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Sci Tech    H2'ed 3/18/11

Husband and Wife Collaborate on "No Secret Where Elephants Walk"

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I'll let Carol expand on the "magic," since I expect you might want to know more about that. 

Carol:   I have always been drawn to viewing animals in their natural habitats. As a very young child, I made friends with Miss Jim, the elephant at the St. Louis Zoo--so, of course I wanted to meet others of her kind in the wild.   And since I was about ten and saw the flamingo diorama at the Museum of Natural History in NYC, I wanted to see those birds en masse on their lake in Kenya.   I never imagined that we would be lucky enough to have more than one trip to Africa, though.

Arnie: Joan, we didn't reply to your earlier question of how we decided where and with whom to go.   Carol and I were having dinner with two other couples who were good and old friends of ours, but with whom we'd never traveled.   We were discussing our desire to go to Africa and both of the other couples said they'd love to go, and were particularly interested in South Africa.   So, I said, "Let's do it" and found a travel agent to help us plan the trip.   As Carol and I were particularly interested in the game preserves, Botswana was a natural addition to South Africa. 

The other two couples were very interested in meeting people in South Africa, which greatly enhanced our trip.   Each of the three couples had great connections, which allowed us to spend an evening with a South African Supreme Court Justice who had been active in the fight to overthrow apartheid, with the top aide to Bishop Desmond Tutu and with community organizers in the townships near Johannesburg.   It's very likely that Carol and I would not have done any (or, at least, most) of this, except for our friends.   We also traveled together very well.   Though we were good friends, that does not at all mean that we would necessarily travel well together.   In some ways, though, this was an ideal trip to test this, since in the various game preserves, our days were pretty much set for us. 

What did you gain by collaborating on this?   Was the end product greater than your individual efforts? Did it make you want to look for more projects to collaborate on?

Arnie: I think that the end product was definitely greater than its parts, both because of changes we each made in response to the comments of the other, but, more importantly, because the two pieces complement, enrich and lend interest and depth to each other.   In March, some of the photos and poems will be exhibited together as part of a show at a gallery in Rhode Island.

We have, in fact, already collaborated on another non-commercial effort around our trip to Ghana last October that we are quite pleased with. I'll let Carol expand on that. 

Carol: Yes, the whole turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts.   Each photo/poem pair offers two separate "takes." Sometimes these are similar, sometimes quite different, but never the same.   The collaboration, once we got serious about it, was quite intense.   So, at that point, I needed a respite.   But we did put together a similar type book to document our trip to Ghana last fall.   We only had a handful of copies printed by an online service, mainly as a "thank you' for the friends who had shepherded us on our week there.   I suspect Arnie has another possible (more commercial type) project in mind, but we will have to see...

Copyright 2011, Arnie Kanter

Arnie: This photo goes with the poem that is the title of the book, No Secret Where Elephants Walk.   Originally, the title of our book was going to be Poetic Images--Africa.   When Carol and I produced a prototype of the book, we decided to conduct a couple of focus groups with friends to get their reactions to the book.   Part of my consulting work involved running focus groups, so I was comfortable in this environment.  

We asked each of the people we invited to read the poems and look at the photos critically in order to give us their honest assessment.   To guide them, we asked them to pick the five photos and poems that they liked best and least and to come prepared to discuss them.   We held two focus groups, each with eight friends.   We got a lot of helpful suggestions from these groups and made changes in the book because of the comments we received.   Perhaps the most dramatic change, though, was the suggestion by one participant that we call the book by the name of one of the poems, "Why not "No Secret Where Elephants Walk?" he asked. As soon as we heard that suggestion, we said, "Yes, that's it." 

The photo itself suggests the enormity of the elephant by focusing closely only on one part, its trunk and tusks.   The small branch it holds is suggestive of the force an elephant brings to bear on its environment, the reason that there is, indeed, no secret where elephants walk.  

                        

No secret where elephants walk


They strip bark, trample

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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of (more...)
 

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