An Introduction
“Eva Rose and Judith", 2015
"The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet, 1903
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Judith Leitner: art educator, photographer, mother, grandmother, newlywed, and lifetime wanderer and wonderer. As I write, I am living in Merion Station, PA; my previous hometowns include London (Ontario), Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Madrid, and, most recently, Toronto.
I am the creator and owner of My Voice My Lens, an innovative program designed to inspire participants to reflect on individual and shared values and identities through the art of self-portrait photography. Its primary mission is to shape and invigorate dynamic conversations that invoke important questions and shared insights re: leadership, health and wellbeing, and diversity and inclusion. I inaugurated My Voice My Lens in 2012, when partnering with The Ontario Arts Council and the Aphasia Institute, and continue to collaborate on shaping this series of workshops at Wave Financial (2016-present). As this entrepreneurial life-chapter evolved, I was also immersed heart-and-soul in co-founding, team-crafting, and teaching visual art at the ground-breaking Toronto Heschel School (199I-2021). I am truly grateful for the generous invitations to connect with and learn from each and every one of my students and colleagues - a bountiful constellation of original, innovative thinkers: my greatest teachers all.
“My Body” Anonymous - Cohort 1, Aphasia Institute, 2013
“Untitled” Maryam Babaloba
- Cohort 7, Wave Financial, 2019
“Weaving Our Ideas” Grade 2 Collective - Toronto Heschel School, 2004
My Backstory
Revisiting Family Photographs, 1983
In retrospect, I've been 'seeing' with an artist's mindset and photographer's eyes as long back as memory allows. In my earliest, most lucid remembrances, I visualize my brother and I immersed in our parents’ and sisters’ telling and re-telling of pre-war, wartime, and post-war stories, all the while sifting through a treasure trove of small black-and-white photographs. They also shared how these precious artefacts had been transported across a heaving ocean from Bruxelles to Halifax in 1950; apparently, the 2 large boxes of photographs proportionately outnumbered my family's other immigrants' belongings.
As with all 'great art', I would respond by filling in the 'empty spaces' with imagined journeys through forests, trains at twilight, danger, and safe homecomings. And, as with all 'eloquent art', these deeply meaningful, interwoven picture-stories continuously influence and enrich my own life-trajectory.
And thus began MY VOICE MY LENS: The Art and Power of Self-Portrait Photography. I wander and wonder through space and time: camera in-hand, attentive to the fluidity of light and the ways it shapes form and meaning and memory, re-negotiating my identity as I find my self embedded in landscapes, cityscapes, and waterscapes, dedicated to teaching and learning from this, my current passion project... and... framing my pictures as 'posed questions', so that one day I might make my way to an answer.
Self-Portrait Tommy Thompson Park, 2020
Looking forward to 'living the questions' together!
Thoughts most welcome!
J
In my next entry Rosa: A Story of Love and Memory I will share with you my 10-year visual journal documenting my mother Rosa's journey into Alzheimer's. I'll talk about the ways my camera held my hand, allowing me as daughter and artist to stand back and to step in – the duality of detachment and intimacy, and, inevitably, how this profoundly influenced my passion for teaching and making self-portraiture.
