Category: Street Photography

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Street Photography

Black & White Directs the Sight: a Post-processing Mnemonic

A street preacher with white hair and beard speaks to a gathering of youth on a street corner. Sunlight glints off a cross he wears and it looks as if his chest is on fire.
Light reflects from cross worn by street preacher at Yonge & Dundas intersection, Toronto

I’m standing on the southwest corner of Yonge & Dundas with my eye on a street preacher. He’s older, with a shock of white hair and a Santa Claus beard that makes him look like a prophet the way people look prophetic in Cecil B. DeMille movies. He’s gathered around himself a group of young people who look on as he shares the good news. He sways a little and I shoot a burst as he’s swinging through the full range of his sway. Well that was interesting, I think, and I go on my way.

It isn’t until I get home in front of my computer screen that I realize one of my images captured a glint of sunlight reflected from the cross dangling against the prophet’s chest. If I believed in any of the man’s hoo-ha, I might take the glint of sunlight as a sign. It’s an alignment of sorts, like the alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only in this case it’s the alignment of sun, flat surface of the cross, and my image sensor. Either way, it must mean something, no?

Then comes the all-important question: colour or black and white? In this instance, the answer is determined by the fact that the whole point of the image is the fiery cross. My choice will depend on which format shows up the glint to best advantage. Does colour or black and white do a better job of directing the eye to the centre of the preacher’s chest?

There are no absolute rules, of course. Every fresh photograph presents a fresh context for a decision. In this instance, colour is a distraction. It draws our attention away from the only thing that really matters in the context of this image. All of this highly subjective, of course. On another day, with my stomach rumbling after a dinner of spaghetti, I might have decided the image makes more sense as a riot of colour, signifying something else, like the vibrancy of urban living. But as it is, I had lasagna for dinner and I made my choice.

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Street Photography

A Month of Nothing but Black and White Photographs

I went through a street photography phase where I made nothing but black and white photos. There is a massive bias on photo-sharing sites towards black and white photographs. If I post a black and white photograph on Instagram with a #bnw hashtag, I get far more traffic than when I post colour photos. Black and white is “real” street. Colour is for wannabes and Joel Meyerowitz.

I expect the bias goes back to the days before colour film existed. Early masters of street photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson had only black and white film to work with and look at what they produced! Clearly, colour film isn’t a necessary condition of great photos. The convention continued long after colour film became widely available, at first because it was more expensive and fussier to develop, and later because … Well, just because. That’s what it means to be a convention.

Here we are in the age of digital sensors where there’s no cost difference based on the colour values we assign to a given pixel. One would think that in such an environment the bias against colour photography would evaporate. But no. It’s as prevalent as ever. Now cameras come with black and white settings so you can pretend you’re shooting with black and white film. Or, you can convert your colour images to black and white in post, either through apps on your phone or through fancy software packages like Photoshop or Lightroom or through plugins like Nik Effects or Luminar.

The only thing we can say for certain about the decision to shoot black and white is that it is no longer a technical or financial decision. Photographers have shifted the decision into other spheres, like aesthetics and politics. And so, for the month of June, I will present black and white images with commentary about why, sometimes, it might be preferable to do things the old way. Not always. But sometimes.

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Street Photography

Buddies In Bad Times

A father and small child walk on the sidewalk while holding hands. In the child's free hand is a happy face balloon. On the building in the background is a large sign that says: Buddies In Bad Times Theatre.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Yonge Street and Alexander, Toronto

If you didn’t know about Buddies In Bad Times before, you certainly did after the building on the corner of Yonge & Alexander came down. Toronto’s premiere queer theatre took advantage of clear sight lines to tack a massive poster to the side of its building. Unfortunately, like everything else in Toronto, construction on a new condo began a few months later and the sign vanished behind scaffolding.

But there were a few good months when I could stand on the west side of Yonge Street and shoot east, watching people pass on the opposite sidewalk while the BIBT sign offered commentary. Oftentimes, on busy city streets, scenes play out in ways that are no less theatrical than staged productions. So I was pleased when a father and child entered from stage right. The child held a happy face balloon which seemed to contradict the “buddies in bad times” message.

I love it when I end up with a photograph that suggests an internal contradiction. Don’t ask me what this means. I have no idea. It makes me happy just to produce an image that raises a few questions for the viewer.

Construction worker surveys site of future condominium at the corner of Alexander & Yonge Street, Toronto
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Street Photography

Crossing Rosedale’s Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge

Night shot standing on Toronto's Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge. A blurred person runs towards a group of people loitering at the far end of the bridge. In the background rise the apartment buildings of St. James Town.
Crossing the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge, Toronto

A place only becomes a place as it accumulates memories. Recently, the city blocked off both ends of the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and began work replacing it. The former bridge, the bridge I’d grown to love, had wooden slats reinforced here and there with sheet metal where the wood had begun to rot. It was almost impossible to set up a tripod and take a long exposure because the minute anybody else stepped onto the bridge, it began to shake. And in a mild breeze, the whole structure wobbled. My wife refused to step onto the bridge because she was afraid it would come crashing down into the ravine below. But I enjoyed pausing in the middle of it and imagining I was on a ship in rough weather.

Unless you look closely, you might miss the fact that the bridge is pasted over with memories. Some of those memories are public, some personal. Most obvious is the plaque at the north end advising that the writer, Morley Callaghan, used to walk his dog, Nikki, every day across the bridge. In fact, the bridge is often call the Morley Callaghan Footbridge although I’m not sure if that’s its official name. More recently, the bridge appeared in an episode of the Hulu production of The Handmaid’s Tale. I know, because I was walking underneath the bridge at the time and accidentally fucked up one of their takes. And just a few weeks ago, a psychopath gunned down an an innocent exchange student outside the Glen Road entrance to the Sherbourne subway station at the south end of the bridge. I didn’t say all the memories had to be happy memories.

Once the city has finished its project, dismantling the old bridge and replacing it with the new, will this still be the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge? I suppose this question is a variation on the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you replace each plank of the ship until none of the original planks remains, can you say that it’s the same ship? In the case of this bridge, if you reconstruct it and give it the same name as the original bridge, does it still support all those memories? Or does it hasten their disappearance? Like shadows running away in the night.

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Street Photography

Good Will Hunting

A woman in a winter coat walks along the sidewalk past a giant poster of a woman dressed in fur.
Advertising Poster on Bloor Street West, Toronto

I have a small wooden display case for Hohner mouth organs. It’s old and scuffed and my wife wishes I’d throw it out. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because it belonged to my great grandfather. Frederick (Fred) Barker, who died long before I was born, kept a small general store in a small community in a backwater of New Brunswick. This display case comes from that store.

I don’t imagine his store was much of a going concern, but it was enough to sustain him and his wife Mary and their four sons. Back at the turn of the (20th) century, Fred sold the sorts of goods that people living in the town of Sheffield might need. He didn’t advertise. I’m not sure it would have occurred to him that he could advertise his business. Even if he had advertised, I doubt it would have made any difference.

Fred relied almost exclusively on good will to attract his custom. He fostered that good will by being an active member of the community. He attended the local church (in fact, two of his sons grew up to become clergy). And when people entered his shop, he spoke to them by name. He expressed an interest in their lives, and in turn they expressed an interest in his life. Good will.

Nowadays, it’s almost inconceivable that somebody could rely exclusively on good will to sustain a business. It may have something to do with increasing urbanization. Maybe the way capital swallows up small businesses and integrates them into large organizations. Maybe it has something to do with changing cultural expectations. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of those things along with other reasons I can scarcely imagine.

Today it’s a matter of scale. When Fred ran his general store, it was a modest concern that fit hand-in-glove with the community it served. Now, retail concerns have grown so large, the customers appears as ants by comparison. It’s no longer the case that the customer is always right. Instead, the customer is always small.

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Street Photography

Too Old To Fail

Shadowy outlines of the words "Hudson Bay Company" remain on the wall of the former Bloor/Yonge retail location after the sign has been dismantled. People pass on the sidewalk underneath.
Hudson Bay Company, Bloor Street East, Toronto

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve grown accustomed to the phrase “too big to fail” as a justification for using government funds to prop up large corporations. The rationale is that certain companies are so large that if they collapse, the consequences will ripple throughout the national or even global economy and take everything down with them. For example, if a bank defaults on its obligations to its depositors, they will then default on their obligations, too, and so on. Never mind that the people who lobby for government money by crying “too big to fail” are the same people who, at any other time, would declare themselves neoliberal small-government libertarians. But that’s a rant for another day.

It strikes me that the phrase “too old to fail” has some traction too, though maybe for different reasons. I feel no sentimental attachment to the Royal Bank of Canada, but I feel very differently about the Hudson Bay Company. As a boy, I read about how Henry Hudson and his son were set adrift in the spring of 1611 by a mutinous crew who were tired of masking wintering in the newly discovered Hudson’s Bay. They floated off, never to be seen again. I read, too, about the adventures of Radisson and Groseilliers and imagined myself paddling alongside them as they explored uncharted territories.

In 1670, a group of wealthy courtiers obtained a Royal Charter formally establishing the Hudson Bay Company. And in 1869 the HBC sold the region known as Rupert’s Land to the recently formed government of Canada (rejecting an American offer).

However, recent transactions have sucked most of the romance out of The Bay and remind us that it’s now just another company, as subject to the logic of free-flowing capital as any other. For example, in 1978, it acquired Zellers. Zellers for fuck’s sake! But that wasn’t the last shit discount retail store it acquired. It bought Towers in 1990 and Kmart in 1998. Holy crap! In 1979, billionaire Kenneth Thompson acquired a 75% stake in the company and, like an unsexy version of Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, proceeded to break it apart.

But the nail in the coffin of HBC romance came in 2008 when an American private equity firm bought the company for $1.1 billion. In 2020, they took the company private and that, as they say, is that. Earlier this year, they announced that they were closing the local retail outlet at Bloor and Yonge. The place where I buy all my underwear! Gone with the snap of a finger. Earlier this month, a crew came and pulled the sign off the side of the building and turned one of Toronto’s shittiest stretches of sidewalk into an even shittier stretch of sidewalk.

But I should have known better. As I boy, I could be forgiven for getting swept away by a romantic telling of the Hudson Bay story. But what took me so long to revisit the story with the critical eye of an adult? What took me so long to recognize that this is just another example of capital, whether in 1670 or 2020, deployed to make a handful of people obscenely wealthy at the expense of whole nations of people and the natural resources that sustain them?

A stain on a wall is easy enough scour away. But other stains endure.

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Street Photography

The Advantage of Photographing Scenes that Disappear

A woman walks through a sliver of morning light on Yonge Street while behind her is a shop called Mind Games with a bolt of lightning above the woman's head.
Woman walks through the morning light on Yonge Street

One of the great advantages of living in a place where the cityscape is disposable and buildings are routinely demolished, rebuilt, and demolished once again, is that if you get a decent shot, the light just so, a person passing through the light just so, a thunderbolt above the person’s head just so, no one else can replicate your shot. The building that served as your backdrop is now a 60 story condo. And another 60 story condo across the road forever blocks that perfect sliver of morning light. Condo killed the photo star. Or something like that.

Fuck Ansel Adams and his photos of eternal natural majesty. El Capitan and all those other enduring scenes from the American southwest. Now, tourist photographers from all over the world show up at these sites, pick out the three holes in the ground where the previous photographer set up their tripod, and set up a shot that exactly replicates all the shots that have gone before. Boring. Worse than boring. All that tourist traffic to popular photographic sites is posing an environmental threat to the natural landscape. At least when I’m tramping through the city streets, there’s not much I can do to make the environment worse than it already is.

That’s why I say fuck Ansel Adams. Not because I dislike his work. I like it very much. But because we need only one Ansel Adams. We don’t need 20,000 tourist Ansel Adams. Be something else. Be you. It’s easier to clarify who you are in a landscape that changes before anyone else can replicate your shots.

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Street Photography

Garbage

A night photograph of bags of consumer waste piled up by the Dundas Street entrance to Toronto's subway.

Coming out of the pandemic, I had great hopes. I entertained a fantasy that, as a society, we would engage in serious introspection, we would learn valuable lessons, and then we would apply those valuable lessons to other areas of our collective life. Just imagine, I thought to myself, if the pandemic’s lessons in epidemiology could provide us with transferable skills, like an understanding of how exponential growth works, or how statistical modelling can help us understand the consequences of collective behaviours.

But here we are! On the down slope of the 6th wave. With no guarantee that there won’t be a 7th wave (although Sting tells us that love is the 7th wave). And no guarantee that we have the stomach to do anything about it even if there is a 7th wave. While I understand that people feel frustrated and worn out, I also recognize that what we have faced—a pathogen—does not reason, does not negotiate, and does not favour one ideology over another. All we have in answer to it is a commitment to apply public health principles and a willingness to learn as we go. For me, that means getting all the vaccinations to which I am entitled, wearing a mask indoors where necessary, and avoiding large indoor crowds of unmasked people. Ideally, I place myself in proximity to people who share my approach so that we can be mutually supportive.

Unfortunately, a pathogen is the least of our worries. There are things we do to ourselves that pose a far greater threat. However, these other things play out on a timeline that allows us to be distracted by more immediate concerns. Consumerism is a fine example of a threat that routinely stymies our collective imagination. We are smart people, aren’t we? It should be no problem to apply our lessons about exponents and statistics. It’s a straightforward thing to extrapolate from a few bags of consumer waste to a situation in which the oceans bloat with plastic and microplastics circulate in the bloodstreams of every living creature on the planet, including you and me. This doesn’t even take imagination. All it takes is a pencil and a calculator.

You think wearing a mask is an inconvenience? Jesus fucking Christ, wait’ll you see what’s coming 20 years from now. We’ll remember these as the good old days.

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Street Photography

Will public libraries become a distant memory?

Night shot of a woman walking past the entrance to the Yorkville Public Library in Toronto
Toronto Public Library, Yorkville Avenue

Carrying on with my May theme of “things that were but are no more” I give you public libraries. With the approach of Ontario’s June 2nd provincial election, incumbent Doug Ford has announced that he will be halving provincial support for both the Southern Ontario Library Service and the Ontario Library Service-North. Ironically, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have learned how to pronounce them. Instead, he routinely abuses our ears by calling them libarries.

This isn’t the first time Doug Ford has exhibited hostility towards libraries. More than 10 years ago, as a Toronto City Councilor, Ford found himself in a war of words with Margaret Atwood over his attempt to chop municipal funding to local libraries. Again, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have found himself better armed for the battle. Then, as now, he went on about libarries and said of Atwood: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” In the same CBC article that disclosed this nugget, we learned that his brother flipped his middle finger to a woman who yelled at him for driving while talking on his cellphone. Ah, Robbie, R.I.P. as you float around in the Elysium Field of witty ripostes.

The problem with defunding libraries is part practical and part symbolic. Libraries provide countless non-obvious benefits to a community. People who foster a social democracy cast of mind have little difficulty noticing these benefits. But for those more politically keyed to believe that people should get only what they deserve or have paid for, such benefits pass mostly invisible. That’s shorthand for: I don’t feel like listing the practical benefits of libraries because, if you don’t know what they are or don’t believe they’re real, then I’m not writing this for you in any event. Persuasion is a waste of time.

In symbolic terms, libraries represent a commitment to learning, literacy, research, and perhaps most importantly, to the written word as a shared resource. Politics aside, knowledge is inherently social, and if you hamstring its social dimension, it withers. The body politic withers. Civil discourse withers. We are all diminished.

Although Doug Ford can’t find the minuscule sum in his budget to ensure that his libarries thrive, he has no difficulty pledging $1.2 Bn for a new prison in northern Ontario. Let’s be blunt, this is just an overpriced housing scheme for Indigenous people. I wonder if Ford has the imagination to see how public institutions like libraries serve a prophylactic function, disrupting the path that leads to a prison’s front doors. For $1.2 Bn, the new prison better have a top notch libarry.

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Street Photography

Continuity Is For Wimps

A middle-aged woman with glasses carries a plastic tray with some plants and wears a white T-shirt with the words: "Continuity is for wimps"
Woman buys plants in Kensington Market, Toronto

I don’t know what it means to say that continuity is for wimps. I do know that I am capable of reading a four word sentence—almost any four word sentence—and egregiously overinterpreting it. Sometimes what makes a sentence great is that it provides fertile ground for overinterpretation. Without that possibility, it would be just another boring sentence.

In the context of words, continuity may have something to do with flow. In turn, flow may be related to the passage of time. When we read a good paragraph, we say it conveys a sense of continuity to the extent that it carries us seamlessly through time from start to finish. The conjunctions and, but, and or (language’s logical operators) contribute mightily to that sense of flow. But the use of conjunctions by itself isn’t enough; their use has to be apt. “Montezuma shouted at Mary, but the dog had died.” This may be a fine use of a conjunction. However, we can’t know this without context. The dog might have no connection whatsoever to the relationship between Montezuma and Mary. A dishonest author may have tried to falsify the existence of a relationship.

The word but can anticipate a reservation, too: “I like you, but … ” Nobody wants to hear the second half of that sentence. In situations like this, we cry out to the speaker: if you feel a compulsion to make your sentences flow, now would be a good time to resist; chop things up like a fresh green salad.

Speaking of fresh green salad, I think of all the times during Trump’s term in office when I heard people complain about how the orange wonder’s speech came off sounding like word salad. America’s foremost pussy-grabbing toupee wearer has a mind remarkably untroubled by concerns for continuity. The stuff in his brain at the beginning of a sentence may not be the same stuff in his brain at the end of a sentence. Pit him against a consummate prose stylist, Julian Barnes, for example, and the difference is stark. Reading Barnes is like drinking a smooth 21 year old single malt. Listening to Trump is like drinking screech scraped from the sides of a barrel and boiled in a tin bucket.

Even if we suppose continuity is for wimps, I’m inclined to think it still depends on who’s pulling the levers. There are extraordinarily discontinuous writers—most notably poets—who still manage to produce compelling work. It’s not so much that they’ve turned their backs on continuity so much as that they’ve foisted responsibility for it onto their readers.

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Street Photography

Photographs of what was but is no more

Shirtless man covered in chalk sits on bench with a balloon that says: Happy Birthday!
Man sitting outside the Bloor/Yonge subway station, Toronto.

As is my habit, I start each month with a fresh theme. For the month of May, I will feature images that represent things / people / buildings / neighbourhoods / objects / ideas that were but are no more. All photography seeks to freeze time. All photography fails in this because time carries on; we gaze at the frozen photograph and can’t help but note how much things have changed. Far from freezing time, our photographs underscore how quickly it flows.

Nothing alerts me to this flow quite like a visit to the local archives. For me, that means the City of Toronto archives, but most cities have an archival service. What shocks me is the speed at which my own photographs become “archival.” The word “archival” calls to mind old black and white prints of people wearing dated fashions and crossing streets where the only mode of transportation is horse-drawn carriages. But my own photographs are quickly becoming archival because the world they portray is vanishing, and at an accelerated pace.

Part of it may have to do with a cultural shift. Once upon a time, we were outraged to learn that General Motors had adopted a principle of planned obsolescence as a way to guarantee a future market for its products. But we’ve grown complacent, allowing the practice to drive consumer demand for everything from new clothes to new phones to new intimate partners. This cultural shift has even crept into municipal planning so that now we treat large buildings, even entire city blocks, as if they were disposable. As a result, it takes only a few short years for our urban geography to become unrecognizable.

I pass a homeless man I’ve seen at different corners throughout the downtown core. Shirtless. Body covered in a chalky white powder. A helium-filled foil balloon says Happy Birthday and reminds me that another year has passed me by. At the man’s bare feet are a dozen or so shopping bags—the universal symbol of consumerism—stuffed with all his belongings. In the background I see scaffolding at a construction site. Today, this is the site of a 76 story condominium residence. I can’t remember what stood there before the demolition.

Most troubling of all is the fact that, today, 7 years after making this image, I no longer see this man anymore. Even people are disposable. Some more than others.

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Street Photography

Saying goodbye to a month of candid photography

Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto. The woman wears a bright red dress, the man wears a baby blue suit. Both are blessed with ample buttocks.
Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto

This is the final post in a series of candid photos that ushered us through the month of April. This is by no means the last word on the matter given that the possibilities for candid photography are as varied and as interesting as the people on this planet.

As I see it, there are only two circumstances in which I run out of candid photos. The unlikely circumstance is that the government passes legislation prohibiting this kind of photography. At least in Canada, this is improbable because the ability to photograph in public is intimately tied to constitutionally protected conduct. One day, we might become the creatures of an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel constrained by constitutional principles. Trump could get re-elected and decide, like his buddy Putin, to invade a neighbouring country. But until such a day arrives, I view the opportunities for candid photography as limitless.

The more likely circumstance that could put an end to my candid shooting is that deep fakes become so widespread they render photography meaningless. I see that a year old video of Bill Gates sporting breast implants has retrended on Twitter. Snopes declares that the video is digitally altered, but debunking it isn’t enough to make it go away. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more unreliable our digital ecosystem becomes in its documentation of the real world, the less likely we are to believe anything is true.

As people assume digital manipulation as their default approach to online images, those like me who make such images will move on to other kinds of image making. Maybe we’ll manufacture backdrops for dystopian sci-fi virtual reality games. Or we’ll produce animal porn. But it’s a losing game. In time, even these specialized areas will be taken over by AI image-making engines.

Eventually, we old-school documentary photographers will grow old and tell tall tales of the amazing and improbable things we’ve seen. No one will believe us, of course. Anything we’ve seen, AI can do better. So we’ll drink ourselves into oblivion instead.

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Street Photography

Health Care Worker on the way to his next shift

Health care worker in hospital greens crosses the street
Health Care Worker heads to Saint Michael's Hospital, Toronto

Throughout the pandemic, my wife has been able to work from home. But every so often she has to go into the office to handle something that can’t be handled virtually. She’s required to carry a laptop with her wherever she goes, but it’s heavy, so I serve as her personal pack mule. I walk down with her early in the morning, carrying her laptop and my camera gear, then I go on from there with a morning photo walk.

Back in the spring of 2020, when we first started doing this, the downtown streets were all but empty. There was no traffic coming into the downtown core and the only pedestrians were either essential workers or, oddly enough, street photographers like me documenting the emptiness. I caught this health care worker arriving for a morning shift at St. Michael’s Hospital as we were standing at the Queen/Victoria intersection. I note the Blue Jays baseball hat, a reminder of a life outside the job even as the job was beginning to overwhelm our health care workers.

Do you remember how, every evening at 7:30 pm, people leaned out their windows and banged on pots and pans to celebrate the dedication of front line workers? When did that stop? It seems our energy petered out, maybe falling victim to Covid fatigue. Two years on, it strikes me that our front line workers need the celebration and encouragement more than ever. Instead, they have to deal with a government that dickers over trivial wage increases. They have to confront incessant denialism and disinformation from a subculture of ignoramuses. And, because so many end up exposed to Covid-19, they find themselves understaffed and unable to deliver the level of care to which they are committed.

I suspect the best way we can support health care workers is to do our best to ensure that we don’t need their services. That way, they are free to offer their services to those who truly need them. That’s my subtle way of saying: wear a damned mask when you’re indoors, self-isolate when you’re sick, and take all other prophylactic measures you possibly can.

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Street Photography

Is that a bullhorn? Or are you just happy to see me?

A man with a bullhorn walks down the sidewalk with a man carrying a flag.
Man with Bullhorn, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Early in the pandemic, before I had figured out that anti-vaxx anti-mask anti-government anti-everything protesters were meeting every Saturday to stage their little marches, I would see people scurrying along the sidewalk who seemed out of place. For one thing, they were walking with purpose. Nobody walks with purpose on a Saturday in downtown Toronto except if it involves shopping. But these were no shoppers. I didn’t understand then that they were rushing to their rallying point where they would get themselves whipped into a frenzy before they took their message to the streets. For another thing, they came in their dozens with flags and signs and bullhorns. What good is a message if you can’t shout it loud to a shopping public?

Ah, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the basic freedoms that buttress a healthy democracy. Even though I vehemently disagree with these people, and even though I think their notions of civic engagement have all the subtlety of a collision with a planet-sized asteroid, I celebrate these moments. They remind me that I share these basic freedoms and, if I so choose, I can stand on a street corner and speak my mind without reprisal. They also remind me that, as part of the social contract, it is my responsibility to ensure that these people feel free enough to continue without reprisal as well.

My daughter went through a stage where she would ask me what things I grew up with that we don’t have anymore. Typically, I would answer with things like rotary phones and vinyl. If I had thought more closely on it, I might have flipped her question on its head and told her about things that didn’t exist then that exist now. Social media would top the list and, with it, certain ideas about civic engagement that have changed since we all became so attached to our iPhones. In particular, I am mindful of cancel culture, an idea that didn’t exist when I was my daughter’s age.

Forget for a minute that cancel culture is something people on the left do to people on the right or vice versa. Instead, abstract yourself from specific political leanings and view cancel culture as a structural problem. When people complain that they have been cancelled, they are telling us that they have been deplatformed. They still enjoy their freedoms; they just have no way to enjoy them. A classic example from 2021 was Twitter’s decision to cancel Donald Trump’s account. We’ve encountered similar events on a smaller scale closer to home. When anti-vaxx protesters tried to enter Toronto’s CF Eaton Centre, private security personnel enforced a mask requirement and prevented them from entering. It seems almost an incidental fact that Toronto police arrested two protesters for assaulting the personnel.

Both incidents illustrate that the constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms that safeguard a democracy apply only to the relationship between citizens and the state. They aren’t binding upon private enterprise. Twitter owes nothing to Donald Trump. Cadillac Fairview owes nothing to the shoppers (or protesters) who enter its premises.

The problem with a world where civic engagement happens increasingly in privatized spaces (especially privatized virtual spaces) is that it is increasingly vulnerable to cancellation. Democracies, and the political thought that underpins them, hasn’t been able to keep up with this strange shift.

But I assure you, me and my camera will be there, tracking the moat that protects our ever-dwindling freedoms.

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Street Photography

What’s more important? Staying fit? Or performing fitness?

A young couple go for a morning run and their image is reflected in a store window as they round the corner.
Out for a Morning Run on Balmuto Street at Bloor, Toronto

I hate exercise. I’m not particularly fit, but I live in a building with a gym and so, in order to get my money’s worth from my common expense fees, I visit it at least 3 times a week. The sound of my bones creaking confirms to me that I’m still alive.

I’m glad my building has a gym. A regular gym wouldn’t let someone like me be a member. I think it was Nietzsche who first articulated the gym paradox. He adapted it from Schopenhauer’s haute couture paradox: they won’t let you into a fancy clothing store unless you are wearing fancy clothes, but how can you be wearing fancy clothes in the first instance if they won’t let you in to buy them? In Nietzsche’s version, they only let you into the gym if you look fit enough to belong to a gym, but how can you look fit enough in the first instance if they won’t let you join to become fit? Is it any wonder most of us sit on the couch in sweat pants and hoover potato chips?

When it comes to exercise, I think I have mixed motives. Like everyone else, I claim that I exercise for the sake of my personal health. But in rare moments of self-reflection, I discover that it’s more complicated than that. The real reason I exercise is to “earn” the right to eat a bag of chips or drink a bottle of wine by burning an equivalent number of calories. Or, since exercise comes after the fact, it’s more like doing penance. In fact, there are deeply religious overtones to my exercise: “Forgive me, rowing machine, for I have sinned. It’s been a full week since my last session.”

I’m self-conscious and grateful every time I visit the gym and find I’m the only one there. Sometimes I choose odd hours on purpose so I can avoid what I imagine are the judgmental stares of all the buff and beautiful people. But I’m convinced that an extraverted subset of the exercising public is motivated by a need to perform exercise. It’s not good enough just to be fit; it’s important to be seen to be fit. That means working out in high-visibility settings. That means wearing the “correct” clothing with expensive brands that declare a financial commitment to the enterprise. Most important of all, that means wearing headbands.