Tag: Candid

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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.

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photography: People Doing Stuff

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photography: The Value of Chaos

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Provocation #2: Photography as an Act of Curiosity

Loading the trunk, Temperance Street, Toronto

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Provocation #1: Photography as a Violent Act

A large woman talks on her cell phone while seated on a stone step.
On the phone at Yonge & Wellesley, Toronto

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Taking Candid Photos

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Winter Scenes: Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Couple kissing at Nathan Phillips Square

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.

Couple kissing at Nathan Phillips Square
Categories
Street Photography

Purple Prose

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

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).