I thought I had sent this out a month ago, came to do a new post, and discovered it was never sent!
Albertans take note! New York photographer, Alison Rossiter and Edmonton sculptor, Catherine Burgess have a wonderful collaborative exhibition titled Temporal on until February 22, 2026 at the Art Gallery of Alberta. I intend to fly out to see it after Christmas.
Years and years ago I studied photography at the Banff Centre with Alison Rossiter and Ross Colquhoun, among others. Both Alison and Ross helped me with my original foray into “saving” the photographs of my grandfather, Byron Harmon, while living in Toronto in the 1970’s.
Both Alison and Ross helped me build darkrooms, first on Spruce Street, (Alison). This one didn’t work out with room-mates, I had to move.
Then, in a warehouse on Ontario Street, (Ross). I rented the 3000 sq. ft. third floor of this warehouse, which had been a peanut factory. It had two offices which we used as bedrooms, and a vast open space with brick walls, windows on two sides, and a hardwood floor with a gigantic mound of peanut oil in the middle. Ross sand blasted the walls and build the darkroom, a bathroom and a rudimentary kitchen. I was manual labour: I tore up the linoleum in the offices, and sanded and refinished the floors. That winter it was freezing cold, except in the offices where the radiators were located, so we hung translucent plastic around the living room area.
Both friends also worked on the conservation project: making copy negatives with the big film processor at Ryerson Polytechnic, (Alison) and contact printing those negatives (Ross). I edited the collection; we made copy negatives of this edit which weeded out duplication, and labelled the archival sleeves which replaced the rotting paper envelopes the originals had been crammed into for years.
While living in Toronto, Ross met and married scientist Mary Brunkow, they now live in Seattle with twin daughters.
On October 27 Alison alerted me that Mary was one of three scientists to be awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Their work identified how the immune system regulates itself. Their discoveries have laid the foundation for a new field of research and spurred the development of new treatments, for example for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The interviews with Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi on the Nobel Prize Website make much better reading than the morning rundown on politics.
I feel proud and lucky to know these remarkable friends. Alison, whose work with expired photographic papers renders poetry from history. Ross for his support of me at an important point in his life, and more importantly, the women in his family.
I thought it would be a good thing to let you know, dear readers, how I got mixed up with trying to preserve, sometimes resurrect, exhibit, and promote my grandfather’s photographs.
In 1972, the first year of my photo program at the Banff Centre, I researched Man Ray for our assignment on historical photographers; I chose him because I had lived in Paris, so it felt like I was walking those streets again.
My friend Ed Cavell chose Byron Harmon. It felt strange to have someone in my class studying my grandfather. I love his pictures but he isn’t famous like Man Ray or Alfred Stieglitz and he wasn’t an art photographer. Or was he?
The next year, at the opening for our final photo exhibition, my friend poet and fellow Banffite Jon Whyte and I were standing beside my installation piece, Window, when he nonchalantly said, “why don’t you do something with your grandfather’s photographs?” I stammered an inane reply. Jon loved my gullibility and often set me up, so I wasn’t sure if he meant what he said or was pulling my leg.
At the time Jon was writing epic poems about historical Canadian figures, like Henry Kelsey, and these included poems about his aunt and uncle, artists Catherine and Peter Whyte.
I took Jon’s comment more literally.
Byron’s negatives are stored in a three drawer wooden filing cabinet in the storeroom at Byron Harmon Photos. I open the top drawer, cough as must and dust erupt. The drawers are jammed full of his 5X7 black-and-white negatives which have been crammed into rotting brown paper envelopes. The name of the trip is typed in the upper left corner: Bow Movie Trip 1914, Bow Movie Trip 1917, Columbia Icefields 1924. When I remove negatives from the envelopes bits of paper crumble away. Along the Line of the CPR: trains, canyons, city streets, farming on the prairies. In another drawer are 5X7 glass plates and film negatives of Indigenous portraits. Under a long counter in the workroom, where postcard orders are packed, the shelves are stacked with black-and-white prints which used to be for sale in Harmony Drugstore on A shaped display stands. Some are hand coloured. Boxes of black-and-white postcards—thousands of them. Jon’s question sticks to me like a burr.
This was a hunting trip, not because Byron was a hunter himself, but because he wanted to film and photograph that popular sport. In my view, Byron was documenting all aspects of life in the mountains, one photo excursion at a time.
In the left hand image the man operating the movie camera is likely the packer for the trip. Behind him is Jimmy Simpson, the guide. Byron often did set-up shots like this. Either he was filming while someone else clicked the shutter of the still camera or, as in this case, someone else was posing as the cinematographer while he took the still shot.
This blog is associated with the website Harmon Mountain Studios where you can view a large selection of Harmon mountain images and order exhibition quality prints.
I had a revelation on Tuesday in my Feldenkreis class.
I’ve practiced conscious breathing exercises in many classes: drama speech classes, sufi breathing, yogic breathing, continuum movement breathing. I’ve understood the importance of exhaling, of emptying the body of air and toxins in order to allow the inbreathe to occur naturally. I’ve practiced this without seeing clearly what was implied.
I don’t want to go into a complex description of the diaphragm and how it works. Instead, here’s a breathing exercise I was given in hospital following surgery to help the body recover quickly from anaesthetic. It’s pretty much the same as the exercise in Silke Billig’s Feldenkreis class about the diaphragm.
Lie on the floor or your bed and empty your lungs. Keep breathing out until you feel there is no more air to be expelled. Hold your breath out until your body naturally begins to inhale (not as a gasp, but as a slow and natural replenishment).
There was more to the class—practice in relaxing various parts of the body while continuing with this breath pattern.
THE REASON I wanted to write about this today is that part of the epiphany for me was realizing that the entire world is holding its breath IN as wars, natural disasters, and mis-directed politics unscroll a scenario of doom before us, with our tense bodies in flight fight or freeze.
Exhale those toxins and allow your body to naturally inhale a new perspective. Relax your muscles as healing oxygen flows throughout your body. I can’t guarantee it will change your worldview but I promise your body will thank you.
I conclude with this photograph because I so love the name of this section of beautiful coastline on the south shore of Vancouver Island.
I have been reading books about plant “intelligence” for most of my adult life, as well as photographing flowers in the Canadian Rockies and on the BC coast. In particular, the work of herbalist, author, Earth poet and teacher, Stephen Harrod Buhner, who died in 2022, has changed my view of the world, particularly the plant world, and contributed enormously to my present good health at age 78.
On Stephen Buhner’s website, after his death, I found this quote: He hated secrets and much of his work was about exposing them. “And death is one of them,” he said. He wrote about his own dying in part to break the injunctions about saying truths about dying out loud and in large part because he was in service to what is real which he did in his articles and books that hold timeless truths and guidance of how to be a human being, one species among many in the community of Earth.
My Lyme’s disease was not life threatening but it was challenging and transformative.
Buhner’s book, Healing Lyme, introduced me to an alternative path to healing when western medicine could not cope. I wrote about my healing journey in the online journal, Dark Matter Women Witnessing, current issue, My Body, an Ecoterrain. This piece was included in the anthology Women Witnessing Dreams Before Extinction which was published in 2024 and can be ordered from the Dark Matter website. The anthology covers the first ten years of this amazing literary journal.
My favourite book of Buhners is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, Beyond the Doors of Perception Into the Dreaming of Earth.
Now I am reading Zoë Schlanger’s excellent book, The Light Eaters, How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.
This book is written from the perspective of western science, and follows the slow, laborious and contentious journey by western scientists to reconsider the life of plants, which is now approaching conclusions written about by Buhner (who she doesn’t cover) and known by Indigenous cultures.
It is a fascinating look at the evolving body of knowledge about plants which our western trained minds will accept as being credible because science based; details of discoveries by men and women who have devoted their lives to fields which expand our knowledge of plants and related fields, like electricity, (yes), bugs, microbes…
Our thoughts, and the products of them—the fabric of our cultures, the direction of our invention—have behind them trillions of plant bodies, each alchemizing the world into existence.
Zoë Schlanger, Chapter 2, How Science Changes its Mind: The Light Eaters.
When producing Writers Radio programs, my co-producers and I work from transcripts of the audio editing program Hindenburg. It is a boon—and, it makes mistakes, especially now that it is assisted by AI. Ingrid encountered this while editing a program which referred to the recent death of Joanna Massey. The numbers are time code. Read it all for a great laugh!
How do you live with this grief?
F1 S1 11:22
I guess the rest of you are aware that Joanna Macy is now dying. And I think so many of you are dying. And I think so many of you are dying.
11:34
And I think so many of you are dying.
11:45
And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. It's dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. So many of you are dying. So many of you are dying. So many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. And so many of you are dying. But all of you are dying, I think, too. And so many of you are dying, I think, too, I think, too, I think, too, I think, too. I think I think that I'm dying. And I think that I'm dying, too, I think, too, I'm dying to die.
12:19
So many of you are dying to die. And so many of you are dying to die.Loading more posts…