten years later this past summer for my "Ulysses, a personal journey" project. What is so uncanny is that when I came upon the scene this year I did not realize that I had photographed it before. It was only upon looking through some old negatives last month that I found the remarkably similar images.

I often feel like I am being led around by my subconscious when photographing and this definitely seems to be the case when I was twice made to stop at the concrete and yet ornate wall on which seems to float an island.

A beautiful US Life Saving Station in Cape Cod.

Waiting in line for the drive-in at Cape Cod.

Chris when we were camping in Cape Cod.

In June, while I was away in Ireland, I had work in a group show in New York. Here is an installation shot from the Visual Arts Gallery, of the section curated by Kate Greenberg. My work is on the far right (2 "Domestic Interventions" images) right beside a video by William Lamson.

This week I did a tour of the Belgo Building (372 st catherine's street west, montreal) and saw a lot of very strong work photographic and otherwise:
Marisa Portolese at Lilian Rodriguez Gallery, till Oct 23rd
Robyn Cumming at Push Gallery, till Oct 16th
Nicolas Baier at Rene Blouin Gallery, till Oct 9th
Liliana Berezowsky at Circa, till Oct 10th (amazing sculptures)

All on the 4th floor except for Blouin which is on the 5th, catch these shows before they come down!

An image from the series that I am currently working on, "Ulysses, a personal journey". I will be having a solo show of this work, which I shot in Ireland this past summer, in the spring of 2011. These days I am scanning the many successful negatives, as well as thinking about sequencing and how to incorporate quotes from the book "Ulysses" in the exhibit.

Soon after returning from Ireland I submitted some images from the series to the "Hey, Hot Shot!" competition. Yesterday I was featured as a contender. Take a look, it will give you a sneak peak into what I am working on and the issues that I am dealing with in this work. I am so thankful to Emma who wrote the post on my work. Her comments are thoughtful and so true to the heart of this project. I'm glad that the short artist statement that went along with the submission communicated my intentions.

The pool at the Hyannis Econo Lodge.

Some food we had in Cape Cod.

More from magical Kingston.

Some of my favourite beach photos from our August trip to Cape Cod. The top one is from Long Nook Beach, and the bottom two are from Head of the Meadow Beach.

I've been meaning to go see the "Hantise" group show at Art Mur, here in Montreal. I hear that there is some good photography in it.

From a few weeks ago in Kingston, when I got to hang out with old friends.

An Entrelacs garage sale, and Chris looking for treasure in the lake.

This morning I watched Rachel Sussman's Ted Talk about her project "The Oldest Living Things in the World". Sussman has been working on this project for five years and she figures that she has two more years to go. That kind of stamina is impressive, and her commitment to this work is evident in her talk. Well worth seeing, especially for those of you who are interested in where science meets art.