Book Review: New York through the Lens

New York Through the Lens

A Review of the Vivienne Gucwa Book

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I was enthralled with the joy of discovering that inside a matryoshka doll was another that opened up to reveal another and then yet another within that one and even another one within that one. There is a delightful joy discovering hidden treasure as you move further and further inside a matryoshka doll set.

Matryoshka dollset photo downloaded from shuttertstock.com (blackboard 1965)

 

            That is the best I know how to introduce you to Vivienne Gucwa’s New York through the Lens. Opening the pages of her book is something like a child discovering the joy of discovering a whole set of matryoshka dolls inside what seemed like one small ornament.

           

Photo of book as shown on Amazon.com

 

            The book seems like a nice book of photographs you would set out on your coffee table for guests and family members to thumb through.

            But if you start reading the opening pages she tells you a story of how she started taking photographs. It was during a stressful time of her life. She would just start walking. She had an inexpensive point and shoot camera. She would take it with her and take pictures of scenes that interested her. She would pick out a street to explore and start walking until it was time to return home. So within this book of photographs there was also a memoir of how photography provided a stressed soul with refreshment and healing.

            Then as you enjoy the memoir sort of feel to the book she tells how she fell in love with writing before she took up photography. You find she is writing in poetry, in fluid prose and in full fledged story-telling. The book is not simply a book of photographs but poetry and story-telling.

            I came into contact with the book at about the same time I was making my very first visit to New York City. She writes of the city as her hometown. To an outsider it is a huge city incapable of being grasped. But to a resident the city is more like a thousand villages interconnected by streets, sidewalks, taxis, buses, boats, tunnels, and subways. Each building and each scene is part of a village with a story in the context of the village in which it exists. The story-teller is a tour guide who has learned the history and dialects of the villages in which her scenes are set forth.

            There is one more thing we discover hidden in this beautiful book. The writer was an art lover as well as a photographer. This seems to tie all the pieces of photographer, memoir and story-teller writer, and tour guide together. This is all brought together in someone who loves the beauty of a scene as an art lover. Who else could better understand a scene than an art lover? I began to imagine the sort of art lover who would stand before a painting and try to draw every bit of it into their soul and imagination. I imagined a scene at the Metropolitan Art Museum. I imagined a father taking his two children to the museum.

            The father wants his children to learn to appreciate art. But the father is not so much a lover of art as he is someone who knows that if his children are really going to be fully educated then they would understand beauty as well as goodness and truth. He feels a sense of weakness. He knows we should love beauty, but he is more moved by his sense of weakness that he does not truly appreciate beauty but wants his children to appreciate it. He is the sort of father who takes his children to the museum and then moves rapidly from room to room in the vain hope of showing them much instead of showing them a little but well.

            Then he sees a painting. It is a painting more in my imagination than I actually saw at the Metropolitan. The father sees this scene not so much of a painting but of a woman enthralled and seemingly held captive by the painting.

            She stands there looking at the painting. Looking isn’t the right word. She is studying the work of art. Neither is studying the right word. She stands as if her body is outside of the painting while her heart, mind and soul has been drawn into the painting. She is experiencing communion and union with this piece of art. The father realizes this woman loves art in the way he wishes he could.

            In my imagination, the father is prepared to walk past the woman without bothering her. But he feels that perhaps this woman could inspire his son and daughter more than he could if he simply asked her to tell his children about what she found so fascinating about this painting. He interrupted her and though she was a bit put out, she sought to honor the man's children.

            She spoke first to the little daughter as if to help her become interested in this art her dad wanted her to enjoy. She asked the daughter, “Do you see the man in the bottom left corner of the painting?” The little daughter looked and looked and then exclaimed as if excited, “The one with the red boot?”

            The woman standing smiled and said, “Exactly, the man with the red boot. He was hard to see, wasn’t he?” The little girl said, “Yes, I didn’t see him at all until I saw his red boot.”

            The art loving woman said, “I think this painter likes to play tricks on us. He makes the man hard to see with the forest behind him, but then he has him wear a red boot that stands out in comparison with everything else. He is playing games with us, I think." The daughter found that kind of funny that a painter would play games with people looking at his artwork.

            Then the woman asked the father's little boy, “What do you think the man in the painting is looking at?" The little boy said, "I don't really know. He is looking towards a direction but I don't see anything."

            The woman then was saying to  the son, “Do you see anything in the stream, that is on the right hand side of the painting. Is there anything in the stream the man might be looking at?” The boy seemed not to understand. But finally he said, “There's a little boat.”

            The woman smiled and said, “There is a toy boat but there are no children playing with it. Where do you think the children are?" The boy didn't know. So she asked whether the boat was going towards the man in the painting or away from him away and out of the painting.The boy answered, “It is coming towards the man.”

            She then could say, “If the boat is just now coming into the painting? Where do you think the children are? Use your imagination."

            The boy looked sad as if he was failing to get the right answer for his teacher. He finally said with his head down, "I don't see any children. I don't see them." The woman said to the little boy, "Don't feel bad. I think the painter is playing games. He has the man in the red boot looking towards children who had put a toy boat in the water, but the children aren't in the painting. You can only see them by your imagination. He is playing a game. After this the boy and his sister were looking at the painting to see everything they could notice. They were making a game of it saying "I see this."

            While the children played their game, and being careful not to try to touch anything, the woman said to their father, “I love this painting. I know it isn't the title but I call it the "Always more" painting. It is like the artist wants us to know that there is always more in every scene. He also wants us to know that there is always more than the scene that we see today." She then said, "Sometimes I just come here to look at this painting because I want to remind myself that there is always something more." After that it seemed like the woman was ready to go home.

            In real life I have never met a woman like that one studying the "always more" piece of art. But in my imagination that would be the kind of woman who would give to the world such a simple, beautiful and profound gift; as you will find if you discover New York through the Lens by Vivienne Gucwa.

 

Rather than post any of Vivienne Gucwa’s photographs here is a link to her blog where she provides a number of wonderful examples. http://nythroughthelens.com A link for her book is provided on that site at http://nythroughthelens.com/book


 The book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other book stores.

2014 Review - Diversity of Persons and Perspectives

2014 Review:

Diverse Persons and Perspectives

Written By Dan McDonald

 

            In late 2012 I joined Facebook. By the middle of 2013 I was on Twitter. In between I had started to blog. I was a late participant in social media. Social media brought me into contact with a growing diversity of persons and perspectives. As I look back on 2014 this diversity of persons and perspectives has had its impact on my life. At times diversity seemed to overwhelm, confuse and challenge me. Sometimes I didn’t handle it well. But overall it has resulted less in changing my core values as it has in reshaping my understanding of how I should connect my core values to the world around me.

            There were times when I found myself faltering between competing perspectives. My Facebook world was composed primarily of people who had been a part of my earlier Christian development. They were mostly conservative, almost exclusively white, but if they had flaws as we all do, I had learned to grow in God’s grace with these people. My Twitter world was a place where I had discovered progressives, often young people, and more diversity. Many of the people I came to know on Twitter had felt like outcastes in the very movements with which I had been associated. As much as I wanted to say they should not reject what I was a part of, I had been a part of enough church splits in my Evangelical world to know that our churches can be a hostile world if one gets on the wrong side in one of our little squabbles. So I do understand that one handles only so much of that sort of stuff before making the exit whether to a better place or just a place outside of the storm.

            For a time this tug of war between my conservative Facebook world and my progressive Twitter world created in me a tendency to have different persona on the two platforms. I could hear a Boy George and Culture Club song playing in my head. Blogging presented to me the possibility to attempt to reconcile my two influences into a perspective which I could express with a sense of integrity. I discovered the truth of what some writer had said. I don’t remember who the writer was but they said something like “We write in order to type out our words on a piece of paper until we at last recognize what it is we believe and feel.” So if my blog had only a handful of readers, it allowed me the opportunity to recognize what it was I believed and felt. In addition every once in a while it did speak to someone else.

            An important change began taking place in my view of the world around me. In my Conservative world, even though we probably didn’t mean to, we too often conveyed the feeling that unless you became a person with the right politics, the right view of economics and the right approach to doing schooling you probably didn’t belong. But I discovered that our world wasn’t limited to our people groups. I am also sure that Christ didn’t come into the world to walk only in the midst of such people. The song, Left of Center, by Suzanne Vega seemed to speak to me about people living in this world left out by my former approach. She sang of how she was here if you wanted to find her, in that place left of center, in the outskirts, on the fringes and off the main strip. Her song spoke to me of people we were inclined to leave out as we built our understanding of the world we wanted to see replace the world in which we lived.

            As the year progressed I began to resolve at least temporarily some of the struggles in my thinking. I was resolved to listen to both Progressives and Conservatives and others without abandoning my core principles. I don’t believe I will ever be free to simply dismiss the words of Scripture that I sometimes see people feeling quite capable of jettisoning. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate or take seriously their issues. How does one deal with an Old Testament passage which commands people to destroy a nation of people; men, women and children? Today we call that genocide. Today we read over such a passage with easy explanations while trying to challenge our world regarding the current ease with which the unborn are aborted prior to birth. I begin to wonder if such a passage is rightly dealt with if we haven’t struggled emotionally with the issue of how blatantly out of character that is with a God of mercy and compassion. Perhaps we are meant to bristle with questions as we read such a passage. Maybe we are meant to cry out like mediators and ask “Why God, why will you not show mercy?” Or perhaps we are reminded that we are not in charge, we are not the ones who are sovereign who get to domesticate our God and teach him to do tricks at our command. But this I tend to be discovering. If we do not treat these passages with questioning then we will likely be led into the errors of our forefathers who found themselves able to use the Bible to defend enslaving people who were a different skin color than themselves, or exterminating a race of natives who didn’t fit into the ideas of manifest destiny in a new world, or of business being conducted with little regard for labor. Perhaps some passages cannot be treated properly without our being driven to ask difficult questions. Perhaps the Scriptures aren’t given to always suggest a quiet moment in a Thomas Kincaid painting. Perhaps God sometimes wants us to rise up and say “NO! God, I protest and plead for something better from you.” Maybe he withholds his mercy to engage us to passionately yearn for his mercy. Maybe he invokes judgment to move us to plead for mercy because his desire is not for us to be enslaved robots, but rather to be freely acting men and women liberated to live passionately in the day of God’s power. Maybe we are meant to find it in ourselves to stand against injustice even if it that seeming lack of mercy seems to be the act of God. Abraham, Moses, Job and Jesus never took the apparent judgment of God at face value. They asked God for something better than he was indicating. They became mediators seeking mercy.

            In the process I have discovered new friends, even if sometimes from a distance with a variety of perspectives. I am sure that I am only in the beginning of my journey into being impacted by listening to the diversity of humanity. On the last day of 2014 I had an internet experience that tells me I have only begun. Last summer, when warfare broke out between Israel and the Palestinians I began to intentionally follow a handful of Palestinians, on Twitter, to see what they were saying. I was not trying to figure out how peace should be created, but simply trying to hear human voices struggling in their actual situation. I learned that life in Gaza and on the West Bank was difficult and frustrating. On many days there is electricity for only a couple of hours a day. Internal checkpoints between towns to protect Israeli settlements in the disputed occupied territories make movement of ordinary goods and services almost impossible, contributing to a broken economy. Border security makes an Amazon shipment of books into Gaza potentially a several month long process instead of only a few days. Life is frustrating and yet you read tweets of people finding bits of joy in a life in a land where almost nothing is normal.

            On the last day of the year, one of the Palestinians I followed on Twitter commented about how it was already New Year’s Day in New Zealand. She had never followed me on Twitter but in response to her comment I expressed my hopes for her to have a happy New Year, and almost immediately she followed me on Twitter. That led to a direct message and we soon had an exchange of greetings that deeply moved me. I discovered that she responded to my simple act of wishing her a Happy New Year with a beautifully warm and kind response of gratitude in addition to expressing kindness. This is the story of diversity that I want to impress on your heart as you finish reading my words today. There is a lot of history between my culture and her culture, my religion and her religion. I have no ambition to try to compare and argue about our religions. It seems to me that the times for such discussions will be far more fruitful when there are no occupying forces making life miserable, no terrorists strikes making others think only force can bring peace, and no drones and bombers blowing up people in the name of peace keeping. Perhaps at such times the best thing we can do is to offer our friendship with someone and go with it. But something happened as this Palestinian and I greeted one another. If we have different religions we are still fellow human beings created in God’s image. That is something very important that we do share. I am now, hopefully forever changed by this experience. The next time I find myself in a room where someone is speaking about Palestinians from the perspective of stereotyped prejudices, I will hopefully not allow myself to sit idly by. Rather I will speak of someone as human as you or me who was moved by a simple New Year’s greeting to respond with gratitude and kindness. Peacemaking begins with a refusal to cooperate in defining someone else as less than human.