Cleaning Windshields on Bay Street at Bloor, Toronto
“Hey, let’s go outside and take photos of people doing stuff.” When I’m shooting candid photos, I prefer to capture people doing stuff. “People doing stuff” seems like a simplistic description and it takes in a broad range of actions. People working. People shopping. People arguing. People enjoying themselves. People eating. People kissing.
What kind of stuff do I want people to be doing when I take their photos? The answer is: absolutely anything just as long as they’re not “not doing stuff.” Most photos of people not doing stuff are boring. A surprising number of photos that people try to pass off as street photography in my social media feeds is photos of people not doing stuff. The photographer stands on the street corner and shoots somebody walking across the street. Or they walk down the sidewalk and shoot from the hip as someone approaches them from the opposite direction. Yawn.
I don’t want to rule out the possibility that a few of these photographs might be interesting. Sometimes people cross streets in interesting ways. Or they wear brightly coloured clothes. Or the light strikes them in a special way. But most of the time, random shots of people standing or walking in public spaces are randomly dull.
I prefer to capture people as they are engaging their world. Their way of being in the world raises questions for me. I imagine myself crawling inside their skin and I wonder: what would life be like if I occupied their space? Saw through their eyes? Felt with their skin? Would I be tough enough? Would I have their courage? I want to create images that open the viewer to fresh stories of what it’s like to pass through this life.
Firemen climb down ladder on the northwest corner of the Sherbourne/Bloor intersection, Toronto
Sometimes getting there first is everything. I’d been sitting on the couch in front of my TV when the phone rang. A friend who lives in a building south of me was calling while he gazed out the window of his 33rd floor apartment. “Uh, Dave, is your building on fire?” I hadn’t heard any alarms. “There are these huge clouds of black smoke but I can’t tell from here if it’s your building.” I stepped to the window and, just as my friend had said, there were huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky, but to the east of us. I said, “I’ve gotta go.” And then I did what comes naturally. I threw on a coat, slipped on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my camera.
I live in an interesting neighbourhood. Interesting in the sense that there’s always something happening here. The Indian consulate across the road is subject to continual protests, as is the Israeli consulate down the road. Extinction Rebellion protests on my doorstep. Psychotic screams in the middle of the night. Smashed windows in the shops across the road. Last fall, we were in lockdown, not because of a virus, but because of a suspicious piece of luggage outside our front door. The bomb squad detonated it and the concussion rattled my ribcage. The downside of living here, especially during a global pandemic, is that a sense of unease wafts through the air at all hours. The upside is that, if you’re a photographer, the opportunities for interesting shots are limitless.
On this particular occasion, our illustrious mayor, John Tory, whose only distinction from his predecessor is that he doesn’t smoke crack, had ordered a sweep of the homeless from Rosedale Valley. A few days later, someone retaliated by dousing old tires in gasoline and setting the south end of the Sherbourne Street bridge on fire. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a gasoline fire. Arson. Firetrucks were still arriving and fire fighters were running hoses to hydrants. Police had just appeared on the scene and were sorting out how best to contain the situation. I took advantage of the chaos to get close to the scene for my best shots, and then the police pushed me back down the street. You can see me, camera in hand, in the second photo of this CBC article.
Chaos is my friend. Chaos stirs up the conditions of an essential creative foment. Without chaos, I’d stagnate.
For me, perhaps the greatest motivation for engaging in street photography is curiosity. Not a salacious voyeuristic curiosity (at least not always). I would like to think that my curiosity is driven more by empathy than by a desire for some weird sense of gratification. I want to know what other people are doing. I want to know what makes them tick. Inevitably, I find myself imagining what my life would be like if I gave my world a quarter degree turn. Or woke up occupying a different body.
A black car pulls to the curb. A man gets out and runs around the corner. Five minutes later, he returns with a wheeled rack of garment bags. He pops open the trunk and begins laying out the garment bags one by one. I wonder what he’s doing. It’s Friday. Maybe he’s picking up clothes for a Saturday wedding. Is he the best man?
But there’s steam and steam gives the scene a vaguely sinister aspect. Maybe these clothes aren’t for a wedding. Maybe this man is a funeral director and he’s picking up clothes to dress his “clients.” Maybe he’s the leader of a cult and needs to dress up his followers before he doles out the Kool-Aid.
Or maybe he’s a co-conspirator in a planned heist. He and his friends are going to do a high-end casino and they need tuxedos so they can look like high rollers. A fine idea except for the fact that Toronto doesn’t have any high-end casinos.
I should apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the true account of the situation. Obviously, each garment bag holds a dehydrated alien and the man has been summoned to dispose of the remains before conspiracy theories leak and run amok through the city. He’ll run the bodies to a nearby construction site and encase them in concrete before anyone notices.
Since the Oscars aired last weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with one thing and one thing only. Never mind that another wave of the Sars-Cov-2 virus may be sweeping the globe. Never mind that a lunatic with his hands on a stockpile of nuclear weapons continues his mission to “liberate” the people of Ukraine. All anyone can talk about is how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when Chris Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Some people defend Will Smith, saying Chris Rock crossed a line when he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, alopecia areata. Other people defend Chris Rock, saying he was the victim of an assault and Will Smith ought to be charged with the commission of a criminal offence. Some people analyse the incident from the perspective of race. Other people analyse the incident from the perspective of masculinity. Pretty soon, pundits throw so many opinions into the blender that nobody knows where to fall on the matter.
I choose to sidestep the matter altogether by using it to illustrate something about a marginally related concern. The infamous slap is an exchange between two men who are, by vocation, comedians and wildly successful comedians at that. What makes them so successful in their respective roles is that they are unafraid to explore that liminal space between the socially acceptable and the taboo. They do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
There is no absolute line that defines for all time the limits of acceptable behaviour. It is a matter of perpetual negotiation and most of us rely on others to do that work for us. Like the court jester, Chris Rock’s role is to say things others think but are afraid to utter. He may not always be right, but there is a rightness in the need to drag certain conversations kicking and screaming from their murky corners, like the the conversation about the way the red carpet supports our collective habit of fetishizing women’s bodies.
Candid photography sometimes functions in the same way. The limits of the acceptable shift over time. What stood in the past sometimes deserves to be re-examined today. Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Kiss in Times Square for example. Originally understood as capturing the jubilation of a particular historic moment, it has subsequently been reinterpreted as emblematic of rape culture. What we can say for certainty about Eisenstaedt’s photograph is that it thrusts us into a liminal space and nearly 80 years later continues to engage us in an important conversation.
New contexts demand new conversations. Sometimes it falls to street photographers to use the photographic equivalent of a slap in the face to get them started.
Asleep at the 2022 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Toronto
My theme for April is taking candid photographs. Candid shots are a mainstay of street photography. What makes a photograph candid is the absence of reciprocity in the interaction between photographer and subject. Where, in the case of a street portrait, there is almost a contractual exchange, in the case of a candid shot, the encounter is emphatically one-sided. The photographer takes the shot without the subject’s permission because, most of the time, the subject is unaware that anything has happened.
Obviously, I am a practitioner of candid photography. However, I acknowledge that, for many, it is an ethical quagmire. For many, especially for those who catch me in the act, the candid photograph is an invasion of privacy.
The answer to the privacy objection is that it depends on the circumstances. The legally protected right to take photographs varies from one jurisdiction to the next, so there is nothing I can say that is universally applicable. For example, I once had a woman tell me I was in violation of the Canada Privacy Act to which I responded that the Canada Privacy Act has almost nothing to say about photography in any circumstance. However, she didn’t believe me, just as she didn’t believe me when I told her I used to practice law in the Province of Ontario so I might actually know what I’m talking about.
In general, Canada’s Anglo-speaking provinces (Québec is a different matter) treat photography as a right if it occurs in public space because nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space. In fact, most Canadian jurisdictions go so far as to treat it as a constitutionally protected form of speech. Like all rights, it’s not absolute, but as long as you’re not a pervert or a terrorist, your photographic habit is probably protected. That means that, in law, if I am standing on a street corner, I don’t need your permission to take your photograph.
Law and ethics are two different beasts, and the fact that I may be legally entitled to take your photograph doesn’t mean it’s right for me to do so. This leads to the next objection: public photography is protected by Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence which means that, in effect, it is a creature of our colonial history. In keeping with our colonial history, a photograph can be construed as a form of exploitation. That exploitation can happen along any number of axes: age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, class. Some, like Susan Sontag, go further and suggest that taking a photograph is an act of violence.
A possible answer is that there are countervailing values at play, like the importance of representation and documentation, that offset concerns about exploitation. If we can’t provide our progenitors with a rich visual account of their past, then we impoverish the imaginative ground they tread as they move forward. The trick, from a photographer’s perspective, is to balance competing concerns in a way that preserves the subject’s dignity while keeping one eye on the context in which the photograph will appear.
Matters of photography and ethics are beyond the scope of a single tiny blog post. My inclination is to hold ethical concerns in abeyance, bringing them to bear on each fresh situation, but resisting the temptation to suppose that these matters will ever be resolved with finality. Even with the passage of a few short years, we see how our frame of reference, and the language we use to give it shape, reform themselves beneath the pressure of changing social expectations. If we supposed that we had finally resolved the matter now, we’d only look like fools 20 years from now.
So I proceed provisionally. The images I offer this month I offer as provocations with the hope that they prompt considered reflection on the purpose and value of photography.
Note: Nothing in the foregoing may be construed as legal advice. If you have concerns about photography-related privacy issues, retain the services of a legal professional.
Person takes a selfie on Bloor Street East, Toronto
I’ve noted in a preview post that when people encounter one another during a snow storm, they tend to be happier, friendlier. Snow storms elicit another (possibly related) response. People love to take selfies against a snowy backdrop and then share them with friends and on social media accounts. Almost invariably, they don’t post the photos to complain about how miserable the snow makes them feel; they post to share their excitement.
Snow does that to people. For me, snow draws up feelings of nostalgia. It reminds me of my childhood, especially my winter visits to my grandparents. One set lived in Montreal and the other in London and both locales got far more snow than my hometown (Toronto). We built forts, and went tobogganing, and poured rinks in the back yard. One year, my parents even took us to Quebec City Carnival and we got to watch people drunk on Caribou fall unconscious into snow banks. Ah, memories!
Years later, whenever it snows, I find myself drifting back in time to childhood moments of sheer joy and, like everyone else around me, I want to capture that feeling. Spread it around. The world can always use more joy.
When I was little, I was fascinated by the fact that my uncle Bill had lost his ring finger. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories about how he lost his finger. That side of my family is full of storytellers, gossips, and bullshitters, so I have no idea which of the stories is true. Instead, I’ve opted to believe the best (i.e. most gruesome) of the stories and truth be damned. In the spirit of bullshit, Bill is not his real name.
The story goes that my uncle Bill served in Korea as part of the US medical corp. Yes, he was in a M*A*S*H unit or something like that. One day, they had to bug out because they were under fire from the commies. My uncle Bill leapt onto the back of a moving truck and caught his wedding ring on something. So there he was, dangling by his ring finger with his feet dragging along the ground and the commies in hot pursuit. One of his fellow medicos grabbed his free arm while another pulled out a pocket knife and cut off his finger. They hauled him into the truck and escaped to safety. I reiterate that I have no idea if this story is even remotely factual. All I know for certain is that my uncle served in Korea and came home minus one finger.
Not to be outdone, his older brother Jeff lost three fingers. Incidentally, Jeff told everyone he was in the Navy; it’s even there in print in my aunt’s obituary. Despite that, I remember Bill rolling his eyes and saying it was just the Coast Guard. Jeff never saw any real action, not like Bill who also did a tour in Vietnam. Ahh, what fond childhood memories I have of my uncles engaged in military service pissing contests!
Again, the story comes to me like a game of broken telephone played by pathological liars, so I have no idea what really happened. Not even his name is real. Still, there are certain things I know to be true. For one thing, Jeff lived in New Hamphire where there is lots of snow in the wintertime. For another thing, he really did lose some fingers. The story goes that he fired up the snowblower during a storm and it jammed. Just to look at it, he couldn’t say why the snowblower had jammed. You might say it was a problem that stumped him. Without turning it off, he reached in to clear whatever was jamming it and that, as they say, was the end of his career as a concert pianist.
I can’t help but speculate here. Given that my uncle Jeff ultimately succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wonder if his tussle with the snowblower wasn’t one of its early symptoms. It’s the sort of thing I think about on a cold winter’s night as I wrap all eight of my fingers and my two intact thumbs around a mug of hot chocolate.
On a wet snowy afternoon, I went to the southwest corner of the Front/Bay intersection to catch people rushing down to Union Station to catch the train. I positioned myself a couple steps down where the stairs on the corner follow the slope of the street. That way, I could shoot lower to the ground which had turned wet with a light snowfall. I was after reflections of people walking across the reflective surface. That’s when I caught a man running so fast that he had enough lift to fly across the pavement. I have the proof. I captured a photo of it. A pox on your house if you try to refute the evidence of my unaltered photograph.
Tomorrow I’ll be posting photos of Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s. Speaking of UFO’s (or UAP’s as the US “Intelligence” community calls them), I note that 2021 was a banner year for unexplained sightings. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (US) released a report on 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (sic) which it has assessed. Of the 144 sightings, the intelligence community has explained only one. It remains open to the possibility that these were sightings of airborne aliens. You can read more on CNN’s web site.
In November, defense officials announced that they would be establishing a new task force to investigate these and other related phenomena (wood faeries? bridge trolls?). Although this appears to have happened under the aegis of the Biden administration, in fact, it was the Trump administration that imposed the requirement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit a report to Congress. Is anyone surprised?
Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a period, after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, of interminable Trump sightings (think Elvis) supplemented with seances licensed of course by Ivanka & Co., the hereditary grifters.
In the meantime, I offer this image to the new task force as its 145th UAP. A man hovers above the ground. How is this even possible? Unless … maybe this is an alien disguised as a man.
Greeting in a snow storm, Carlton & Church Streets, Toronto
I’ve noticed something paradoxical about snow storms. Although people like to complain when a snow storm rolls through, if they’re actually out in it, most people I observe tend to be happier and friendlier. I find that strangers are more inclined to start up spontaneous conversations with me and, as illustrated by the photograph shown here, they tend to be more expressive.
According to an article in Vice, there may be psychological research that supports my observation. However, in reading the article, I find it doesn’t say anything explicitly about snow storms. So, for example, it mentions the positive feelings generated by the white noise effect of rainfall. But despite their colour, snow storms don’t produce white noise. Unless accompanied by howling winds, snow storms produce the opposite of white noise, more a muffling effect that creates a sense of intimacy.
Maybe it’s like a mild version of a shared trauma that, for a brief time, invites strangers into a connection based on their experience. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, maybe it’s like a mild version of a local sports team victory. In my hometown, the most recent victory was the Raptors NBA Championship in 2019 when millions of people crowded into the downtown core and shared their joy. That’s what a snow storm is like. For whatever reason, people find joy in it.
Umbrella in Snowstorm, Bloor/Yonge intersection, Toronto
I recently read, although I can’t remember where, an established street photographer’s rant about all the visual tropes he felt had grown tired and tiresome. He made a list of all the things he would no longer shoot and he urged fellow street photographers to join him in his little boycott. One of the items on his list was photographs of people carrying umbrellas. In general, I agree that, as with good writing, so with good photography: avoid clichés. That said, I offer a couple exceptions.
First, aspiring photographers learn by shooting clichés. If you turn your rule against photographing clichés into an absolute prohibition, then nobody plays, nobody has any fun, and nobody discovers anything new. So hop to it. Make hay while the sun shines. Take no prisoners. Be your best self. Be a photography thought leader.
Second, there is no such thing as a photograph of an umbrella. I’m not flogging Magritte’s dead pipe (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) which I take to mean that a representation of a thing should not be equated with the thing itself. I’m getting at something more straightforward. The fact is: most photographs of umbrellas are not photographs of umbrellas; they’re photographs in which umbrellas happen to appear. They’re photographs of scenes in which the umbrella may have an important place, but most likely the umbrella is only one of a constellation of features that coalesce to produce the photograph.
In the case of the photograph featured here: is this a photograph of a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman holding a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella while a red car approaches from the opposite direction? And so on.
I was standing on the observation deck above the snack bar at Nathan Phillips Square. The marshals had cleared the ice so the zamboni could come out. Most people were bored and wished the zamboni would hurry up so they could get back to skating. But not everyone. At least one couple found a way to pass the time as the zamboni traced its loops around the rink. The woman pulled back, looked up, and saw me with my camera trained on them. She smiled then tapped her partner on the shoulder. He turned and together they waved at me. By then, the zamboni had turned and was making its way to the far end of the rink.
It wasn’t until I was at home processing my day’s captures that I noticed the tagline on the zamboni: “The Passion That Unites Us All.” I’m amazed at how the gods of photography contrive to lend a little something extra to so many of my photos. I couldn’t have timed this shot better if I had tried.
As for the tagline … I’m not sure what I feel for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Although one of the most valuable franchises in the NHL (ranked #2 in 2021 at US $1.8 B), it hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967 and routinely doesn’t even make it to the playoffs. It’s an infuriating club: no matter how badly it does, the fans display an unshakeable loyalty. The club/fan relationship is like one of those increasingly rare relationships that sticks it out no matter what.
Maybe that’s what lies behind the tagline: the passion that unites us all is not a passion for winning but a passion for honouring marriage vows (or whatever the sports equivalent is) for better or worse. As for this couple, who can say what unites them? However, I think it’s heartening they can find ways to pass the time that don’t involve whipping out iPhones and taking selfies.
Shot at 365 Bloor St E outside the Post Media building
I keep a journal where, among other things, I make notes about some of my shots. On Friday June 8th, 2018 (the day after Doug Ford won the Ontario provincial election), I wrote:
Returning to our building, I noticed a man with a long lens run along the sidewalk across the road. I paused, trying to figure out what he was after. My next door neighbour came up to me and said something but I didn’t hear what. “Doug Ford. Isn’t that Doug Ford across the road?” I looked and, sure enough, there he was, the man of the hour, glad-handing passersby and posing for selfies. “I better shoot him.” I ran through the traffic to the far side of the road and went to it. … I was shooting Ilford HP5 so it should come out crisp and contrasty. Also, I was using the Tamron 70-150 mm lens so was able to get in close as he was shaking hands and grinning his pugsly mug at people. The guy’s a real porker! Shoulders, neck and head form a continuous slab of flesh, thick and hard near the base and growing soft near the head. I assume he was doing an interview at the National Post. As he entered the building, a Native woman was coming out and she tore a strip off him. She saw me laughing. Our eyes met and she fist bumped me.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t a street portrait as it doesn’t meet my usual criteria. There was nothing in our interaction that could be construed as him giving me consent to make this image. Nevertheless, as premier elect, he had suddenly slid back into the public sphere where the rules governing the capture and use of his image aren’t quite the same as for mere mortals. I make the assumption that while he’s engaged in the performance of his public office, there is implied consent. Here, he was greeting his adoring public as he went to his very first interview, all shiny and new, like a virgin.
Two masked women pass windows on Bloor Street, Toronto
I imagine a time a few decades from now, say the 2060’s, when in all likelihood I’m dead and buried or planted or repurposed or whatever they do to corpses in the future. Someone, maybe an archivist or social historian, stumbles on one of my old photos and immediately recognizes it as a photo from the early 20’s. Maybe it’s the masks or the look of anxiety in the eyes, or the uneasy way the subjects carry themselves. There’s just something about it that screams pandemic.
A hundred years ago, the 20’s were the Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age, the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald and flappers, libertine excesses and bottomless champagne glasses. Those were the 1920’s. How will we remember the 2020’s? What will we call them? And what feelings will those epithets evoke?
Photography and writing go together like hand and glove. Some people decry the use of text in or around images; the image should speak for itself, they say. I’m not such a purist. That should be obvious from the fact that I offer text alongside every image I share on this web site.
I look at this tableau, three people riding a streetcar in downtown Toronto as darkness falls across the city, and I can’t help but see narratives leaking from the image. The image sets my imagination adrift. It’s no coincidence that the word “imagination” has “image” as its root. The same process can happen in reverse, too. Sometimes I read a story or a novel and it stimulates my visual imagination. I can’t help but turn the words into a tableau.
Here, all three riders wear masks and all three have their heads bowed into their cell phones as if engaged in a liturgical rite, a confession, say, or the reading of a holy text. The two men wear toques while the woman is bare-headed. Maybe, in the enclosed fish-bowl world of the streetcar, head-coverings have some significance.
Are they going home after a long day at work? What sort of lives wait for them when they get off the streetcar at their respective stops? A dinner alone, poured from a tin can into a pot and heated on the stove? A night streaming shows on Netflix while thumbing through social media feeds? A spouse? A partner? Someone to save them from the pandemic’s forced isolation?
Early days of the pandemic: news reports from all over the world said there was no one in the streets. Thanks to lockdowns, urban cores had been hollowed out. Everything fell silent. In my hometown (Toronto), I walked the streets to see for myself if they were as empty and quiet and the news reports said they were.
It reminds me of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass. The White King wants to know where his messengers have gone and asks Alice to look for them. We end up with this exchange:
“Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
“‘Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.’
“But the cruel wretch said, ‘Then I will eat all Noman’s comrades before Noman himself, and will keep Noman for the last. This is the present that I will make him.’
After Odysseus gets the giant drunk and pokes out his eye, Polyphemus cries out to all the other cyclopes.
“… [S]o they gathered from all quarters round his cave when they heard him crying, and asked what was the matter with him.
“‘What ails you, Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise, breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?’
“But Polyphemus shouted to them from inside the cave, ‘Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.’
“‘Then,’ said they, ‘if no man is attacking you, you must be ill; when Jove makes people ill, there is no help for it, and you had better pray to your father Neptune.’
“Then they went away…
I wandered the city streets, but I couldn’t find no one anywhere.
