Carol Mcgorry I Choose Film for Both the Look and the Experience. the Contact of Film With

Carol McGorry I Choose Film for both the look and the experience. The contact of film with light creates a fuller, smoother range of subtle tonality that I can work on creatively in post-production. But I choose film more so for the way loading the camera, imagining a shot, and shooting slow me down in the moment. Film forces me to use all my senses, to enrich the connections between word and image, subject and field. Even though I have permission to photograph, I am uncomfortable with the nearness. So before we start to interview the old one, I turn to him and ask, “May I photograph you?” He looks to Claudine who translates. They speak back and forth for several minutes then moments of silence. I immediately regret asking, assuming all the back and forth means he is saying no. But then, Claudine looks to me and says, “He says his life is over. He is only waiting to die. You can photograph him. You can do whatever you want to him.” I look to the old one. He continues to stare ahead, between our gazes. Later, when I stand and walk behind the couch for a better angle, I look through the viewfinder and cry— Once committed, no one can step away from these crimes from the memory and the pain and the anger and the shame. ••• My current work, Veil, grew out of four summers in Rwanda and includes images and interviews with survivors and perpetrators of genocide, guided by survivor Claudine Uwamahoro and inspired by my interest in family stories. Over the past year, I would get translations of the interviews week by week, and then step back from the pages of conversation and ask, “What does this make?” I would watch the videotaped interviews as I read, looking from transcript to image to feel the stories surfacing. The connections between words and images grew more complicated. The book form in this exhibit lends itself to the unfolding of experience. The common thread, for me, is the frustration of our desire for simple resolutions. I hope that Veil will challenge us to ask: How do we construct our stories? What shapes the story we long to tell? From where do we gather our sources? The narration of others? The still photograph? Does it matter what’s real or not? Who/what is the arbiter of reality? Bio: I am a Professor of English at Suffolk Community College in Selden, NY, specializing in creative non-fiction and personal narrative. I grew up playing hopscotch on the sidewalks in Queens, never imagining that I would have the opportunity of spending a decade of my life traveling to the sub-Arctic Shetland Islands, equatorial Rwanda, and, most recently, to Cuba. In my travels, I have taught workshops in visual thinking and poetic expression, including at the Shetland Museum and Archives and at Uburanga Arts Studio and Ready for Reading in Rwanda. For my work in the Shetlands, I was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Amherst, VA. My photographs of weavers in Rwanda were presented at gala events for CHABHA (Children Affected by HIV/AIDS) to benefit the Isano Weaving Cooperative. My pinhole camera images, focusing on memory and imagination, were presented at a SUNY Conversations in the Disciplines Conference. And, the Richmond Symphony, Virginia, featured my Lomography spinning camera image of folk dancers in Budapest for the promotion of their Hungarian Heritage event. Most recently, images from my early work in Rwanda were selected for solo exhibition at the Spiral Press Gallery in Manchester, VT, and at the Michael S. Currier Center Gallery in Putney, VT.