Author: David Barker

Categories
Street Photography

Child on Buchanan Street

Child climbs a step on Buchanan Street, Glasgow, Scotland

I was standing beside the entrance to the Buchanan Street underground, shooting south down to the Clyde River, mesmerized by the reflective surface of the polished rock, when a young girl (and her reflection) stepped into my frame. How could I not make the shot? I’m not sure what she was thinking but I suspect it was simple curiosity: what is that man doing with that funny-looking box in his hands? There is something satisfying about this shot—the reflection, the way the perspective lines all lead us to the girl, the red bow in her hair, the simple expression of innocence—so that I’ve ended up including it in my portfolio.

A child on a Glasgow street, she reminds us why we’ve tasked our world leaders to gather nearby and hammer out an agreement to limit climate change. She is emblematic of our future. We do this for her.

Categories
City Life

Cop26 in Glasgow

Keep your coins, I want change - graffiti in Glasgow

This year’s iteration of the UN Conference on Climate Change (Cop26) is sponsored by the UK and held in Glasgow. Needless to say, plunking a UK-sponsored event in the middle of a Scottish city must cause tension given that there is a concerted separatist movement afoot in Scotland that has only gained momentum since Brexit. It must also cause tension for a more practical reason. Cop26 will see 30,000 delegates and support staff descend upon a relatively small town (as a Torontonian, I compare it to Hamilton) with only 15,000 hotel beds. Maybe visitors can double up.

To mark the occasion, I thought I’d devote the month of November to photos from Glasgow and environs. I love the city. I have friends who live there and so I have visited roughly 10 times. I feel at ease there. If not for the insurmountable paperwork, I can imagine myself making it my home.

I shot this piece of graffiti during my last visit in 2019 a little before the pandemic. It nicely captures the conflict at play in these conferences between economic interests and environmental concerns. Mud and grit have accumulated especially over the lower half of the mural. Grit floats on the air in Glasgow. Every time I get off the plane at the airport in Paisley, I can taste it. It serves as a reminder of Glasgow’s role as a ship-building, coal-burning, chemical manufacturing centre of modern industry. No matter how hard it works to scour the city’s dirty corners, it can never quite get rid of all the accumulated grit.

Categories
Street Photography

Scary Hallowe’en Photo

Hauling a clothes rack up Augusta Avenue in Toronto's Kensington Market.

I shot this photo in beforetimes. You can tell. No one is wearing a mask.

It was just before Hallowe’en in 2019. Ah, we were so young, so naive. We didn’t have a care in the world. We had no idea what scary things lurked just beyond the horizon.

This year, I’m dressing up as an anti-vaxxer. I’m leaving the mask at home. That’s the scariest costume I can think of.

Categories
Street Photography

Seeing Red

Person stands on sidewalk wearing a maple leaf suit to promote a tax preparation service

By its association with blood, red is the colour of life. Paradoxically, red is also the colour of death because we rarely see blood except when it has been spilled.

In a roundabout way, red is also the colour of equality. We learn this from one of Shakespeare’s most marginalized characters. Shylock cries out: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Pierce the skin and what you find underneath is remarkably democratic.

Red has the longest wavelength of any colour on the visible spectrum (620-750 nm) which means, ironically, that it has the lowest level of energy. I say “ironically” because, when we set aside our scientific bias and examine matters from the more useful perspective of human emotions, we find that red is associated with high-energy feelings, like anger and passion. If we want to provoke a bull, we wave a red cape. If we want to evoke sexual passion, we put a woman in a red dress and call her Carmen. Bizet’s opera would have been considerably different if he had called it Violet; it would have been the story of a depressed banker.

Red is also the colour which appears on the flag of the country I call home. This is not so surprising given that Canada is one of the most sanguine countries in the world (as least by reputation). My use of the word “sanguine” is deliberate. According to medieval medicine, a person whose humour is dominated by blood (sanguinity) is cheerful and happy (like a good Canadian). And that happiness extends to happiness in bed too. Sexual passion.

I’m not sure how passionate a person has to be to stand around in a maple leaf suit trying to persuade people to use a tax preparation service. I’m guessing not much. Unless the pay is really good.

Categories
Street Photography

Orange is the new um Orange

Graffiti on concrete wall near the Bloor Street East overpass at Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto

When I was a kid in art class, I learned that you make orange by mixing red and yellow paints. As my art teacher told me, red and yellow are primary colours, and when you mix them, you get a secondary colour. With words like primary and secondary, what I took from his lesson was that orange is a lesser colour, maybe parasitic on the more legitimate colours. It has taken me a lifetime to undo that bias and give orange the recognition it deserves.

Part of the reason we don’t acknowledge orange as a colour in its own right is that, for centuries, at least in the English language, we didn’t have a word for it. In a book called On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, we learn that people used to describe the colour associated with wavelengths of 590 – 620 nm as red-yellow or yellow-red. It wasn’t until the people of England were introduced to a certain citrus fruit that the word “orange” began to describe things that share the fruit’s colour. And it wasn’t until the beginning of the 18th century that the word “orange” was used to denote the colour itself. So, yes, orange the fruit came before orange the colour and not the other way around. Just imagine what would have happened if people in England were introduced to the pumpkin first.

Categories
City Life

Beating the Drum for Yellow

Yellow Drummers march through Toronto's Bloor/Avenue Road intersection

Yellow shares the middle of the visible spectrum with green. Hovering somewhere between 570 and 590 nm, its wavelength is just a little longer and its energy just a little less than green’s.

Yellow is bright, sunny, uplifting. It is the colour of brilliant morning sunlight, the colour of a cracked egg sizzling on the frying pan, the colour of bumble bees spreading pollen through fields of goldenrod.

Despite the feelings of optimism that yellow can engender, it simultaneously holds negative meanings. A coward is yellow, refusing to face duty and preferring instead to flee.

Yellow has long been associated with a racist trope. The Chinese in particular, and Asians generally, have been called yellow. Since the end of the 19th century, Western political forces have toyed with the trope of the Yellow Peril as a way to manipulate anxiety and to galvanize public opinion. Donald Trump is only the latest in a long line of demagogues to leverage Western racism in this way.

Whenever I use my photography to celebrate the colour yellow, I hope, in some small way, to push back against these tiresome tropes.

Categories
Street Photography

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Walking up Yonge Street towards College Street while dressed all in green

The title for today’s post comes, of course, from Kermit the Frog, who faced discrimination for the colour of his skin. Amphibians have faced such discrimination since the first tiny tadpole sprouted legs and crawled from the primordial slime onto dry land.

Martians face similar discrimination as, historically, they’ve been known as “little green men.” Oddly, feminists have tended to ignore the sexism embedded in the “little green men” stereotype. When you think about it, though, there’s no reason little green women couldn’t be the ones who invade planet Earth. Maybe they need space for themselves because they’re sick of living with all those little green sexist bastards.

Vulcans have green blood. Ask a phlebotomist. It’s one of the first things they learn in Phlebotomy 101.

Ever since Othello killed poor Desdemona, we’ve called jealousy the “green-eyed monster.”

And people can be “green with envy” as Anne Shirley discovers when she dyes her hair.

Green is the colour of money, at least in America.

The colour green falls in the range of wavelengths from 495 to 570 nm on the visible spectrum of light. There is some debate about where blue ends and green begins but given the passion some people feel for such distinctions, I prefer to avoid this controversy altogether.

Personally, I am partial to green. In fact, we named my daughter “Green” but in Japanese because it sounds much more delightful as a Japanese word–Midori.

Categories
Street Photography

Feeling Blue

Walking outside the Royal Alexandra Theatre, 260 King Street West, Toronto

Picasso had a blue period.

The blues is a genre of music that takes its name from an emotional state.

Mild depression is a case of the blues. The cure is to sit on your stoop and play a guitar.

Beginning sometime around World War I, blue started to be associated with being a boy.

Shades of blue have wavelengths between 380nm and 500nm.

Pyroflatulence or flatus ignition (setting light to your farts) is commonly known as a blue angel.

Becoming a blue man can take from 10 weeks to 2 years. However, if you’re in a hurry, you can become a blue man by falling through ice in the middle of winter.

Categories
Street Photography

Purple Prose

Woman leans over a stroller and a baby stares up at her wondering: what the fuck?

The colour violet has the shortest wavelength on the visible spectrum (380-450 nm) and, given its high frequency, it has the most energy of any light that enters our eyeballs.

Violet—or its low class stand-in, purple—is a lavish, extravagant colour. Overblown writing is called purple prose. Overdressed musicians produce movies called Purple Rain. And people who think they’re better than us (i.e. royalty) use purple to reinforce that very rotten idea.

Most edible tubers can be purple. Beets are an obvious example. Despite our belief that carrots should be orange, that’s really a matter of marketing. Carrots would happily be purple if we let them. The same goes for potatoes.

If we fall down and hurt ourselves, a phenomenon called bruising turns our skin purple. And if our lover strangles us, we turn purple for pretty much the same reason (lack of oxygen in our blood).

Categories
Street Photography

What’s The Story

One man accosts another man in Toronto's Dundas Square

I have no idea what’s going on in this photograph. I had parked myself in the southwest corner of Toronto’s Dundas Square, framing a shot and watching as people moved through the frame. It’s a bit like setting a trap and waiting to see what wildlife I can capture. Eventually, these two men walked through my frame and I shot a burst of about 10 stills.

Even though I was within spitting distance of the pair, I have no idea what was passing between the two of them. The guy to the left is wearing a shirt decorated in cannabis leaves. He holds a lighter in his left hand and a cigarette in his right hand. He’s saying something to the guy on the right, waving his left arm as if he’s trying to get the other man’s attention. It’s impossible to hear what he’s saying because there is loud music blaring nearby and because the fountains are splashing water.

The guy on the right is eating a hot dog and continues to walk, either not hearing or deliberately ignoring the man on the left. Is the man on the left trying to sell him something? Drugs, maybe? Is he uttering a racial slur? There’s no way to know simply by staring at the photograph.

I like it when my photographs defy my expectations for them as documentation or evidence. I like them best when they prove to be documentation of nothing. Or documentation of ambiguity. At most, they are evidence of an unknowability at the heart of human experience. We really don’t know what’s going on in any of it.

Categories
City Life

AI Photo Manipulation

City skyline, mid-town Toronto

I received an email from Skylum Software promoting Luminar Neo with its new Line Removal feature (in caps). In just a couple clicks, you can leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence to remove power lines from your photos. Last week it was Adobe’s Photoshop with a new AI tool to change the expression on your subject’s face. Got an otherwise perfect wedding photo spoiled by a frowning bridesmaid? No problem. Select her mouth, click the smile button, and there you go! No one will ever suspect she just heard that her boyfriend is sleeping with the maid of honour.

I’m not sure how I feel about these new reality-bending tools. I suppose my reaction depends upon what I think photography is for. If I’m trying to make pretty images, then I should be happy to have tools that optimize their prettiness. On the other hand, if I’m trying to record my encounters with the world I actually inhabit, then maybe these tools are just a distraction. The world I inhabit is full of power lines and micro plastics, landfill sites and buildings that tower over the forests.

I can tolerate only so many kitschy images before I feel like someone who’s eaten too many slices of cherry pie and needs to vomit.

Categories
Street Photography

Text and Photographs

Poster on utility pole: rental ad titled Husband Abandoned

Certain photography purists insist that text should never mix with photographs, not inside the frame of a photograph, and most certainly not as commentary alongside the photograph. Text is text. Images are images. As I understand it, their reasoning is that if an image can’t speak for itself then it doesn’t deserve our attention. Text is a crutch for second-rate work.

I’m not sure how these purists answer Marshall McLuhan who, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, reminds us that text is a visual medium. Font designers understand this, as do layout and advertising designers. But, in the world of photography, text is somehow parasitic to the truly visual.

Obviously, I’m not a purist. I devote an entire website called nouspique to my textual infidelities. Maybe I have loose morals.

As an aside, today’s featured image is an anomaly because it’s black and white. It had no choice because I shot it with black and white Kodak T400 film on my little Yashica rangefinder.

Categories
Street Photography

Naked man at city hall

Naked man sits in front of Toronto's City Hall.

I captured this man taking a break in Nathan Phillips Square during the 2019 iteration of the World Naked Bike Ride. He’s eating a snack while seated facing Toronto’s city hall. That mushroom shaped dome near his head is the city’s council chamber where our elected representatives debate important issues, some sober, some high on crack. High on crack. Ha ha ha. I’d like to think this cyclist is offering a clinic in transparency. He’s utterly open, with nothing to hide. We could all learn from his example.

Categories
Bugs

Bee on Teasel

Bee on teasel, shot on Lower Don Trail north of the Bloor Viaduct.

Living in the heart of the city, it’s only natural that a lot of my photos are unnatural: traffic, buildings, people rushing through urban spaces. Even a lot of my nature photos happen in the heart of the city. For example, I shot this bee on a teasel flower in the Lower Don Trail just north of the Bloor Viaduct. It required a macro lens, a tripod, and patience.

Categories
Street Portrait

Are the Eyes the Window to Anything?

Street portrait of Ben.

We’ve all heard that the eyes are the window to the soul. I can’t find a source for this cliché, but both Shakespeare and the New Testament offer passages that suggest we can know a person truly by gazing into their eyes. I base my street portraiture on this supposition, and when I post these photographs, I do so on the assumption that you, the viewer, share this supposition too. You gaze into the eyes of my subject and feel you know something about them.

Nevertheless, I find this supposition problematic for several reasons:

First, like most people, I’ve had the unsettling experience of being deceived by a convincing liar. I look into a grifter’s eyes and see nothing but sincerity. Part of what makes this experience unsettling is that it undermines a basic assumption I have about human interaction: I can know a person just by looking at them.

Second, the cliché obviously favours sighted people. And yet people with low vision or with injured eyes manage quite nicely to know and to be known. They demonstrate that my basic assumption is not so basic after all.

Finally, new technology shows how easy it is to fabricate faces. This person does not exist is a web site that generates a face you would swear belongs to your next door neighbour. You gaze into their eyes and impute to them a lifetime of experience when, in point of fact, those eyes have existed for only a couple seconds.

The photo featured above belongs to Ben who posed for me on Yonge Street a few years ago. He is very real, but you’ll have to take my word for it.