Tag: Candid

Categories
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
Categories
City Life

A Day at the Museum

People gaze at an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum while the skull of a triceratops looks on.

In the dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, two visitors gaze into a glass display cabinet. I notice how the skeleton of a triceratops, suspended from the ceiling, is reflected in the glass of the cabinet. Two heads from the late Cretaceous period gaze at two heads from the early Anthropocene period, spanning a gap of 65 million years. Through the window, blurred in the background, is a new condominium residence on the north side of Bloor Street West, a typical sight as the urban population here intensifies. The triceratops skulls give the impression they are whispering secrets to the human visitors, maybe imparting a little of what they know about extinction.

Roughly 65 million years ago, in an event known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, a series of meteorites slammed into the planet, triggering an impact winter that killed 75% of all life on Earth including all dinosaurs. The upside is that this catastrophe created the conditions for mammals to thrive and ultimately evolve into homo sapiens. This is an upside from the point of view of homo sapiens; if we could interview cows domesticated for milk production, we might get a different opinion on the matter.

The idea of the Anthropocene is that humans have made an indelible mark on the geological record. As it has done in the past, the Earth could undergo a radical transformation, whether by asteroids or earthquakes or continental drift, yet none of that would be sufficient to erase the changes we have wrought upon the face of the planet. The lingering question is whether the idea of the Anthropocene is necessarily tied to a human-triggered 6th mass extinction. It is conceivable that we could leave an indelible mark without destroying ourselves and most other species in the process.

As a realist (depressingly so, at times), I’m inclined to think that Earth’s 6th mass extinction is already well underway. As with the K-T Mass Extinction, the event we have triggered will create fresh opportunities for new species to evolve. Maybe some of these new species will enjoy sentient self-awareness or, better yet, sentient self-aware wisdom. Imagine the rise of a hyper-intelligent dung beetle, or gnats that coalesce to form a collective consciousness. After another 65 million years, they might come to dominate the planet. They will build museums with a “Human” exhibit as an object lesson in how not to live. Giant dung beetles will gaze into cabinets at samples of teeth and fossilized fingernails while overhead, suspended from the ceiling and gazing down on them, are ancient human skeletons: the fossil record of a spectacularly unsuccessful species.

Categories
City Life

Where Does Grease Go?

Pumping Grease, Yonge & Wellesley, Toronto

There are many things about the modern world I don’t understand. The restaurant business is one of those things. When the guy comes to pump all the grease out of the fryer, where does it go? Yes, it goes through a hose and into a tank on the back of a truck. But what happens after that? How does he dispose of it? This is one of life’s mysteries.

I don’t have an answer to my question, but I do have an imagination, which means that the lack of an answer is no great impediment. I wonder, for example, if maybe the cooking grease gets sold to manufacturers who turn it into capsules that get resold to health food stores as the latest omega epsilon z.27 rejuvenation regimen. Why not? We already do worse. Slaughterhouses sell cow hooves to make gummy bears. (Why do they never make gummy cows?)

It reminds me of a pair of decorative elephants that sit on a shelf in my living room. I inherited them from a great uncle. They revolt me, but I feel compelled to keep them close at hand as reminder of what a monumentally stupid species we are. The elephants are carved from ebony but the tusks are ivory. Real ivory. In other words, somebody killed an elephant to provide some of the materials to produce a decorative figure of an elephant. Somebody cut down a utter miracle to support the creation of mediocre disposable crap.

But that doesn’t help me answer the question at hand.

Do we dump the grease into Lake Ontario? Do we pour it into mine shafts along with the spent fuel rods from our nuclear power stations? Do we store it in rusty barrels and bury them somewhere beneath the tundra? Do we mix the grease into tailing ponds with all the heavy metal by-products from the manufacture of our lithium ion batteries? What? Please tell me. I want to know.

Categories
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.

Categories
City Life

A Different Kind of Homeless

Walking south on Bay Street in December, Toronto

A lot of street photography that documents people living on the street is little more than homeless porn, a salacious leering that doesn’t even pass as curiosity. I’m sometimes guilty of this myself as I try to find my way through the ethical quagmires of street photography. A question that often passes through my mind as I’m framing a shot: exploitation? or social commentary? Typically, the answer that returns to me is: a little of both. It’s nigh impossible to do the latter without the former.

Since none of us can ever achieve ethical purity—at least not without allowing our work to devolve into a Disneyfied kitsch—the next question we have to ask ourselves is whether people might nevertheless need to see the images we make. We acknowledge that our hands are dirty. We steel ourselves against the slathering absolutists that run in packs on social media. And we share our images.

It’s early evening in December of 2019. People carry on with their holiday office parties. There are vague reports of a mysterious new virus. But the outbreaks are on the other side of the globe. It has nothing to do with us. I’m walking up Bay Street toward King, the heart of Toronto’s financial district. A young suit is walking my way, probably on his way to Union Station after an office party. Despite the snow piled around the utility pole, he’s feeling warm. Maybe he’s had a couple of cocktails. He’s ditched the tie, an open neck in freezing weather. The young can get away with that sort of thing.

The suit passes a homeless person in a sleeping bag laid across a warm steam vent. The suit doesn’t appear to notice the sleeping bag. He sidesteps it the same way he’d sidestep a lump of dog shit, all while keeping his gaze straight ahead. He’s pulling a smart phone from his pocket, maybe to text his buddies, meet up for another drink.

This is what I call a high contrast photo. It’s not high contrast in the technical sense, the juxtaposition of strong shadows and bright lights. It’s high contrast in the social sense, and that contrast will only grow more pronounced as the distant virus settles in closer to home. The suit will be fine. He’ll work from home for a few months, recoup his losses one way or another. As for the person sleeping on the vent, all our talk of resilience in the face of adversity won’t much help, will it?

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Still Life

Woman Sketching Clay Bowls in a Museum

Woman sketches ancient pottery in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum

While visiting the museum, I stumble upon an intimate scene: a woman sits on a stool sketching bowls in a display cabinet, her reflection faintly visible in the glass. I’m not sure why I call this an intimate scene. We tend to think of intimacy as something that happens in the way that one person relates to another. How can we speak in relational terms of someone who is alone? Still, the scene feels intimate.

Can an image be quiet? I feel a quietude settle over this scene. In this quietude all I hear is the drawing of breath and the faint scratchings of a pencil on the sketch pad. If I’m quiet enough, maybe I can hear the noise the photons make as they bounce off the glass cabinet. I’m afraid to move in case I betray my presence by shattering the quiet. I’ve noticed that my running shoes tend to squeak on the museum’s polished wooden floors.

There is something about this woman’s close looking that deserves to be repaid in kind. Does she see the clay bowl the way a 3D scanning algorithm sees a clay bowl, mapping enough points onto the surface to replicate its shape, then wrapping it in a textured surface that reproduces the bowl’s colour, opacity, and reflectivity? Or does she see it organically, a living thing with a breath of its own? Or does she see it with her heart, using her pencil to capture the way the bowl makes her feel?

Capturing this image, I place it in a museum of my own making. I import it into Adobe Lightroom where I can easily read the meta-data, date and time (April 17, 2018), along with technical details (1/250 sec at f/1.4, 85mm, ISO 1600). In addition, I give it a label and description, just like an artifact in a museum (“Woman sketches ancient pottery in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum”). I finish by assigning it keyword tags to make it more readily searchable on any platform where I share the image.

Like a bowl dug from the earth and exhibited in a museum, I pull my image out of its natural context, put it on display, and do my best to protect it from the ravages of time. The timeless quality of museum exhibits is a fantasy, of course. One day, a catastrophic event will shatter the bowl. It might be something dramatic, like an earthquake. More likely, it will be something banal, like a careless curator who trips while moving the bowl. But long before the bowl meets its end, my image (made to support my personal fantasy of timeless creation) will succumb to digital rot, or hard drive failure, or format deprecation or whatever the digital equivalent of an untimely demise.

For the time being, I invite you to pause to relish the quietude, acknowledging that soon enough it will be gone.

Categories
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.

Categories
City Life

How do people move through built environments?

Steam Vent, Temperance & Bay Streets, Toronto

Street photography is a protracted series of interrogations. One of those interrogations looks to the way people move through built environments. Although we might once have constructed our buildings in service of people, it’s not apparent to me how that is true anymore. Our urban spaces have assumed an internal logic that has flipped the standard assumptions and now places people in service of buildings. But I’m not certain of this. Me and my camera pose our questions and have begun our investigations.

The global pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the investigations. I was preparing to file a definitive report on the way our urban spaces have enslaved the people who use them, like the victims of an alien invasion movie, when the arrival of the Sars-Cov-2 virus undid my working assumption. For months, hectares of office space lay empty. Shops that served the office workers went bankrupt. Without foot traffic, custodians stopped mopping the floors. In certain sectors, new technologies have obviated the need for in-person work. In the blink of an eye, people abandoned their built environments, or at least those built environments tied to work.

I had thought my images of people passing through steamy cityscapes spoke to the fleeting nature of the human presence in built environments. But the global pandemic has changed the meaning of those images. The human presence is fleeting, not because the overbearing logic of built spaces renders humans insignificant, but because the overbearing logic of digital spaces has asserted primacy over our built spaces. Humans aren’t vanishing from built spaces so much as evaporating into the ether.

Categories
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!

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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?