TRANSLATIONS:Photographs by Erin Brubacher

A J

Go, we told her.It was summer in Sackville, New Brunswick. My partner,

John, and I had just finished our final year of university. Wewere loafing and inviting unemployment, and our friend, theartist Erin Brubacher, was off to France.

As we dawdled along the trail that skirted the waterfowlpark, we conjured France. Fine wine, we said. Great art.

John and Erin, photographers both, were toting cameras,pointing them at things as we walked. We passed the facili-ties-management plant of the university: hardly the old-worldarchitecture of which we were dreaming. Stand under that mas-sive smokestack, said John, and pretend you’re holding abaguette.

Fall in love, I said. We emerged from a stand of alders ontothe boardwalk that led out over the water. Fall in love with aplump chef.

A jolly chef, said John. And bring him back to Canada tocook for us. He popped open the back of his camera. Proppingone leg on the boardwalk railing, he rested the camera on his

knee, removed the old roll and pocketed it, dropped the newone into place. The late sun cast the railing’s shadow onto thesurface of the water, and where it did we could see beneath thesurface: cattail roots, a single hovering minnow. John closedthe camera’s back and wound it, click, wound it again. Makelots of pictures, he said.

That was the summer of . Now it is the spring – if onecan call it that, in St. John’s where May temperatures habituallyflirt with zero – of , and Erin, John, and I are once againliving in the same town.

Here, too, is Erin’s husband, Vivien: français, naturelle-ment. Though he is hardly plump. And he is, by vocation, ajournalist, woodworker, and ecological designer – though onelow-budget winter in Iqaluit he supported himself as a pastrychef, thus proving John and me at least partially prophetic.

Erin and I have been talking about photography again.“When I first went to Strasbourg, I was conscientious aboutnot making photographs,” she said. “When you’re new to aplace you make different kinds of photographs – you see theplace in a different way – than you do when all the newnesshas settled. I had never been to Europe before: there were cer-tain things that were going to dazzle me, or strike me as odd.So I thought, I’m going to let the shine wear off, before I startto make pictures.”

When she lifted this embargo, a month or so later, she didn’tjust make pictures. She made rolls of them: images of public lifein Strasbourg and other European cities – their gardens, plazas,and museums – that I still find compelling, years after seeingthe initial prints. I recently asked her if she would allow me tocollect some of these photographs, along with a few from laterEuropean sojourns, under the title Translations, one thatseemed to me apposite for a number of reasons.

Any photograph is a translation, of course, in a quite literalsense: light is “carried across” from the source or the reflectingscene, through the lens, to the film’s emulsion. Later, that nega-tive image is retranslated, from negative to positive, into the sil-ver gelatin of the photographic paper.

But in Erin’s European photographs translation oftenseemed to me to be not only method but theme. In the photo-graph titled “Translations,” for instance, four gallery-goers arepictured in the company of James Pradier’s sculpture of Sapphoat the Musée d’Orsay. Not one of them is looking at the sculp-

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Man with Cane. Strasbourg, .

ture, however. Rather, they attend to their gallery phoneguides, which are presumably translating this objet d’art into astring of words – much, I suppose, as I am doing. What is beinglost in this translation?

In another photograph (see cover), a blind piano tuner atthe National Portrait Gallery in London translates sound intosense into finely-tuned sound: but we cannot hear his work. Weare deaf to it. Rather, we see the candid gaze and frank postureof Irish actor Fiona Mary Shaw, in the portrait by Victoria Rus-sell which hangs on the wall behind the piano – and which theblind piano tuner cannot see. Translation is at issue once again:those master-translators, our sensory organs, and what they canor cannot “carry across” from the world into our brains.

In a third photograph, a man walks with a cane: the canetranslates the man’s walking weight to the ground; likewise, ittranslates the ground’s resistance to the man’s hand, to hismind. Meanwhile, the sun translates the man, the cane, a lightpole, a parked bicycle, into shadow. “Light is often anothercharacter in my photographs,” Erin has said.

As I spoke to Erin about these photographs, other transla-tions became apparent beyond those I could immediately see inthe frame: translations between a sense of away-ness and a senseof home; between private life and public life; and perhaps mostimportantly, between reality and fiction.

The writer Steven Heighton, for whom translation is alsoimportant as both theme and method, has written that thereare two kinds of writers: “chroniclers of home,” who “findinspiration in the small yet vital details of domesticity, in men-tal maps of known locales”; and “explorers of elsewhere,” who“are imaginatively cramped by the familiar and the familial.”Does this apply to photographers? I asked Erin.

“I don’t know if it does apply,” she said, “but I instantly feltthat I was a chronicler of home when you said that.” She con-ceded the oddness of this statement, given that the photos wewere discussing had all been made when she was, in some sense,away – away from Toronto, the city in which she grew up, andto which she is still connected; away from her family members,with whom she is close; and away from her native language. Butshe has moved so much in her adult life, that a sense of “physi-cal home” is “really not that great” for her. “Instead, there areplaces where I have felt that I was at home in myself, beingthere.” And these are the places in which, most often, she hasbeen moved to make pictures.

I asked her if art-making is itself part of what makes her feelat home in a place. “Yes,” she said, “but I would add to that, notjust art-making, but art-making with some kind of collabora-tion involved: a person or community of people with whom Idiscuss ideas on a regular basis, or with whom I’m working on aspecific project, as in theatre.” Theatre, amongst the art forms,is her other great love. “When I was living in Strasbourg, thecollaboration was with the art I was seeing . . . . I went to see aperformance on average once a week for the entire year. I wouldoften see two a week. And I went to galleries all the time. It was

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Julianna. Colmar, .

Translations. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, .

Afternoon at the Pompidou. Paris, .

a tremendous education, and maybe one of the reasons thatthat period was so fruitful, photographically.”

Do you consider photography to be collaborative? I asked.“Sometimes,” she said. “It’s kind of a balancing act.” She

described to me a conference she attended, a few years ago, inQuebec, on the subject of les droits de l’image. “It was a big dis-cussion about how laws have been changed and precedents set

for people having total control over representations ofthemselves, in any form. There’s this conception that a photog-rapher’s either going to misrepresent them or do somethingnasty on the internet with their image, or that the photogra-pher’s going to make all kinds of money off the image, and thatthey should get a cut of this.” People are worried, she said; shefeels this more strongly now than she did a few years ago, mak-

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Bust. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, . Girl. Offenbourg, .

Dialogue. Strasbourg, .

ing photographs in the street: “People want to know exactlywhat you’re doing, even if they’re a blip on the corner of a nega-tive.” It’s inhibiting: “all those wonderful photos made bystreet photographers, people like Cartier-Bresson or AndréKertész, they couldn’t be made now, in the same way.”

Still, an “unspoken collaboration” occasionally takes place,between her and the people who figure in her pictures: “It’s avery subtle communication, but some kind of consent is given,in such a way that they know that you’re going to take their pic-ture and that you want them to just not pay attention to you atall. And they’re going to agree or not agree; sometimes the waythey disagree is just by stopping whatever it was that they weredoing.”

Did she find European street life more amenable to thiskind of collaboration than Canadian street life? I asked. I

remembered something John Metcalf once told me about thephotographer Sam Tata: when Tata moved to Canada in 1956,after living in China and India, he was temporarily stymied bythe comparative lack – due to culture or climate – of street lifehere: that vernacular theatre of the sidewalk, the marketplace,the train platform, that animated his Asian photographs. Iwondered if Erin had experienced something of the reverse,when she moved to Strasbourg from Canada in .

Yes, she said; but she attributes this not so much to cultureor to climate as to urban design: “Our cities and our communi-ties are not designed for people to be outside together.” Wemake streets for cars, not people, she said. It’s ironic, then, thatwe still use the term “street photography” to describe the docu-mentation of public life. “It’s dangerous to be outside in our cit-ies. We’re quarantined to little sections.” There are exceptions,however: “there are places and pockets of great street life, orpark life, in Canada.” A few times a year, in Montreal, certainstreets are closed to cars: “And the minute they are, the city iscompletely transformed. People are out there using it: beingtogether, interacting with each other, having a public life . . . .It’s proof, again and again, of how people would use publicspace if it was there.” On a recent trip to her “home” city, tovisit family, she was struck by “the life in the spring and sum-mer months in Toronto parks.” Canadian parks provide a dif-ferent kind of public life than do European “gardens,” she said:people can kick a soccer ball around, or picnic, or stretch outon the grass. “The first thing I’d like to do when I’m living inToronto again is to document that.”

Theatre is very much the art form of public life, I said. It isfounded, at the most basic level, on interaction: between actorand audience, actor and playing space. How does she see the

relationship between photography and theatre – in general, orin her own artistic practice?

“When you make a photograph you haven’t scripted –where you haven’t composed the situation or the players – younonetheless compose certain elements of that reality. Youimpose the frame that prevents a viewer from seeing anythingelse that was going on, and ask the viewer to look at very spe-cific things that were going on. You create a drama or a fictionfrom that very real situation.” All artists work with the given;for a documentary photographer, this is particularly true. Erinsees herself, qua photographer, as more director than play-wright.

The element of “fiction” in documentary photographyinterests her: “Once you step out of the realm of the recognizedsubject” – the family snapshot, the celebrity portrait – “anyonein a photograph could become a character – arguably doesbecome a character. There’s an agreement we have when welook at a documentary photograph that what we are seeingactually took place. These things are reality. If they aren’t, wefeel like we’ve been tricked. But when we look at somethingoutside of our own interactions and agree to believe in it as real-ity, the only way we can understand it is as a story.” Story is theshared grammar, then, that allows us to translate between theknown and the unknown: to take an unfamiliar scene, and toimagine it as a “still” from the ongoing narrative of real life. Asense of this ongoing narrative is strong in Erin’s pictures. Thecliché is that a photograph stops time; Erin’s photographs,rather, evoke it. Looking at her portraits I don’t so much think“who is this person” as “what’s happening here?”

Many of us are adept at picking out the telling moment in apiece of fiction or a theatre script, she said, and pointing it upin analysis or on the stage – yet we struggle to perform thissame act of interpretation in regards to life. “As a photographer,I’m interested in learning to see life with the same kind of clar-ity that we bring to fiction,” she said. “In a fiction – a novel ora play script – it’s all right there. We can say, isn’t that tragic,that he took off his hat just at the moment she looked away –but we can see this moment because the writer told us to look.She put it there for us to see it. But these moments are there inlife, all the time.” The identification of these moments is, forErin, what “the good photographs” are about. The photogra-pher is a translator: she translates real life into fiction. Theirony is that, in doing so, she gives it back to us more real.

* * *(All images copyright Erin Brubacher.)

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There’s an agreement we have when we look at a documentary photograph that what we areseeing actually took place. These things are reality. If they aren’t, we feel like we’ve been

tricked. But when we look at something outside of our own interactions and agree to believein it as reality, the only way we can understand it is as a story.