Category: Street Photography

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Street Photography

Casually Strolling Down the Street in a Gorilla Suit

Man in gorilla suit walks down Kensington Avenue, Toronto

Sometimes when I’m out and about (yes, I’m Canadian and I don’t say oot and aboot), I play a game of photography scavenger hunt. I keep a mental list of things I’d like to photograph should the opportunity arise. Examples include: 1) middle-aged men wearing argyle socks and sandals; 2) looters smashing a store window; 3) a woman landing a slap; 4) a dog pooping on a religious tract; 5) a car at the moment of impact as it careens into a utility pole.

But if I included: 6) a random guy walking down the street in a gorilla suit, I guarantee you I would never in a million years get that shot. The only way I could get the gorilla suit shot would be to hire someone. But I never included the gorilla suit shot on my photography scavenger hunt list, so the gorilla appeared quite naturally and I seized the moment.

Lists are fine, I guess, but they don’t do me any good if they distract me from the strangeness of the world I encounter with every step. With a tip of the hat to Yogi Berra, I see a lot just by looking. And if a guy in a gorilla suit happens to appear, strolling casually down the road, then who am I to deny my camera the opportunity to make the shot?

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Street Photography

What’s The Point?

City News at Bloor Street east of Yonge in Toronto

If I’m out on a photo walk and I see reporters, my first instinct is to suppose that something interesting is happening; I should keep my eyes open for opportunities. But when the news reporter is wearing pastels, I know he’s never going to report anything of substance. The most I can expect is school children showcasing new dance moves. Or the release of a new line of cosmetics. Or tips on how to avoid pigeon shit. That’s not to say there’s nothing of visual interest for me to shoot; only that I’ll have to look somewhere else to find it.

In this case, the visual interest lies in the news people themselves. They look as if they’ve just teleported to this corner and are trying to get their bearings. The cameraman is pointing to the west as if to say: Look! That’s west. The reporter (or the personality, or whatever he is) says: Well if that’s west, then which way’s east?

To be honest, I feel sorry for media personalities. They face horrible discrimination, especially the white blonde ones on Fox News. Much of that discrimination has arisen thanks to comedic Fascists like Will Farrell whose Ron Burgundy suggests that news personalities are vapid ciphers. If I had more money, I’d create a charitable foundation that provides support for the victims of such discrimination. Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity no matter where they score on the Human Vapidity Index (HVI), which is a real measure, at least in my own mind.

Whatever’s happening in this photograph, we can see clearly that it’s happening somewhere else. That’s the point of the pointing. There’s something to the west. What is it? Godzilla? Lady Boadecia riding naked on a horse? People wearing last year’s fashions? We’ll never know, but at least we have the consolation of our overactive imaginations.

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Street Photography

Split Perspective

Front & Bay, Toronto

During the pandemic I have noticed a rise in conversations about the benefits of mindfulness meditation practice. I’m skeptical of those people who claim they use it to be more focused, more awake, more aware, more attentive, more directed. As the proud owner of a monkey mind, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to focus attention. My monkey mind isn’t unique; I think everyone has a monkey mind and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

People talk about staring at a candle flame and achieving a state of perfect concentration. They then take that state with them from their meditation to think great thoughts, imagine cutting edge technology, implement never before heard of investment strategies, write Man Booker winning novels, and calculate in their heads the trajectory of the next mission to Mars.

I try. Honestly, I do. But my monkey mind keeps hopping around. There are bills to pay. Stupid conversations to replay in my mind. Infuriating comments on social media that won’t go away. Ear worms from the latest music. An itch on the back between my shoulder blades.

I’m inclined to think the mindfulness meditation narrative, or at least the one that’s pitched to us by the oversimplifying media, is grossly unfair. It presents us with an impossible ideal: a perfect focus that is supposed to unlock astonishing creative potential. Although I’m no expert when it comes to human cognition (if you discount the fact that I engage it every second of my life), I suspect that we can’t help but entertain a split perspective. Part of us lives in the moment while, simultaneously, another part of us detaches from our present self and looks down on us, observing and commenting on that part of us that lives in the moment. This is our monkey mind and we can’t help but give it free play.

I’m an advocate of a far less utilitarian mindfulness, one that puts no stock in achieving a perfect focus, and concerns itself instead with loving kindness, starting with the self. It forgives us for failing to meet impossible standards. We are a monkey mind people. Consciousness is a necessarily fragmented state. We are present both within and without it. We do, and at the same time we narrate our doing.

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Street Photography

Candid Photos: Public Displays of Affection

Bloor/Yonge Intersection, Toronto

I’ve gone two years now without capturing a single shot of physical closeness. With masks and social distancing and self-isolation, people have grown suspicious of personal contact. So when I stood at a busy intersection just as two friends (who obviously hadn’t seen one another since the pandemic began) screamed hello and hugged one another, it seemed almost shocking. They rushed into one another’s arms and clung to one another.

I happened to be standing two steps to the left. At first, it felt awkward, like I was privy to the most intimate moment that had ever passed between two people since hugging was invented. Then I shook my head, like I might shake off a bad dream, and reminded myself that this is the sort of thing people used to do all the time. I reminded myself, too, that unabashed affection in a public space is fair game for street photography. By the time this last thought occurred to me, the moment had almost passed. I raised my camera and captured the tail end of a long embrace that had been two years in the making.

We are forgetful creatures and treat Covid-19 like it’s the first time we’ve ever experienced such a crisis. But it wasn’t long ago that we faced SARS, another novel coronavirus. And before that, there was HIV/AIDS, a global pandemic that remains with us to this day. A generation ago, I lost friends and family to AIDS-related complications. In the intervening years, we’ve forgotten how HIV/AIDS changed physical intimacy.

Before people understood how HIV was transmitted, people refused to touch others especially if they thought those others were gay. (Some were even afraid to sit on toilet seats for fear of contracting the “gay disease.”) When it comes to physical intimacy, the enduring (science-based) legacy of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the use of condoms during sexual intimacy between non-exclusive partners. When infectious disease experts were able to dispel the misinformation and provide better information about transmission, people resumed their public displays of affection. Kissing on street corners, bear hugs, these things started up again, just as they will as Covid-19 plays out.

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Street Photography

Itching for a Pint

PJ O'Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto

Nearly 25 years ago, I woke with a start in the middle of the night with an excruciating itchiness on my back and shoulders, calves, forearms, even my earlobes. In particular, my palms drove me out of my gourd and I starting doing this thing where the fingers of each hand scratched the opposing palm. This worked fine until I started to draw blood. I stood in the shower to ease the itching. I slathered myself in different lotions. I lay on my back and shimmied around the bedroom floor. Nothing worked to ease the itchiness.

A couple days later I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a dermatologist. It was a high-rent location and all the other “patients” in the waiting room looked as if they were there for their latest botox injection. When the dermatologist saw my back, he made his colleagues drop everything and come in for a look. Then he asked me if I’d be willing to put myself on display for grand rounds at Women’s College Hospital. This was the most exciting thing he’d seen all week. My back was a grade A teaching opportunity.

A biopsy confirmed that I had DH or dermatitis herpetiformis. Celiac disease typically manifests as a gastro-intestinal problem but for a subset of celiacs it produces skin lesions. For some, it’s both. Essentially, it’s an autoimmune disorder and, despite the fact that itchiness doesn’t sound like much of a problem, prolonged itchiness is bloody excruciating. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect the CIA to use in Guantanamo. The solution is to avoid foods containing gluten. This isn’t some kind of lifestyle new-age fad diet; this is necessary to keep people from going absolutely bonkers.

And so I changed my diet. I shifted from a wheat-based Western diet to a rice-based Asian diet, not so difficult since my wife is Tamiko. However, it also meant I had to stop drinking beer. Guinness was out of the question.

That explains a moment of wistfulness as I was walking down Leader Lane past the PJ O’Brien Pub and watched a woman retouching the pint of Guinness on the side of their building. Recently, I went to Ireland with friends and, while everyone else drank Guinness, I ordered pints of Bulmers (Magners) cider. I remember the smell of the drinks to either side of me. The frothy heads. The thick opacity. If drinking beer were a carnivorous act, drinking Guinness would be the equivalent of eating a buffalo steak charred black on a grill.

Then I remembered the itching and the moment of wistfulness vanished.

A woman retouches a painting of a pint of Guinness on the wall of the P.J. O'Brian Pub in Toronto.
PJ O’Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto
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Street Photography

Unintended Consequences

Negotiating Concrete Barriers, SW corner of Front and Bay

After the Toronto van attack on April 23rd, 2018, when Alek Minassian drove a van down a Yonge Street sidewalk, killing 11 and injuring 15, the city took measures to ensure that such a thing could never happen again. While the city’s motives are laudable—after all, who wouldn’t support measures than ensure public safety?—nevertheless, implementation came with unintended consequences. The most obvious safety measure the city took was to drop concrete barriers at key intersections where there is high pedestrian traffic. Pedestrians could walk through gaps in the barriers, but the barriers were impassable to vehicles.

One key intersection the city identified was Front and Bay Streets where workers in the financial district move to and from Union Station for their daily commute. The intersection is 14 km away from the site of the attack, but I suppose it is best to err on the side of caution. I visited the intersection a week after the attack and observed how people passed through gaps in the concrete barriers. For most people, it was a minor inconvenience. But for others it was a challenge.

I don’t think this unintended consequence is an aberration. I suspect unintended consequences proliferate every time authorities implement prophylactic measures in the name of public safety. Perhaps this is because safety is not an absolute value, but is one of many variables in risk assessment. If we treat it as an absolute value, then all the other variables get thrown out the window.

After 9/11, the United States Government invoked public safety to secure its borders especially where passage across its borders happened by air travel. The measures it implemented soon became the global standard which means that virtually anyone who has traveled by air since September 11th, 2001 has found themselves subjected to these safety measures. Collectively, we have decided that other values, like privacy, sanctity of the person, and personal dignity, do not matter. However, increased surveillance at airports is a contributing factor in the rise of nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiments, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and general feelings of xenophobia. It is a deep irony that security measures have made the world less secure. Unintended consequences.

The global pandemic has produced a strange mirror image of this behaviour. I call it a mirror image because, while the behaviour is similar, it is reversed. One would think that concerns for public safety would motivate political leaders to err on the side of caution, especially given that today’s global political climate is emphatically conservative and conservatism tends to treat public safety as a plank in its law and order platform. But here we are, beginning our 3rd year of a global health crisis, and politicians both locally and around the globe tell us that we need to set aside our concerns for public safety. Other values, like economic prosperity, are more important.

The only thing I am certain of in all this is that unintended consequences will appear. It’s still too soon to say what these consequences will be, but as surely as the world turns, they will rear their pernicious little heads. I guarantee it.

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Street Photography

There’s what I shoot, and then there’s what I really shoot

Marvelous by Fred Pastries, Queen Street West, Toronto

It often happens, especially when I’m doing street photography, that I shoot something that happens in the blink of an eye. Somebody does something. A fleeting movement. Or a brief interaction. If I don’t respond quickly, the moment will vanish. Later, when I’m processing the image, I have time to examine it and realize that while I was making the shot, there was a lot happening in the frame that I missed.

I’m walking along Queen Street West when I pass the window of Marvelous by Fred Pastries. A woman in white uniform and white mask is making a confection. Before she has a chance to notice me watching her, before she has a chance to ruin the moment by posing, I raise my camera and take a burst of images. I’m wholly fixed on the way she holds her knife poised above whatever it is she’s preparing.

Only later do I notice everything else in the frame. The reflection of the man passing behind me on the sidewalk. The customers in the background. The colleague talking to someone outside the frame. And the chandelier! Really, I think this photograph is all about the chandelier. In this context, its extravagance strikes me as absurd. Why had I not noticed it when I was framing the shot?

In this age of corporate mindfulness and new-age Buddha-speak, people make a lot of noise about the importance of being awake. The idea of being fully awake is lifted straight from Gautama, the Buddha, as reported by his contemporary followers. I review an image like this and say to myself: “If only I had been fully awake, I would have noticed the reflection, the customers, the colleague, the chandelier.” I scold myself for not being observant enough. After all, I’m the guy with the camera; I’m supposed to be observant.

But there is an upside to being unobservant. Especially in the city, there is a feeling that everything is coming at me all at once. The sights and sounds of the street, the roar of the traffic, the screams of the sirens, all of it ratcheted up another degree by the tiny metal computer in my pocket, with its social media feeds pushing the latest horrors from around the world. If I’m too awake, I risk feeling overwhelmed. It feels to me as if it might be a healthy defense against overwhelm to pass at least some of my time in a state of somnolence. This may be in line with another Buddhist practice: loving kindness. As an act of loving kindness to myself, I allow myself, at least from time to time, to be oblivious to what is going on around me.

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Street Photography

Candid Photography: The Pushmi-Pullyu

Bay/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

Looking forward. Looking backward. A balanced view of life that takes stock both of our history and of our future. That’s a nice candy-coated way of interpreting a scene.

It’s just as plausible to say that when a body feels tugs from opposing directions, it remains static. Like Dr. Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu, all it feels is a sense of paralysis.

The interpretation you choose depends very much on context. Since I’m the photographer here and the first person to have a crack at interpreting my own image, I’ll look to my context first. I shot this on March 11th, 2022 at a busy intersection in downtown Toronto. Here is an excerpt from my journal for that day:

Today marks the 2nd anniversary of the WHO’s declaration that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. It also marks the 2nd anniversary of a relentless onslaught of denialism, disinformation, and cranksterism, and has given cover for the rise of populism the world over. To celebrate, the government of Ontario has stopped reporting Covid-19 deaths because knowing the truth of our situation is such a downer and we’re never going to resume our old lives if we keep worrying about hospitalization and death.

If you detected a note of snark in my journal entry, you were right. Despite the government’s efforts to scoot us along into a world where time resumes its normal pace, a mid-winter gloom has settled over the city. Time has stopped. Things seem to have progressed no further than they were two years ago. This is the context in which I made this photograph.

Based on this statement of context, you can see, then, why I would give my photograph a more problematic gloss. People don’t seem interested in a balanced view that draws on accumulated wisdom; they seem hellbent in occupying an ahistorical now. Without movement. Without dynamic engagement.

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Street Photography

Superheroes

Batman T-shirt in the crowd, Kensington Market, Toronto

I grow increasingly skeptical of superheroes. Even ordinary heroes give me pause. Those I admired when I was young have disappointed me by proving to be flawed. As I get older, I find myself reconciled to my disappointment. For the most part, my personal heroes weren’t flawed so much as they were human. My feelings of disappointment are less a result of their failings than of my unreasonable expectations. I had no right to demand more of them than they could give me.

What I once experienced in the personal sphere I now witness playing out in the public sphere. Angry mobs pull down statues because the historical personalities they commemorate fail to meet ever-shifting standards of virtue. I hope one day for a reconciliation in the public sphere that mirrors the reconciliation I’ve crafted in my personal experience. If the aim is to celebrate a person’s virtue, then it was unreasonable to erect a statue in the first place. It’s a cruel thing to impose such a burden on a person’s legacy.

It’s easier to make our peace with fictional superheroes. Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is a billionaire, as is Iron Man’s Tony Stark, and if history has taught us anything it’s that there is only one way to accumulate egregious wealth: through the exploitation of the powerless. In the real world, we would label the trope of the billionaire superhero as cognitive dissonance, but in the fictional world we call it suspension of disbelief. When the video is done, so is the suspension, and we go on with our lives in a world without batmobiles and flying suits.

The modern fictional superhero is an iteration of an older and more durable fantasy: the saviour who will rescue us from evil. In Judaism, the evil, whether it arrived in the form of Ramses or Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar, was an embodiment of a more deeply rooted evil: the people of Israel had strayed from their God. Enter Moses or Ezekial or Nathan to challenge the powers that be and guide the Israelites back to the paths of righteousness. The followers of Jesus took the superhero saviour shtick to a new extreme by declaring Jesus their one-and-only, but the broad outlines are the same. We are worms who can’t do anything for ourselves and we need someone more powerful to broker our salvation.

As with all the other heroes in my life, I’ve had to work hard to reconcile myself to the disappointments engendered by the unreasonable expectations I impose on this last cloaked and sandaled superhero.

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Street Photography

The 5 Stages of Masking

Walking on Front Street by Union Station, Toronto

In her seminal 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I wonder if there isn’t a similar set of stages at play in our mask use. My speculations have no scientific data to support them. All I can offer are my personal observations of others wearing masks in public spaces and, of course, reflections on my own responses.

The first time I encountered mask-wearing as a normalized practice was on a visit to Hong Kong in 2016. Since the outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1918, mask-wearing has been a common practice in large Asian cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul. These cultural hubs are probably more receptive to mask-wearing because of their long-held values of respect for elders and commitment to social responsibility. As a Westerner thoroughly indoctrinated in the values of individualism and aggressive self-interest, my first response to mask-wearers was: Well, isn’t that odd! If they want to do that, then good for them; but I’ll never do that. Denial.

On March 11, 2020, when the WHO declared a global pandemic, and when local public health officials recommended mask-wearing as a preventive measure, I grudgingly went along with the new protocol. I didn’t like it, but I went along with it. I manifested anger, but not at mask-wearing. Instead, I got angry at people who refused to comply with the protocol. In particular, I remember an incident when a maskless neighbour tried to step into the elevator with me and I stood in his way and wouldn’t let him on. He yelled at me and called me a covidiot, which I thought was an ironic thing to say. I shrugged my shoulders and told him he could wait for the next elevator. Anger.

It’s been a long time since this began, so we forget how we felt in the early days of our mask-wearing. I remember feeling anxiety and uncertainty. There were questions about what kinds of masks we should be wearing. How many layers? Did we need to wear them outdoors? When we weren’t wearing them, could we strap them to our wrists? Disposable vs. washable? What about the environmental impact of disposable masks? Some people started sewing masks, little social projects like knitting wool socks for soldiers during the war. Some people started treating masks as fashion statements. Others hot stamped logos onto the cloth, personal branding, or declarations of personal affiliation. Nike masks. Hells Angels masks. These questions about masks sounded a lot like bargaining.

With the arrival of the omicron variant, people realized that home-sewn masks weren’t good enough. I tossed all my triple-layered cloth masks and began wearing only N95 masks. I noted that most people did the same or, at the very least, resorted to those blue medical masks. The heavy duty masks offered some reassurance, but with winter approaching, it was such a drag. Depression.

To make my narrative fit the Kübler-Ross paradigm, I should round this out with an “acceptance” stage. However, I don’t see evidence of acceptance. I don’t think we can say there has been a long-term adoption of mask-wearing. It certainly hasn’t embedded itself in North American culture the way it has in many Asian cities. If anything, I think we’ve reverted to the bargaining stage. Where I live, in Ontario, the government has lifted masking mandates. The same is true in the U.S. and in Western Europe. Infectious disease experts tell us we’re in the midst of a 6th wave, but politicians want to bargain with the virus. Go easy on us. We want to get on with our lives. Let us throw away our masks.

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Street Photography

A baby looks out at the world through a sheet of plastic

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

There was a meme circulating 15 or 20 years ago, back in the days when people thought memes were clever. Maybe you remember it. It was a series of infant photos and a series of famous adults and you had to try and match the infant face to the adult face. One of the adult faces belonged to Adolph Hitler and the point of the meme was that, based on appearance alone, we have no way to predict which innocent children will grow up to be genocidal megalomaniacs.

I look at this infant’s face and I see a generic plasticity to its expression. It has an undifferentiated innocence that makes it both delightful and dull. Delightful, because all infants return us to a time when the world was bright and simple. Dull, because innocence is an amoral state and therefore not particularly interesting.

Like the infant shown here, I’m inclined to direct my attention to the woman gazing down into the stroller. Life in the stroller is constrained; not much happening in there. But out in the world! Look at all those people walking past. And that woman looking down. What has she done to her lips? And her eye lashes? Why does she need to accentuate them like that? Will I have to do that someday? And that coat! Who dresses her in the morning? Who changes her diaper? Maybe, when you’re grown up, you get to drop your shit wherever you please. Wouldn’t that be amazing!

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Street Photography

I would’ve shared this image sooner, but I’m a little behind

Couple walks up Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, Toronto

In fact, I’m more than a little behind.

As a general rule, I take my street photos head on so that I can see the subject and the subject can see me. A subject’s face is usually the most interesting thing about them. However, as happens again and again, I discover that the rules I set for myself have exceptions. Sometimes the face is the least interesting feature of a subject.

The same thing is true of buildings. My first impulse is to photograph a building by shooting its official entrance. We recognize the New York Public Library by its staircase flanked by stone lions. We don’t recognize it by the grand sweep of its service entrance. However, a careful eye will discover that the service entrance has its charms too.

Someday I may publish a book about photography. I’ll call it “Fundamentals of Photography” and this image will appear on its cover. An important lesson in my Fundamentals is that one should never ignore the backside. A subject’s visual interest can reach out and grab you in unexpected ways and you must always be prepared to capture that moment.

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Street Photography

Provocation #4: Candid Photography and the Flaneur

Woman smokes cigarette in crowd that's overflowed onto University Avenue waiting for the arrival of the Toronto Raptors

A keyword in the technical jargon of street photography is the French word flânerie which attempts to get at the state of mind of someone who idles in crowds. As it was first conceived in 19th century Paris, it described an aimless wandering coupled with the mentality of a connoisseur. In today’s world, a street photographer who engages in flânerie might be described as a sommelier of the streets.

Unfortunately, thanks to the global pandemic, flânerie has fallen out of fashion as it violates social distancing rules. Although, technically, many jurisdictions have chosen to relax protocols, the fact of the matter is, we are in the midst of a 6th wave and it would be foolish for us flâneurs to resume our old habits.

For now, we satisfy our compulsion by diving into our archives and dredging up images from happier times. Today’s images come from the 2019 Toronto Raptors NBA Championship celebration when more than 2 million people crowded into the downtown core. Things got so densely packed that it took me half an hour to walk across University Avenue. During my crossing, I held my camera at shoulder height or over my head and took shots of people as we jostled shoulders. Despite the discomfort, everyone was in a good mood and nobody minded that I (and thousands like me) were taking photos of them.

One of the appeals of flânerie is that it is accompanied by a feeling of invisibility. I suspect some people who practice the subtle art think of themselves as undercover agents who takes photos surreptitiously. But that isn’t my approach. I don’t take steps to hide the fact that I have a camera and am actively using it. For me, the feeling of invisibility has more to do with a dissolution of the ego. I lose my self in the crowd in the same way that someone might lose their self with psychoactive drugs or meditation or gazing at the stars. It gives me a short relief from the pressures of my own internal monologue, that yammering inside my head that rarely does me the favour of shutting up.

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Street Photography

Provocation #3: Candid Photographs of Homeless People

Homeless woman sleeps on sidewalk across from Dundas Square, Toronto

One of the insoluble debates that regularly tears through the street photography community relates to the ethics of photographing vulnerable people like those living on the streets. The challenge here is that both sides of the debate are right. On one side are those who say that these photographs are an affront to the dignity of the subjects. On the other side are those who say we need to photograph suffering in order to hold accountable those responsible for producing the social inequality that generates this suffering.

Without resolving anything, I offer a couple more considerations:

First, there is a danger that the entire conversation will assume a patronizing tone insofar as both sides of the debate sit over and above the situation and talk from a “we know what’s best for these people” point of view.

Second, it is tempting for photographers to aestheticize the scenes they encounter. Instinctively, they worry about things like composition, catching the scene in a sweet light, making sure the scene is properly exposed. There is a risk that this temptation will result in homeless kitsch or homeless porn or, god forbid, the Trisha Romance homeless print available for $14.95 on Etsy.

Personally, I don’t feel equipped to address let alone resolve this debate. The best I can do is consider matters on a case by case basis. I think it would be an especially craven thing to sell decorative homeless prints. At the same time, documentation is important. I think it’s incumbent upon me to challenge the self-congratulatory talk that local politicians spread like so much manure whenever some ridiculous survey-for-hire announces that we live in one of the world’s most livable cities. I point to the evidence I trip over every day and ask: but what about this person? and this person? How can we say this is livable if it isn’t livable for everyone?

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Street Photography

Candid Photography: People Not Doing Stuff

I offer this post as a counterpoint to yesterday’s post in which I seemed to be saying that I prefer candid photos of people doing stuff. Today, I celebrate candid photos of people not doing stuff. In particular, I offer a photo of a man wearing a red T-shirt and waiting at a crosswalk. In the immortal words of Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I photograph multitudes.)

Well, maybe he didn’t say those exact words, but he said something close to those words, and I take them as permission to be human instead of consistent.

I want to share this photograph because I like the way the red T-shirt creates a single block of colour that dominates the image. And I like the way the left arm juts out at an angle that matches the angle of the crosswalk line. Finally, I like the way the late afternoon light washes the image in a yellow that shifts the blue just a little to green; it gives the image a faintly nostalgic feeling as if I had shot it with film. However, the image doesn’t show a person doing something. Nobody is doing anything. The man is just standing there, waiting.

What I love most about photography is the opportunities it gives me to embrace inconsistency, contradiction, and paradox. Introductory photo workshops will sometimes take a rule-based approach to making a good photograph: apply the rule of thirds, the golden-mean, remember foreground, middle-ground, background, visual tricks that more or less guarantee a decent result. Then there are the personal rules I impose on myself, like the rule of yesterday’s post: only shoot people when they are doing something.

The challenge of a rule-based approach is that, in a world where AI is reaching a critical mass, there’s little we can do in terms of image-making that an algorithm can’t do better. Our only advantage is our capacity for irrationality. Intuition, holy unreason, the embrace of irreconcilables. These are things we do with ease that would short-circuit a microchip. Increasingly, I think we will find that our most successful creative work ignores those rules that are reducible to algorithms.