I shot this photo in beforetimes. You can tell. No one is wearing a mask.
It was just before Hallowe’en in 2019. Ah, we were so young, so naive. We didn’t have a care in the world. We had no idea what scary things lurked just beyond the horizon.
This year, I’m dressing up as an anti-vaxxer. I’m leaving the mask at home. That’s the scariest costume I can think of.
By its association with blood, red is the colour of life. Paradoxically, red is also the colour of death because we rarely see blood except when it has been spilled.
In a roundabout way, red is also the colour of equality. We learn this from one of Shakespeare’s most marginalized characters. Shylock cries out: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Pierce the skin and what you find underneath is remarkably democratic.
Red has the longest wavelength of any colour on the visible spectrum (620-750 nm) which means, ironically, that it has the lowest level of energy. I say “ironically” because, when we set aside our scientific bias and examine matters from the more useful perspective of human emotions, we find that red is associated with high-energy feelings, like anger and passion. If we want to provoke a bull, we wave a red cape. If we want to evoke sexual passion, we put a woman in a red dress and call her Carmen. Bizet’s opera would have been considerably different if he had called it Violet; it would have been the story of a depressed banker.
Red is also the colour which appears on the flag of the country I call home. This is not so surprising given that Canada is one of the most sanguine countries in the world (as least by reputation). My use of the word “sanguine” is deliberate. According to medieval medicine, a person whose humour is dominated by blood (sanguinity) is cheerful and happy (like a good Canadian). And that happiness extends to happiness in bed too. Sexual passion.
I’m not sure how passionate a person has to be to stand around in a maple leaf suit trying to persuade people to use a tax preparation service. I’m guessing not much. Unless the pay is really good.
When I was a kid in art class, I learned that you make orange by mixing red and yellow paints. As my art teacher told me, red and yellow are primary colours, and when you mix them, you get a secondary colour. With words like primary and secondary, what I took from his lesson was that orange is a lesser colour, maybe parasitic on the more legitimate colours. It has taken me a lifetime to undo that bias and give orange the recognition it deserves.
Part of the reason we don’t acknowledge orange as a colour in its own right is that, for centuries, at least in the English language, we didn’t have a word for it. In a book called On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, we learn that people used to describe the colour associated with wavelengths of 590 – 620 nm as red-yellow or yellow-red. It wasn’t until the people of England were introduced to a certain citrus fruit that the word “orange” began to describe things that share the fruit’s colour. And it wasn’t until the beginning of the 18th century that the word “orange” was used to denote the colour itself. So, yes, orange the fruit came before orange the colour and not the other way around. Just imagine what would have happened if people in England were introduced to the pumpkin first.
The title for today’s post comes, of course, from Kermit the Frog, who faced discrimination for the colour of his skin. Amphibians have faced such discrimination since the first tiny tadpole sprouted legs and crawled from the primordial slime onto dry land.
Martians face similar discrimination as, historically, they’ve been known as “little green men.” Oddly, feminists have tended to ignore the sexism embedded in the “little green men” stereotype. When you think about it, though, there’s no reason little green women couldn’t be the ones who invade planet Earth. Maybe they need space for themselves because they’re sick of living with all those little green sexist bastards.
Vulcans have green blood. Ask a phlebotomist. It’s one of the first things they learn in Phlebotomy 101.
Ever since Othello killed poor Desdemona, we’ve called jealousy the “green-eyed monster.”
And people can be “green with envy” as Anne Shirley discovers when she dyes her hair.
Green is the colour of money, at least in America.
The colour green falls in the range of wavelengths from 495 to 570 nm on the visible spectrum of light. There is some debate about where blue ends and green begins but given the passion some people feel for such distinctions, I prefer to avoid this controversy altogether.
Personally, I am partial to green. In fact, we named my daughter “Green” but in Japanese because it sounds much more delightful as a Japanese word–Midori.
Picasso had a blue period.
The blues is a genre of music that takes its name from an emotional state.
Mild depression is a case of the blues. The cure is to sit on your stoop and play a guitar.
Beginning sometime around World War I, blue started to be associated with being a boy.
Shades of blue have wavelengths between 380nm and 500nm.
Pyroflatulence or flatus ignition (setting light to your farts) is commonly known as a blue angel.
Becoming a blue man can take from 10 weeks to 2 years. However, if you’re in a hurry, you can become a blue man by falling through ice in the middle of winter.
The colour violet has the shortest wavelength on the visible spectrum (380-450 nm) and, given its high frequency, it has the most energy of any light that enters our eyeballs.
Violet—or its low class stand-in, purple—is a lavish, extravagant colour. Overblown writing is called purple prose. Overdressed musicians produce movies called Purple Rain. And people who think they’re better than us (i.e. royalty) use purple to reinforce that very rotten idea.
Most edible tubers can be purple. Beets are an obvious example. Despite our belief that carrots should be orange, that’s really a matter of marketing. Carrots would happily be purple if we let them. The same goes for potatoes.
If we fall down and hurt ourselves, a phenomenon called bruising turns our skin purple. And if our lover strangles us, we turn purple for pretty much the same reason (lack of oxygen in our blood).
I have no idea what’s going on in this photograph. I had parked myself in the southwest corner of Toronto’s Dundas Square, framing a shot and watching as people moved through the frame. It’s a bit like setting a trap and waiting to see what wildlife I can capture. Eventually, these two men walked through my frame and I shot a burst of about 10 stills.
Even though I was within spitting distance of the pair, I have no idea what was passing between the two of them. The guy to the left is wearing a shirt decorated in cannabis leaves. He holds a lighter in his left hand and a cigarette in his right hand. He’s saying something to the guy on the right, waving his left arm as if he’s trying to get the other man’s attention. It’s impossible to hear what he’s saying because there is loud music blaring nearby and because the fountains are splashing water.
The guy on the right is eating a hot dog and continues to walk, either not hearing or deliberately ignoring the man on the left. Is the man on the left trying to sell him something? Drugs, maybe? Is he uttering a racial slur? There’s no way to know simply by staring at the photograph.
I like it when my photographs defy my expectations for them as documentation or evidence. I like them best when they prove to be documentation of nothing. Or documentation of ambiguity. At most, they are evidence of an unknowability at the heart of human experience. We really don’t know what’s going on in any of it.
Certain photography purists insist that text should never mix with photographs, not inside the frame of a photograph, and most certainly not as commentary alongside the photograph. Text is text. Images are images. As I understand it, their reasoning is that if an image can’t speak for itself then it doesn’t deserve our attention. Text is a crutch for second-rate work.
I’m not sure how these purists answer Marshall McLuhan who, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, reminds us that text is a visual medium. Font designers understand this, as do layout and advertising designers. But, in the world of photography, text is somehow parasitic to the truly visual.
Obviously, I’m not a purist. I devote an entire website called nouspique to my textual infidelities. Maybe I have loose morals.
As an aside, today’s featured image is an anomaly because it’s black and white. It had no choice because I shot it with black and white Kodak T400 film on my little Yashica rangefinder.
I captured this man taking a break in Nathan Phillips Square during the 2019 iteration of the World Naked Bike Ride. He’s eating a snack while seated facing Toronto’s city hall. That mushroom shaped dome near his head is the city’s council chamber where our elected representatives debate important issues, some sober, some high on crack. High on crack. Ha ha ha. I’d like to think this cyclist is offering a clinic in transparency. He’s utterly open, with nothing to hide. We could all learn from his example.
A recent article in The Guardian documents a number of incidents where Viennese Museums have fallen afoul of social media user guidelines. For example, the article states that “[i]n 2018, the Natural History Museum’s photograph of the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figurine was deemed pornographic by Facebook and removed from the platform.” It appears that social media platforms have no mechanism to distinguish between nudity as art or as social commentary and nudity as exploitation or pornography. By “mechanism”, I’m not talking about an algorithm to sift through image files; I’m talking about the means to engage in meaningful internal debate about underlying philosophical issues.
Despite a market capitalization that has topped a trillion dollars, Facebook doesn’t appear to have the resources to engage questions that are central to what it means to be human. Questions like those of aesthetics, embodiment, and mortality. The lack of meaningful guidance from platform owners like Facebook has a chilling effect upon users who then err on the side of caution by avoiding limnal cases. Vienna’s solution to the problem is to develop an OnlyFans account where images of famous art won’t be banned or its account terminated.
My personal solution to this problem is to maintain my own domain where I’m not at the mercy of ill-conceived or poorly interpreted user guidelines. I suppose my host could shut me down, but that would only mean a brief interruption; I can always take my backup and go somewhere else. I suppose, too, search engines can choke access to my site. I’m not sure what to do about that except to recommend that you turn off safe browsing and risk stumbling upon the occasional bit of porn as you surf your way to enlightenment.
I’m grateful I live in a city where it is possible for people to be unafraid to live as they are. It isn’t perfect, of course. Wherever they are, people will always struggle to negotiate with grace the challenges of difference. But here, at least, I witness more moments of grace than not. That leaves me free to notice little details I might otherwise miss: a yellow pepper in the basket, a plastic Dumbo the Elephant fixed to the handlebar.
The “I Hate Rubber Boots” guy is becoming a fixture around downtown Toronto. The first time I saw him was in June 2018 when I was carrying my Konica T3 loaded with 35mm black and white film. This time, I was carrying my Sony A7R IV. I saw him in the distance walking north up Yonge Street. Anticipating his approach, I dropped to my knees. Instead of approaching, he stopped and posed, but I was shooting with a 35mm lens and he was still just a small figure in my frame. I motioned him to keep walking and he obliged. Better an action shot than posed, not that walking is much of an action.
In The Global Soul, Pico Iyer includes an extended meditation on Toronto. He observes that the people of Toronto have a well developed sense of irony. The “I Hate Rubber Boots” strikes me as typical of that sensibility. We all hate rubber boots but go on wearing them anyways. Same goes for masks.
It’s easy to stand near an intersection and shoot people as they pass; it’s a different matter to shoot them in a way that hints at larger story. In this instance, I saw two women carrying a large bag. In itself, it’s visually interesting. On closer examination, I see that the bag is from a wedding dress boutique in The Hudson Bay Store (across the street). The two women appear to be mother and daughter just picking up the daughter’s wedding dress. Of course, I could be reading the scene wrong. It could be the mother’s wedding dress. The women could be unrelated. Who knows? Nevertheless, the scene suggests a story and it raises enough questions to keep us looking.
I was framing a shot of this Huawei advertisement overlooking O’Keefe Lane (which, despite its name, is really an alley) when a woman stepped into the shot. It looks as if the woman in the ad is watching everyone on the street. I don’t know if concerns about Chinese surveillance through Huawei 5G infrastructure are warranted. Maybe it’s just another conspiracy theory that has somehow connected 5G networks to Covid-19. The only surveillance I know about for certain is the surveillance happening behind the camera that made this shot.
