Category: Street Photography

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Street Photography

Flash Fiction: What would it be like to win the lottery?

A woman sits in a window reading a note.
Reading Note In Window

Melvin phoned his mother and, as always, she asked if he needed money.

No, Ma, I don’t need money, he said.

Why not? Is something wrong?

It was hard to say who had the more annoying voice: Melvin, with his unctuous wheezing, or his mother, with her whining rasp. Between the two of them, they could have vocalized all the sound effects for a film shoot in a car parts manufacturing sweatshop.

Afterwards, when Delores had time to reflect on the conversation, she told Melvin’s father that it was the most bizarre conversation in a lifetime of bizarre conversations with the boy. He told me he loved me, Bert. Can you believe it?

Bert shook his head and agreed that it was a strange thing for the boy to say.

He said he was grateful for all we’ve done for him through years. For being his parents. For giving him life. I mean, what kind of crap is that?

Bert shook his head and wondered if Melvin was using again.

Delores didn’t think so. The boy’s voice sounded clear and he strung his words together in an orderly way, not like when he was at his worst.

And he didn’t want money?

No. All he said was how he didn’t need anything from us anymore on account of him winning the lottery.

Well that’s a load of bull. You sure he isn’t using?

Delores gave a helpless shrug and fell to silence. With great effort, Bert hoisted himself out of his easy chair and announced that he’d visit the boy, check to make sure everything was copacetic, take a look around the apartment for the familiar paraphernalia. Delores didn’t join her husband on these visits. Not anymore. The “G” diseases kept her confined to their home: gout and goitre. Gout affected her mobility, and goitre affected her sense of self-esteem. There was also the “B” word. Not a disease so much as a physical state. Breasts. Between the goitre and the breasts, Delores was so top heavy that the consequences of a fall could be devastating. As a precaution, she passed most of her waking time on the living room couch and relied on Bert to run errands. Of course, the trip to Melvin’s apartment wasn’t an errand so much as a duty.

Bert frumped his way across town and burst in on his son doing not much of anything at all. The boy lay on a student’s equivalent of an easy chair, a canvas cloth slung between the slats of a wooden frame, and he was watching YouTube videos on the laptop that rested on his bare stomach. Bert found no paraphernalia. All he found was a lottery ticket stuck to the fridge door with a Bart Simpson magnet. Beside it was the latest list of winning numbers torn from somebody else’s newspaper, a strange anachronism in an otherwise digital life. Bert checked the ticket’s number against the numbers on the strip of newspaper and saw that Melvin hadn’t won anything.

How come you told your mom you won?

I tell my mom lots of things.

But winning the lottery?

Melvin paused a video of skateboarders destroying their genitals on railings.

I dunno, he said. I guess I wanted to know what it’d feel like. You know. To win something. To be more than just a fucking loser.

Bert didn’t know what to say. He never liked speaking with his son. The boy had a voice almost as annoying as his mother’s. Bert shrugged and took his leave and backed out the door. Dolores would need help getting supper ready.

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Street Photography

Flash Fiction: A Ghost Story with a Scary Ending

A black and white photo of a man walking past a steam vent while a cement truck passes in the background.
Temperance Street Steam Vent, Toronto

When he showed up at the office ten minutes late on a Monday morning, everyone noticed. They didn’t notice that he was ten minutes late; they noticed his general appearance. No one came right out and said: Geez, dude, you look wasted. Instead, they stabbed him with their judgmental, Puritanical stares and that was as good as coming right out and saying what he already knew. He’d seen it reflected back at him in the subway window as he rode to work: the bags under the eyes, the coarse stubble that made him look apathetically desperate, the tie that never quite settled into place. All in defiance of the office ethos and its strict professionalism. But most striking of all was the shock of white hair. On Friday afternoon, he’d left the office with a thick head of dark brown hair, and on Monday morning, he’d shown up with the scalp of a man thirty years his senior.

His office colleague (the one people assumed was his friend) approached and put an arm around his disappointing shoulders: Geez, dude, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

That is precisely what had happened, but he was afraid to say anything. The ghost had arrived at midnight, teetering on the fulcrum between Sunday and Monday. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake when the disparate wisps coalesced at the foot of his bed or whether he’d been dreaming when it first assumed its form. He had thought the ghost was there to scare the bejeezus out of him since scaring people seems to be the point of ghosts. But things didn’t play out that way. They shot the shit for a while—this and that—and things grew comfortable enough that he excused himself to get a beer from the fridge. When he returned, he found that the ghost had cracked a cold one, too, and was lounging with its feet up on the spare night stand.

He wasn’t Roman Catholic, so he couldn’t be sure, but he’d say the ghost was in a limbo situation. At one point, the ghost mentioned the bardo, but that could’ve been the brand of beer. Limbo. Bardo. Whatever you call it, the ghost had unfinished business on this plane and he expected that, as the night progressed, the ghost would ask for help concluding whatever it had to conclude in order to release itself from its entrapment in the netherworld. But the request never came. The ghost had another drink, and then another and another. The ghost was having too much fun to ruin it with talk of unfinished business, preferring instead to ramble on about the joys of a full life, the love of a good woman (or man, as the case may be), the passionate pursuit of interests, a deep curiosity about the world at large.

As the earliest light began to unfurl itself across the city, he interrupted the ghost and asked: but aren’t you going to frighten me, you know, say boo or something?

The ghost laughed and swung its feet from the night stand: Really? You want me to say boo?

The ghost excused itself to take a piss and when it came back it said: You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked and, to be honest, you don’t need me to say boo. You have enough to be afraid of as it is.

As the first light slipped through the cracks in the window shade, the ghost vanished. He was angry. This was the best the ghost could do? He’d stayed up all night, talking, drinking, baring his soul to an apparition. And this? This? He slapped on a rumpled shirt and didn’t bother to shave. He skipped breakfast and ran to the subway station. Riding into the office, he stared at his reflection and noted that he looked like hell. He rode the elevator to the 33rd floor, coffee in hand, and steeled himself for his office job, noting the semantic detail that he didn’t actually work in an office, but in an interior cubicle with no view of anything except a stupid screen saver of his employer’s corporate logo jittering across the monitor.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: The Magical Land of Janice

Entrance to ION Orchard viewed at night from Scotts Road, Singapore
Entrance to ION Orchard viewed from Scotts Road, Singapore

Janice fell asleep on her way to work. She’d got on at Greenwood and was lucky to find a seat. That, perhaps, was her downfall. She hadn’t drunk her morning coffee yet, and there was something about the subway’s side-to-side sway that set her mind adrift in the magical land of Janice. Ordinarily, she switched at the Bloor/Yonge interchange and rode down to the financial district where she worked in a clothing store that sold tight-fitting yoga pants to people with too much money. Had she been standing, she might have noticed the missed stop, but this morning she lay slouched in a corner, oblivious as the train rumbled past her station and continued west. She woke to a voice on the public address system announcing that they had reached the end of the line and all passengers must leave the train. Oh God. Janice jumped to her feet. Heart pounding, she grabbed her things and ran from the train.

The station didn’t look unfamiliar. It adhered to the rules laid down by a secret global society of subway station designers. All walls must be covered in glossy porcelain tiles that looked (and sounded) like the interior of a giant shower stall. All floors must be of a polished aggregate like the floors in virtually every high school ever built. And, most important of all, the structure must reinforce an ethos of soul-deadening conformity. By these rules, this station could have been the station she used when she left for work in the morning, or it could have been the station she used when she arrived, or it could have been the station she used for her regular visits to the local liquor store.

The only way to distinguish one subway station from any other was to look for the name neatly etched in the porcelain tiles, always in the same sans serif font, maybe Helvetica, like the default font setting for Janice’s email client. She saw that she was exiting Orchard MRT Station. She’d never heard of the Orchard MRT Station. Then again, she never went to the west end of the city. She harboured a private fear that if she went all the way to the west end of the city, she might fall off the edge of the planet, flailing her limbs and screaming into the soundless depths of space. When she shared her fear with her cousin, the one who lived in Wingham, the girl scowled and accused her of going full Toronto, what with her centre-of-the-universe pretensions and general uppityness.

Orchard MRT Station, Singapore
Orchard MRT Station, Singapore

Conveniently, the Orchard MRT Station had an exit straight up the middle of a mall that looked like any other mall. Janice rode the escalator and found the shop where she worked with its stock of overpriced yoga pants and its sales staff with their generic pasted-on smiles. She threw her bag in the back and swapped her flats for heels, then began her day. There were pleasantries with the customers. A few good sales. A short lunch break in the food court downstairs. It was a good day like any other.

When her shift was done, Janice swapped her heels for her flats and decided to go for a walk before riding the subway home. She strolled all the way down Orchard Road, in and out of malls, until it turned into Bras Basah Road, then she walked along North Bridge Road across the river and down along the quay. She paused for a drink at a table overlooking the water and waved to tourists who chugged by in a boat on its way down to the Marina Bay Sands. A little further along, she realized she was hungry and found a place that served fresh seafood. Others joined her under a patio umbrella, and although she didn’t know them, they would do just as well as any of her usual friends. Together, they drank. They laughed. They did group poses for influencer posts to their social media accounts.

It was getting late and Janice had to be up in time for work the next morning. She had to stop doing this, going out late, drinking more than she had planned, then sleeping past her stop the next morning. She walked over to the Clarke Quay MRT, and although she didn’t know exactly where it went, she had faith that, one way or another, it would take her home.

Boat at night on the Singapore River
She paused for a drink at a table overlooking the water
Categories
Street Photography

Using black and white to silence the noise of Toronto Pride

Black and white photograph of people sitting on scaffolding against a white background, most of them watching something in the distance.
West side of Yonge Street, south of Bloor, Toronto

For the first time since the beginning of the global pandemic, the city of Toronto has not cancelled Pride celebrations. We so needed a party! For one thing, the city needed a reason to cut loose. Just because. For another thing, it gave us a chance to celebrate the fact that we enjoy freedoms here that the rest of the world seems hellbent on demolishing.

The festivities were mercifully free of the freedom rhetoric that our gaslighting friends from the anti-mask, anti-vax, trucker convoy movement have been tossing around so flippantly. It was such a relief to shut out all that noise, even if only for a few days, and to fill the city with noise of a different sort, the pumping bass of dance music and people cheering and laughing and filling the air with a positive energy.

It’s a funny thing, all that noise. While I like the idea of noisy celebration, and while I like to lose myself in the crowds, I do have my limit. I am, after all, an introvert, and if I spend too much time in dancing screaming throngs, I go mental. So I go out for a few hours, and then I retreat to my fortress of solitude to recover a sense of equanimity.

This tension between celebration and solitude finds its analogy in my photographs. Pride is about rainbows and glitter cannons and wild splashes colour. But the auditory overwhelm that finally drives me to silence has its correlate in the visual field. The colour fills my eyes and my answer, in the quiet of my post-production space, is to desaturate my photographs. It calms my senses.

During Sunday’s parade, people had climbed the scaffolding around the construction site on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. Behind them was a broad white swath that served as an obvious background for a photograph. For a black and white photograph. Although colourful (for example, a person in the front row sits on a trans flag), the image plays just as well without colour.

This gives me pause for one last thought: does the act of desaturating a photograph have a political dimension? A rainbow flag means something. A trans flag means something. But in a context where colour is an important signifier, can the removal of colour be construed as a hostile act? I remove colour for a cognitive reason, to avoid overwhelm, but my benign intentions may be a pale excuse.

Categories
Street Photography

The Front of Things

A man in overalls steps up onto the curb beside a fire hydrant while in the background are stores fronting a city street.

I’m surprised at the number of fledgling street photographers I follow on social media who complain about being nervous when they shoot strangers. They’re reluctant to shoot them straight on. They’re afraid something bad might happen. The person they’re trying to shoot might get angry or punch them out.

I think of the scene in The Godfather when Johnny Fontane, the Vegas crooner, is speaking to Vito Corleone. He whines to the Don that his voice is getting weak; he’s all washed up; a Hollywood director has passed him over for a good part. Don Corleone yells at him that what he can do is act like a man, then he smacks Fontane in the face and mocks him. That’s what I want to do to people who complain that it’s too hard to stand in front of people and take their photo.

Act like a man, godammit! You think you’re somehow unique because you feel nervous? Everybody feels nervous. Feeling nervous is a good thing. Only psychopaths don’t feel nervous. If you feel nervous, at the very least, it means you’re not a psychopath. More than that, feeling nervous puts you on edge. It gives you a heightened sense of your surroundings and a greater feeling of immediacy in the moment. You make better images when you feel nervous.

As for making people angry, it happens. Some people will regard you with suspicion, as if you plan to do something nefarious with their image. It’s a fact of contemporary life that a strong strand of paranoia winds through our public engagement. As a photographer, it’s part of your job to allay those feelings of paranoia. If you find yourself channeling Vladimir Putin, maybe you should find other ways to spend your time.

And as for fears that someone might beat you up, exercise common sense. Don’t shoot late at night outside the local Hells Angels clubhouse. Personally, I’ve never found myself in a situation I couldn’t talk my way out of. In my experience, some of the meanest scariest looking people have proven to be some of the most receptive to my photographic overtures. I suspect their appearance means most people avoid them and so these mean scary looking people are excruciatingly lonely. The minute I express interest in their lives and demonstrate that I’m not afraid, they open up to me and are happy to pose for my camera.

https://youtu.be/idP5-vtkhBE
Categories
Street Photography

The Back of Things

A man walks south down Yonge Street with his left hand pressed to his hip.
Yonge Street south of College Street

Shooting street photography, I feel a tension between shooting from the front and shooting from the back. This tension has its correlate in the wider world of social relations. Most of us are conflict averse and would rather not face people head-on even though we know we should. Maybe somebody slights us and we feel we ought to stand up to them. It’s a matter of principle. It’s a matter of personal dignity. But when the time comes, we feel nervous. We hesitate and the moment passes.

Something similar happens with a camera in hand. We know that, at least in street photography, the best images happen when the subject approaches us. We get to look them in the eyes and examine their expression. If we shoot them from the back, it’s only because we’re cowardly. We tell ourselves we haven’t got the right stuff. Our inner critic yammers on until it makes us feel two inches tall and we wonder if we’ll ever be any good at our chosen craft.

And yet, as with any rule-bound practice, we discover that the rules take us only so far. There are occasions when it’s best to break the rules. Sometimes the view from the back offers its own interest, as it does here with the hand pressed to the hip, the posture of discomfort, the four rings on the left hand, the rumpled texture of the shirt. The scene from the back raises enough questions in its own right to sustain our interest.

I find the same situation arises with buildings. The front of a building has an obvious interest. But sometimes, the back of a building tells a story all its own and I would miss that story if I didn’t duck around the side and explore what lies behind.

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Street Photography

Statistical Photography

Black and white photo of a woman wearing ear buds and smoking while texting on her cellphone.
Shot on SE corner of Queen St W and Bay St, Toronto

I’ve noticed that in the curation of my own photos, there’s a statistical process at play. I go out and I shoot and I shoot and I shoot. When I’m done, I dump my images into a folder and do a preliminary cull. Typically, half my photos go into the trash right at the start. I load the rest into Lightroom and begin a closer examination of my shots, flagging those I like best for post-processing adjustments like colour correction and cropping.

So far this year, 1 in 14 of these images have made the cut. That’s 1 in 28 of my total. In any given year, that leaves me with a thousand or so images of a certain quality which I then cull to a hundred or thereabouts, those I regard as suitable for print. In other words, I end up with 1 in 10 of the 1 in 28. If my math is accurate, that means that, on average, I make 280 images for every one that really satisfies me. That ratio is pretty consistent year over year.

No doubt other photographers function differently. Some take greater care at the moment they capture the image, making sure they release the shutter only if they know the image is good. For them, the ratio of satisfying images is higher. But that isn’t me. I can’t afford to be so precious. I subscribe to the Wayne Gretzky school of photography: the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t make 100% of the shots I don’t take. So I shoot and I shoot and I shoot.

As odd as it may sound, the global pandemic has provided affirmation of my approach to photography. The pandemic has made me daily mindful of statistical thinking and its importance to public health policy. No one action will guarantee that I avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but if I wear a mask and get vaccinated, and if others do the same, then collectively we improve the odds that everyone will avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus. It’s all a matter of statistics.

Applying the same kind of thinking to my photographic practice … no one photo may be a great photo, but if I keep shooting, and if I do my best with each shot, then, statistically speaking, at least a few of those shots are going to be good. The real trick is recognizing them when they happen.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographic Clichés

A woman cleans the interior face of a store window, holding a bottle of window cleaner in one hand and a white cloth in the other.
Window Cleaning on Spadina Avenue

I remember hearing a story about a university student taking an English Lit course. The class had been assigned Shakespeare’s Hamlet and on the first day of lectures the professor asked: “So what did you think?” The student put up his hand and said: “It was great, but there were too many clichés.”

I have no idea if the story is true. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, it’s becoming a bit clichéd in its own right. But the story points to the fact that every cliché was once an original thought. Before there were new age self-help gurus, there was Polonius saying to his son: “To thine own self be true.” And before we had hedge fund managers standing on ledges, we had Hamlet saying: “To be, or not to be. That is the question.”

Although photography hasn’t been around quite as long as classic literature, it has explored huge swaths of what it is possible to say with images. It has developed a canon of “great” images and these images have produced a kind of stylistic grammar. Want patient suffering? Look to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Want the 1000 yard stare of collective trauma? Look to Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. Want puddle jumping? Look to Henre Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazare.

Tourism has added to the range of our stylistic grammar. For example, if you Google “holding up the leaning tower of pisa” you end up with enough visual cheese to make a thousand pizzas. And, of course, there’s the selfie. Here I am in Times Square. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. And here I am at the Taj Mahal.

As evidenced by today’s featured photo, I am a great practitioner of the visual cliché. In fact, I am absolutely shameless in my taste for visual cheese. I have a couple thoughts on this. First, trying to put my own spin on what the masters have done before is a great way to hone my craft. Second, let’s be realistic. With eight billion people on this planet, the majority of whom now walk around with cameras in their pockets, the chances of me coming up with anything original are minuscule. Even if I do come up with an original idea, it’s likely that other people are coming up with the same idea simultaneously.

In such an environment, it makes more sense simply to revel in cliché. Own it. Roll around in it like a pig in mud.

Categories
Street Photography

The Migraine Dress

A woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress.
Woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress

I get migraine headaches. They are textbook classic migraine headaches. Most of the time, they follow the same pattern. First, I see a hole. A spot goes missing from my visual field. Maybe I’m reading, and as I move my eyes from left to right, the words on the right disappear as I shift my gaze. It’s as if all the words tumble into a black hole. Or maybe I reach for something and I notice that my hand has disappeared. It’s an odd feeling to lose track of your body parts.

Next up are the fortification hallucinations, jagged lines shaped like the parapets of a medieval fort, but unlike fortifications, these lines shimmer, and they’re lit up like electric arc lights. When the fortification hallucinations start, the whole world lights up and quivers. The woman’s dress shown above, looks a lot like the start of a migraine headache. Clearly, this woman does NOT suffer from migraine headaches; if she did, she would avoid this dress like the plague.

These preliminary stages are called the aura. There is speculation that they are the source of stories about poltergeists. Many people, myself included, report an extraordinary sensitivity to sounds and strange auditory sensations. While this is probably caused by a sudden rush of blood through the ear drums, I can understand how premodern migraine sufferers might have thought they were hearing ghosts. At the same time, I experience a taste/smell of icy mintiness. And let’s not forget about the numbness that typically affects my left hand and the left side of my face (because the migraine headache affects the right side of my brain).

Of all the preliminary stages, my favourite is transient aphasia which typically lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. I use the word favourite loosely. It’s such a weird experience to hear words inside my head but find myself unable to communicate them. The experience makes me feel horribly for those (like Bruce Willis) who have permanent aphasia because of a brain trauma or progressive dementia.

On a couple of occasions, I have had a journal close at hand when I happen to be entering the aphasic stage of migraine and so, as an experiment, I have recorded whatever happens to enter my head as I pass into and out of my aphasic state. The results are odd and I have shared them on my other site, nouspique.com.

Then comes the headache proper. Most of the time, medication keeps the worst of it at bay. But there are times when nothing helps. It feels like somebody has taken knitting needles and a hammer and has pounded the needles up my nostrils through my brain and out the top of my head. The next day, it feels like I have a hangover from the bender of the century.

Why would anyone wear a dress that looks like that?

Categories
Street Photography

The Naked Truth

A man stands naked on a busy street corner.
Butt naked at the intersection of Church & Bloor, Toronto

I could stand butt naked (or is it buck naked? I’m never sure) on a busy street corner, and nobody would notice.

That seems to be the way it is for me. I write. I photograph. I create. But I attract very little attention to myself.

In the world at large, it seems as if people are scrabbling over one another for attention. Despite talk about cancel culture and deplatforming, never have so many of us had so much access to tools designed to amplify our voices. In fact, our apparent anxiety about cancel culture and deplatforming implies that we regard widespread attention as a right. We have the right to develop a personal brand. We have the right to carry media studios in our pockets to promote that brand. We have the right to be famous.

I regard myself as a bit contrarian and, certainly when it comes to digital culture, I feel like I’m forever walking into a serious headwind. Still, I feel that my time has come. No, I don’t think I’m on the cusp of becoming famous. Only that I’m better prepared for an inevitable and impending oblivion.

In her Norton Lectures: Spending The War Without You, Laurie Anderson has this to say about our creative impulses:

We’re also the first humans who face the possibility, some say the probability, of our own extinction. And we’re the first humans who are trying to find the words for this. But here’s the thing about stories. A story is usually something you tell to somebody else. And if you’re telling a story to nobody, is it still a story? And this is our awesome job. We are the first humans to try to do this: to tell a story to nobody.

I’ve pulled the quote from the second of the CBC Ideas broadcasts starting at 36:20.

Laurie Anderson gives me hope because she makes it clear that I’ve devoted my whole life to the bleeding edge of our latest (ultimate?) cultural trend: I’m seasoned in the art of telling stories to nobody. I have no expectation of fame or even of a modest reputation, and I have no confidence in a posterity to receive my creations.

That isn’t as depressing as it sounds. It’s simply to note that I act on interior motivations. I do what I do because I have to. Obsession. Compulsion. Call it what you will. I prefer to think that I am motivated by the immediate pleasure I feel at the very moment of creation. It is a quiet and private satisfaction and it is enough.

Categories
Street Photography

Feeling Down

A man stands naked on a street corner and stares down at his schlong.
Toronto Pride, Church & Bloor St E

While yesterday’s post concerned bodily autonomy in the face of state power, today’s post concerns the related matter of photographic autonomy in the face of media power. Ironically, most contemporary public conversations happen on media platforms that are privately own. These are the virtual equivalent of POPS or “Privately Owned Public Spaces.” The problem with POPS is that, although they feel public, the usual constitutional protections, like freedom of expression, don’t apply. Private ownership means that the owners of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Telegram and Tik Tok and YouTube get to regulate whatever happens on their respective platforms and nobody gets a say. All those arcane clauses in your TOS or EULA documents, those are the law of the land.

In Instagramistan, for example, nudity is pretty much verboten. Assuming you can reach a real person there, you can argue with them until you’re blue in the face about artistic merit or breast feeding or innocent incidental nudity. It doesn’t matter. Their decision is final and there is no further recourse.

This means that nudity as speech, nudity as a way to change hearts and minds, nudity as protest, can’t even get a foothold on these platforms much less convey a message. (Some platforms, like Twitter, don’t regulate nudity, but that could change if/when Elon Musk assumes ownership.) Never mind that nudity as speech has a long and venerable tradition, from King David dancing in his ephod and flipping his schlong (think Scotsmen dancing at a ceilidh) to Lady Godiva protesting oppressive taxation to the Doukhobors in Canada who protested, well, just about everything.

In the context of Pride, public nudity may be celebration, it may be foreplay, it may be strategy, it may be a lot of things. It may also be an assertion of the simple fact that embodiment is fundamental to human experience. Not just queer human experience. All human experience. And attempts to regulate how we talk about embodiment often infantilize important aspects of that experience, like the joyful gift of sexual pleasure, the mystery of its genderedness, and its many frailties that usher us to our deaths.

This is one of the reasons I maintain my own private domain. It’s a fallback. Here, at least, in my own space, I can do my modest part to push back against the ridiculous prudery of Instagram and Facebook.

Categories
Street Photography

Bodily Autonomy

Two naked women walk down the middle of a busy street.
Walking Down Church Street, Toronto

As often happens, noisy news from the US drowns out what’s happening in my own back yard. With the May 2nd leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, talk about abortion rights has formed a tsunami of toxic discourse that has washed over the border and threatens to sweep away Canada’s quieter conversational habits.

Then June arrives with Pride and I’m reminded that conversation in one sphere doesn’t happen in isolation, but leaks into other spheres. To the extent that abortion laws concern themselves with matters of bodily autonomy, their language and reasoning ends up contributing to conversations about sexuality, gender and identity, too. To what extent does the state have an interest in the bodies of its citizens? And how far can it go in asserting its interest? These are questions that we can ask in nearly every sphere of public engagement.

Taking a long view of history, we can be forgiven for thinking there is a general trend that favours bodily autonomy. We have shifted away from the view that treats the body as property. Feudalism and indentured servitude give way to natural rights theory. Humans have a transcendent quality that eludes bondage, or so goes the narrative. We abolish slavery. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in women which means that women are not subject to masculine authority. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in people who express their sexuality differently. And so it goes.

Until it doesn’t.

I find it odd that the pro-life crowd lean to the libertarian end of the political spectrum. A rational person who enjoys coherence in their public conversation might expect a libertarian to favour bodily autonomy. I guess we shouldn’t expect coherence from people who call themselves pro-life while renewing their NRA memberships. As a famous American poet once said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” It seems an incidental fact that the poet in question was also gay.

If we are to be consistent, we should also reinstate laws that criminalize suicide since those laws were premised on the view (from feudal times) that suicide is an offence against the state because the body exists by right of the state. We abolished such laws because they were cruel. That was the same motivation for the abolition of abortion laws. But these days people seem inured to cruelty. For the sake of consistency, maybe we should abolished compassion altogether and be done with it.

Categories
Street Photography

People Not Doing Things

A man offers a pamphlet to a passer-by who ignores him completely.
Pamphleting in Dundas Square, Toronto

There is a kind of street photograph that I try to avoid at all costs. It’s the “catch whatever’s walking down the sidewalk” photograph. People being people. People going to work. People going home from work. People waiting for the light to change. People walking at night. People walking in the morning. People walking in dull light. People walking in bright light.

Yawn.

I prefer to capture people engaged in interactions either with other people or with their environment. People kissing people. People yelling at people. People avoiding puddles. People protesting things that make them angry. People spray painting messages on walls.

In the first case, I could photograph a cardboard cutout on the sidewalk and you wouldn’t be able to say for certain whether it was a flesh-and-blood person or a poster from the print shop. In the second case, my photograph would capture a dramatic encounter impossible to replicate no matter how many times I revisited the scene.

However, every rule has its exceptions, as does the rule about photographing people only when they’re engaged in interactions. In today’s photograph, a man offers a pamphlet to a passing woman who emphatically ignores him. This documents a deliberate refusal to engage.

In a way, this encounter typifies all contemporary public discourse. Never have so many people had so much to say. And, thanks to universal literacy and social media, never have so many people had the means to disseminate their messages. At the same time, never have so many people found themselves the unwilling audience for so many messages. Never have so many people felt so overwhelmed by the sheer noise of others exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms.

Increasingly, this dynamic produces an exchange in which one person does their utmost to promote a message while another person, the intended recipient, does their utmost to ignore that message. As Janis Joplin never said: “Freedom’s just another word for making a nuisance of yourself.”

Categories
Street Photography

Pushing back against Susan Sontag: Cozy in Plato’s Cave

Man in tie and overcoat walks past the west entrance of Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel.
York St., West entrance of Fairmont Royal York Hotel

The first essay in Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, is titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I love Sontag’s writing. It does what all good writing should do: it provokes me. It doesn’t try to be my friend; it tries to make me think.

The trope of Plato’s cave—firelit shadows dancing on a wall—suggests the basic mechanisms of photography itself. Instead of firelight, photographers rely on sunlight or flashes; instead of shadows, they capture light reflected from their subjects; and instead of a wall, they cast that light on film or image sensors. Sontag invokes the trope the way clergy tell a parable: it has a didactic purpose. Like the dancing shadows, the reflected light we have captured on our image sensors is a dull likeness of a fuller reality that lies just beyond our apprehension.

But there’s something about Sontag’s tone that troubles me. She expresses her views in extreme terms:

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

I’m troubled by her use of the word all. She lays this down as an absolute law of universal application. She leaves no room for variations in personal experience.

At the end of the essay, she offers another grand pronouncement of universal application:

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

First published in the New York Review of Books nearly 50 years ago, her words have taken on new life in the post Instagram age when people will produce 1.72 trillion photographs in 2022. How prescient! say her admirers. Well. Yes and no.

While I do agree that we are a society of image-junkies, our addiction goes beyond image-making. We are addicted to stimulation: binge-watching Netflix shows, road rage in GTA, Twitter hate-fests, Tik-Tok porn, live-streaming Ukraine gun battles. An image avalanche may well be the least part of our addiction.

What Sontag’s observations may miss 50 years after the fact is that, among the countless motivations for making images, many contemporary image-makers may use the process as a defence against over-stimulation. Like so many others, I answer Sontag’s invitation to turn around in Plato’s cave and stare at the world as it really is, only to find a world so saturated with stimuli that I find myself inundated.

My reality is a media-saturated reality. The only way I can cope with its overwhelm is to turn its tools on itself. I don’t make photographs to colonize the world, or to commodify it, or to fetishize it. I make photographs as a way to throw up a buffer between myself and a fuller reality. I tighten the frame and get rid of the colour to make the buffer more effective. Without that buffer, I would go crazy. I need Plato’s cave. I need the protection it gives me from a version of the real that isn’t interested in my well-being.

Categories
Street Photography

Plywood Canyon

Woman passes plywood-covered shop windows on Bloor Street. A diagonal shadow terminates at her feet.
Woman Passes Plywood-Covered Shop Windows, Bloor Street, Toronto

I can’t speak to the way things played out in other cities during the pandemic. All I have for a reference is what I observed in Toronto. Based solely on appearances, Toronto looks like any number of large American cities. That’s why, in films, it often serves as a body double for cities like New York and Chicago. Of course Toronto isn’t an American city. While the features that distinguish it are often subtle, those features are real all the same.

Early in the pandemic, when everybody went into lockdown, most retail enterprises had to shut down. Unless they could hold themselves out as an essential service, they had to shutter their doors and send their workers home. As soon as this happened, most of those stores covered their doors and windows with sheets of plywood. By this gesture, these stores said, in effect, that they expected an end-of-civilization scenario complete with marauding gangs and looting and molotov cocktails.

I can’t say for certain, but I get the feeling the plywood order came from head offices in large American cities where end-of-civilization scenarios are more probable. Especially in those cities where (lack of) urban planning has encouraged (white) flight to the suburbs, downtown cores are less stable in times of crisis. But Toronto is not one of those cities. Say what you will about all the condominiums sprouting like mushrooms, these projects guarantee that the city’s core enjoys a vibrant street life which in turn promotes a greater sense of social cohesion.

In addition, there is a certain alchemy in Toronto that’s harder to nail down. Call it local culture if you like. The fact is: people in Toronto are extraordinarily compliant. Relative to other large cities, rates of violent crime here are extraordinarily low. (The 2021 Safe Cities Index ranks Toronto as the 2nd safest city in the world). Vaccination rates in the city have been high (almost 90% for 2 doses). And most people have accepted public health protocols like masking and social distancing.

Despite the evidence, as soon as Doug Ford issued his first state-of-emergency order in March of 2020, retailers with windows fronting on major thoroughfares covered those windows with plywood. As I discovered on my pandemic photo walks, the only people out on the streets at that time were the homeless and marauding gangs of photographers. I feel badly for all the trees they wasted.