The Inlent - Winter; The Ice Fishers.
The idea of returning, of patterns, of seeing oneself as separate and a part of one's surroundings has been on my mind.
I return to the inlet daily to observe that everything has stayed the same except for the date and the weather.
I return to watch the ice fishers and remark how things remain the same here. I am observing myself, but I do not recognize myself in my observation.
How do we all condemn and criticize our actions and patterns without seeing our reflection in the world we pick apart?
I am returning to watch men fish just as the men return to drill holes in the ice to lower their lines.
I walk the same way, do the same things, remark upon the mundanity of my surroundings, and make remarks about myself.
Home is the place for now; I am here, home, tripping over shadows of myself and looking for someone or something to blame.
So I return to watch the men fish with my camera and project my life onto theirs, except now I am conscious of what I am doing, and the fish are all the better for it.
Hello everyone, it seems that March is upon us, and here in southern Ontario, the weather is abnormally warm already for this time of year, making winter feel like a distant memory.
I completed a small series of images entitled “The Inlet - Winter: The Ice Fishers,” which will be my first handmade zine made with the inexpensive inkjet printer I recently purchased.
The zine is now sold out. Thank you to everyone who picked up a copy; I genuinely appreciate your support.
Cyclical events have been on my mind lately, and this small body of work, made over a few months, is an ode to the idea of returning to one place and observing it and one’s internal landscape.
These photographs were inspired by the photography of Jem Southam and Alexandra Rode, and I encourage you to check out their work.
The zine is handmade in an edition of five with an Instax (instant film) film photograph of the inlet made consecutively one after the other and acts as a guarantee that this form of publication can never be reproduced outside of this limited edition.
It is printed on 65 lb bright white card stock measuring 4.5 by 6.5 inches. The zine contains twelve monochrome images and text and is numbered and signed. It has a total of fifteen pages, and the cover image is a scan of three Instax film photographs made throughout the process of photographing the inlet. The zine is bound with double-sided tape and black wrap on the spine. It is a testament to the DIY spirit I love in art.
The zine will cost $20.00 Canadian, and this includes standard shipping (no tracking) to the United States and Canada; for those of you who might be interested residing elsewhere, I can get a quote from the post office for you and adjust the cost of the zine for you accordingly.
If you are sincerely interested in purchasing a copy, there are only four left of the five already, and you will need to email me. Do not comment if you are genuinely looking to pick up a copy.
matthewpoburyny@gmail.com
That will do it for today’s newsletter, and I hope to have some prints to share with you next month as I learn how to prepare my digital files for print (I am already getting along pretty well with my very inexpensive and quirky setup).
I will leave you with some quoted passages from a book I am currently reading from the library by Paul Gruchow entitled “The Necessity Of Empty Places.”
Thank you for stopping by, and I will see you all in the Spring; take care!
You may record the phenology of frogs and sunflowers and cranes, but it is not possible, as naturalist Ann Zwinger has said, to keep phenologies of your children.
Their lives are not cyclical, as lives in nature appear to be. Your children do not come back in the same form to the same places season after season.
The best you can expect from children, the thing you hope for, pray for, is that they will grow and change, that each year will be for them new and different, an advancement.
We live our lives along a linear progression we cannot forecast.
I find structure in the life of cranes but not in my own life or in the lives of my children, I realized, because I see cranes in communities but I think of humans individually.
The paradox of Easter is the paradox of rebirth. Yet the death and rebirth of a community is not paradoxical.
An individual sandhill crane is born, matures, and dies: but the community of cranes returns century after century to the same meadow at the foot of the sandhills along the North Platte River in southern Nebraska.
It is this truth, the transcendence of the species over the individual, the way in which a community endures and accumulates a history despite the frailties of the creatures who inhabit it, that we celebrate when we stand in awe before the great seasonal migrations.
The story of Easter is not paradoxical either if we will think of it in the same way: If we will think not of the individual existence, which is fleeting, but the continuities in the human community—the continuity, despite everything, of human life, of culture, above all, of faith.
very meditative and calming. I love it, man. Makes me want to dissect a specific location in my neck of the woods!
What a wonderful way project. In all my years on social media I never saw too many ZINES being made. Here on Substack I’m seeing so many, especially from photographers!