.: 10 Years In Canada!

Friday, January 04, 2008

10 Years In Canada!

It's 2:00 PM January 4th 1998 and I am crossing the boarder with my roommate Sam at the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit to Windsor. It is the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken in my life. I am leaving EVERYTHING that is familiar to me to move to a new city, and new country. Ahead of us is our moving truck.. a semi loaded to the roof with everything we have ever owned.

When we get to the the other side we are required to go inside at the boarder to officially declare our status with the fine folks of Canada. Our paper work, two sets of documents meticulously prepared by the company who hired us... Anderson Consulting. The trip is a result of eight pull ya through a ringer interviews which resulted in our invasionary force of two. The boarder guard carefully reviews our applications and promptly declares them to be invalid as he begins to fill out a slip for our return to the USA.

Sam faintly sits down on a bench with both hands in his head... and I start to get Detroit on the guy! "What do you mean invalid, these were prepared by the immigration lawyers at Anderson!" To which he replied "I don't care if they were prepared by Bill Clinton him self! They are not correct!" "But everything we own just passed this boarder in a semi truck, we are going to Toronto!" Now raising your voice to a boarder guard is not recommended.... EVER. But I was not going to be deterred and with steely eyes I said "Get your supervisor!"

Minuets later the guard returns with a supervisor and the 10 inch thick NAFTA Binder.... The supervisor flipping through hundreds of pages of free trade documentation, "Actually these papers are in order she says to the other guard, We need to let them in." "Sorry for the confusion she said, and welcome to Canada!" I force a smile and glare at the guard who stamps our visas as if he is trying to drive them through the top of the counter. "Here you go" he says with no apology for the error... I restrain myself from saying "Ya Momma!" and pull Sam off the bench "We are in!, Lets go!"

We leap into Sam's BMW and four hours later we were in our new home in Toronto... our entry all but forgotten there was a sense of exploration in the air, we were fish out of water big time and quickly we determined that Canada was going to be very different from the USA. Like everything there has been the good and the bad but after five visas I finally became landed in Canada. I have made the decision to stay and the experience has transformed my life. So it is January 4th 2008 and I sit here and reflect on everything that has happened in the past ten years. Canada is more than a country, its a refined idea of how life and humanity should be, and I am smitten by the very idea it represents. So heres to the next 10 years!

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

1 comment:

Naijadude said...: Wow thats interesting, 10 whole years?? its been awhile. But whatever happened to the border guard??
Well i hope the 10 years have been a good experience and wish you well in more to come! Here's to another 15 years, no not really make that 25 years!!; 12:35 PM

The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com