Tag: Night Photography

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Why I’m Still Repaying my Student Loans

Night photograph of a sculpture called Pair, by Neil Campbell, at the 2012 Nuit Blanche in Toronto. Pair is a pair of giant pink balls sitting underneath the court house library on University Avenue.
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto

On the morning of his 18th birthday, Jonas disappeared. His mother found him hiding in the loft above the garage. They had to leave in two hours if they were going to make it on time for the ceremony and Jonas wasn’t even cleaned or dressed yet. She pleaded with her son to climb down the ladder and get himself ready.

Jonas told his mother she was nuts if she thought he was going to the ceremony. It was cruel. It was barbaric. It was something stupid from their primitive prehistory. They lived in the modern world now. And whatever meaning the ceremony had in the past, that meaning had vanished with the invention of things like cars and airplanes and the internet and Twitter.

His mother called up to him from the foot of the ladder. We’ve been through all this before. I thought we agreed: your reluctance is just a product of anticipatory anxiety. You’re afraid of the pain. And yes, there is an initial pain, but beyond that is a much deeper reward. Look to that reward.

If, on the day of his birth, he could have chosen his parents, Jonas would have asked for a mother who was anything but a clinical psychologist. She was always ruining her parental talks with psychologist buzzwords. Jonas couldn’t give a shit about anticipatory anxiety. All he knew was: the thought of taking part in the ceremony made him want to hurl.

The last time he’d been to one of these things, it was for his brother, Simon. That was almost enough to make Jonas tear off to the north country and live in the bush. He remembered how they made Simon disrobe in front of everybody, then lay his genitals on the ceremonial block of wood known in the old tongue as the ptarchuck. He remembered how they isolated Simon’s left testicle with the metal casing called the sinistrabölle then flipped the lever that sliced through the flesh. It was so sudden, Simon didn’t even know it had happened, but when they applied the boiling tar to cauterize the wound, he screamed and doubled over. Two hooded acolytes dragged him off the platform to make room for the next boy waiting for the rite of passage.

Jonas. Honey. This is a beautiful thing. It makes you a full participant in our community. But more than that, it gives you a sense of connection to your ancestors. Our young men have been doing this for as long as anyone can remember.

The boy’s father appeared in the doorway while he was complaining that he liked having two balls and didn’t see why he had to give one up for some stupid superstition.

Where the mother was soft and looked to persuasion, the father was hard and just as apt to speak with a leather belt as with his tongue. He had no patience for the boy and demanded he come down this instant.

It’s not the pain. It just makes no sense to me.

Who cares what you think? It’s about being a part of something bigger than you. I did it when I was your age, and my father before me. We’ve always done it this way and we’re none the worse for it. I’ll be damned if I let you float through life without knowing the suffering I’ve had to suffer. You think you’re better than me? Is that it? You think you deserve to have a pain-free life while I suffer to put food on your table and see to your education? Is that it?

As you might expect, Jonas relented and went to the ceremony. Backed by a massive social machinery, the force of his father’s words seemed unassailable. Privately, he promised himself he’d never end up like his father, that when his sons came of age, he’d give them his blessing to challenge the system. But we know how that goes. If you give up a nut when you’re 18, then you’ve pretty much set the pattern for your whole life.

Categories
Street Photography

Wine Pairing Suggestions For The End Of The World

Night photograph of a homeless person sleeping underneath an orange blanket on the sidewalk at the intersection of Queen and Bay in Toronto.
Reclined on sidewalk, NE corner Queen and Bay

As a matter of habit, Peter Hadley III turned on his TV. He was now more than 90 days into it and yet another day with no TV signal, no internet connection, no cellphone service. He’d even tried old media like radio, shortwave, and CB, but all he heard at any frequency was a fitzing sound like when he pressed his ear to the mouth of a freshly opened bottle of Champagne. He wouldn’t even have electrical power if it weren’t for the building’s backup generator and a stack of jerrycans filled with diesel fuel. At least he could keep his wine collection chilled at the proper temperature.

Every day, Peter wandered the city streets, finding no one, not even human remains, and only now was he beginning to reconcile himself to the possibility that he was the sole survivor of whatever mysterious holocaust had taken everyone else. But on the 91st day, he discovered Cliff sprawled by the entrance to the city’s largest grocery store and eating potato chips and gulping diet cola from a two litre plastic bottle. Peter introduced himself and asked how long Cliff had been on his own.

Cliff answered that it’d been maybe two or three years.

Peter said that was impossible since things had gone haywire only 91 days earlier.

Still, Cliff said, I been living rough maybe two or three years. The rest of the world vanishing don’t really change that none. Tent in the ravine, just like always. Come up in the morning, just like always. Only, instead of begging for change, I bust into grocery stores and eat Twinkies.

Peter suppressed the customary feeling of revulsion that seized him whenever he encountered a homeless man. He observed that Cliff’s clothes were ragged and dirty. The man smelled. His fingertips were black with grime. Even so, Peter had grown tired of eating alone and craved the company of a live body, even if it was the live body of a homeless man. Besides, as Peter Hadley II had once said: You cannot drink a fine wine in solitude; it tastes so much better when you share it in the company of men. Given that, in the current situation, it appeared the only people left alive in the world were men, Peter was inclined to overlook the sexist undertones of his late father’s dictum.

Peter asked if Cliff wanted to join him for a proper dinner back at his apartment. Cliff could get himself washed up and put on some clean clothes. Peter had caught some fresh trout off a pier on the lakeshore and they could fry it up and, in lieu of lemons, they could accompany it with a crisp Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough.

Cliff didn’t care one way or the other about a snooty wine-paired dinner, but he did like the idea of simple human contact. He followed Peter to his penthouse condo and when he walked through the front door said holy god almighty. Peter had been the CFO of a Fortune 500 company before he retired at 40 with his stock options and his Bentley. It was easy for a man in Peter’s position to forget that most people aren’t accustomed to sprawling accommodations with views that go forever.

While Cliff whacked off in one of the guest room showers and picked at a corn on his foot and trimmed his fingernails, Peter prepared dinner in a kitchen whose hardware rivaled that of any Michelin rated restaurant. Cliff gulped his Sauvignon Blanc in precisely the same way he had gulped his diet Cola and, as before, finished with a belch. He took no time on the nose, didn’t pause on the front end, ignored the mid-palate. And as for a finish, the wine had disappeared before there was any hope of that. Then again, it wasn’t as if he’d wasted a Lafite Rothschild on the man.

Peter Hadley III kept a wine room weighted heavily in favour of left bank Bordeaux wines along with a selection of Grand Cru Burgundies. One of the challenges in the current situation was finding appropriate pairings for his wines. While he found it easy enough to catch fresh fish and had even slaughtered a couple chickens while wandering through Little Portugal, locating red meat was a greater challenge. When the power went out, butchered meat began to rot. Peter had grabbed whatever cuts he could find and had stored them in his personal freezer, but that was no long term solution. There were still cows grazing in fields north of the city, but Peter had no idea how to slaughter a cow, much less carve it into pieces suitable for laying out grilled on his fine china. He wondered if maybe a pig would be easier. Burgundy would pair well enough with pork. He lived in Hogtown. Surely there must be pigs nearby.

Peter savoured the grassy notes as he took a modest sip of the Sauvignon Blanc. He gazed across the table at his guest, and beyond to the open kitchen door where he saw a wide selection of knives stuck to the magnetic strip across the far wall. With a roofie in Cliff’s glass, the man would be easy to handle, certainly easier than a fat sow. Peter could drag him unconscious into the guest shower and drain him there. What makes a good pairing with human flesh? he wondered. He had a twenty year old Romanée-Conti he would love to try with a well seasoned flank.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Houston We Have A Problem

A Nuit Blanche outdoor contemporary art exhibit on Toronto's Queen Street West featuring orange cherry pickers extended high above the crowded street and laden with palm fronds.
Gap Ecology (Still Lives With Cherry Pickers and Palms) by David Brooks

A dick pic started circulating around mission control and, after some investigation, Dr. Laura Bybis discovered that it had been leaked from Commander Niezosi’s confidential medical file. Niezosi complained of tinea cruris and had sent a photo of his groin area to the ground-based medical team. Unknown to everyone involved, the default email settings automatically copied communications from the crew to a minor administrator who didn’t realize the sensitive nature of Niezosi’s complaint and laughed when she saw the poor man’s penis floating weightless between two patches of flaming skin. She’d been sleeping with a kid on the engineering team and forwarded the pic with a note: “If you ever let it get to this, don’t even think of crawling into my bed.” Once in the engineer’s hands, the image went viral.

Bybis called a team meeting and addressed everyone about the indiscretion and what it meant for crew morale. The crew, of course, was not present at the meeting because, at twelve million kilometres from Earth, a signal took forty seconds to travel in one direction. Forty seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but it’s enough to make live meetings unworkable. Instead, Bybis played a pre-recorded address from Niezosi to his colleagues on the ground. Bybis hadn’t screened the video before she pressed play, a decision that struck her in retrospect as regrettable.

Niezosi appeared on the main screen in mission control and addressed the team while framed on either side by screens that displayed diagrams of the mission’s trajectory to Mars. He was unshaven, haggard, dark circles under his eyes. But there was no hesitation. As you’d expect of a mission commander, he got right to it: “I want to thank all you assholes, all you dim witted engineers and shit-for-brains medical people for failing to anticipate the obvious. If you add up all the time we were confined to our space suits during the initial phase of the mission—prep in our cockpit twiddling our thumbs, then blast off, then the initial burn—you get nearly three days confined to our suits. Plenty of time for the rot to take hold.

“Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent nearly nine days in their suits and neither of them complained about jock itch. But look what you give us to wear for the rest of the mission. For more than three fucking years we’ve gotta prance around in these skin-tight get-ups. No natural fibres. No breathable cloth. It’s as if you’ve vacuum sealed my dick in a Petri dish. What the hell were you thinking?

“And then there’s the medical team. I’ve searched our module from top to bottom and I can’t find a fucking thing. No anti-bacterial creams. No anti-fungals. I’ve searched the pantry for ingredients I could throw together. Make some kind of powder or balm. But the rest of the crew is worried I’ll compromise our food supply. I’ve taken to floating around au natural. At first, the rest of the crew thought it was funny, but between my feelings of humiliation and their feelings of embarrassment, it’s starting to take its toll on morale. Never mind morale, I’m so fucking itchy I’m going out of my gourd.”

The ground crew at mission control was an international team, and Dr. Bybis worried that many of the people wouldn’t understand the phrase “out of my gourd” but, as she later discovered, it’s an expression transferable to many cultures. Everyone on the ground knew exactly what Niezosi meant. And although a few of them suffered the same malady, they at least had the reassurance that, whenever they liked, they could drive to the corner Walgreens and pick up some ointment.

A man wearing special glasses stands in a crowd gazing at the sun. In the background is Toronto's Old City Hall on Queen Street West.
Gazing at the sun during a solar eclipse
Categories
Street Photography

Crossing Rosedale’s Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge

Night shot standing on Toronto's Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge. A blurred person runs towards a group of people loitering at the far end of the bridge. In the background rise the apartment buildings of St. James Town.
Crossing the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge, Toronto

A place only becomes a place as it accumulates memories. Recently, the city blocked off both ends of the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and began work replacing it. The former bridge, the bridge I’d grown to love, had wooden slats reinforced here and there with sheet metal where the wood had begun to rot. It was almost impossible to set up a tripod and take a long exposure because the minute anybody else stepped onto the bridge, it began to shake. And in a mild breeze, the whole structure wobbled. My wife refused to step onto the bridge because she was afraid it would come crashing down into the ravine below. But I enjoyed pausing in the middle of it and imagining I was on a ship in rough weather.

Unless you look closely, you might miss the fact that the bridge is pasted over with memories. Some of those memories are public, some personal. Most obvious is the plaque at the north end advising that the writer, Morley Callaghan, used to walk his dog, Nikki, every day across the bridge. In fact, the bridge is often call the Morley Callaghan Footbridge although I’m not sure if that’s its official name. More recently, the bridge appeared in an episode of the Hulu production of The Handmaid’s Tale. I know, because I was walking underneath the bridge at the time and accidentally fucked up one of their takes. And just a few weeks ago, a psychopath gunned down an an innocent exchange student outside the Glen Road entrance to the Sherbourne subway station at the south end of the bridge. I didn’t say all the memories had to be happy memories.

Once the city has finished its project, dismantling the old bridge and replacing it with the new, will this still be the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge? I suppose this question is a variation on the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you replace each plank of the ship until none of the original planks remains, can you say that it’s the same ship? In the case of this bridge, if you reconstruct it and give it the same name as the original bridge, does it still support all those memories? Or does it hasten their disappearance? Like shadows running away in the night.

Categories
City Life

Psychic Readings: What Does Your Future Hold?

Man walking along sidewalk gazes back at sign advertising psychic readings.
What Does Your Future Hold? Sign on Yonge Street south of Bloor, Toronto

NASA has released a photograph of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* which spins at the centre of our galaxy. With a mass of only 4.3 million suns, it is relatively small for a supermassive black hole, especially when you consider that the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 has a mass of 6 billion suns. Strictly speaking, the photograph doesn’t show us the black hole since a black hole captures all information and releases nothing back to observers outside it; more properly, it’s a photograph of illuminated gas surrounding the black hole.

Whenever I read news stories like this, it sends my mind reeling, partly speculation, partly existential musing. Thankfully, neither of these tendencies need be limited by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about theoretical physics. In fact, my general ignorance probably makes the speculation more fun and free-wheeling.

What I do know is that the technical term for a black hole is singularity. Extreme gravity pulls matter to a single point in spacetime. Because we’re talking about spacetime and not just space, the extreme gravity also affects the flow of time. Observed from outside, as something approaches the singularity’s event horizon, time appears to slow. Beyond the event horizon (the boundary beyond which no information returns to outside observers), it’s impossible to say how time flows within the singularity. This is where speculation comes into play. Maybe time stops. Maybe time flows backwards. Maybe time flows randomly. Maybe we get time soup.

Another speculation that occurs to me: maybe we already know what happens inside a black hole because, in effect, that’s what our universe is. Like a black hole, the universe has a limit beyond which no information can escape. It’s limits appear to us dark and empty, not because there’s nothing there, but because whatever is there is unknowable. And if our universe is like a black hole, then maybe the flow of time in our universe is likewise fluid.

In his book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wonders why time appears to move in only one direction. There doesn’t appear to be a reason why time can’t move backwards. An incidental consequence of Hawking’s observation is that the physical laws of our universe offer no reason why psychics shouldn’t be able to do what they claim they can do. This suggests a different kind of singularity: a convergence between theoretical physics and theoretical psychics.

Categories
Street Photography

Garbage

A night photograph of bags of consumer waste piled up by the Dundas Street entrance to Toronto's subway.

Coming out of the pandemic, I had great hopes. I entertained a fantasy that, as a society, we would engage in serious introspection, we would learn valuable lessons, and then we would apply those valuable lessons to other areas of our collective life. Just imagine, I thought to myself, if the pandemic’s lessons in epidemiology could provide us with transferable skills, like an understanding of how exponential growth works, or how statistical modelling can help us understand the consequences of collective behaviours.

But here we are! On the down slope of the 6th wave. With no guarantee that there won’t be a 7th wave (although Sting tells us that love is the 7th wave). And no guarantee that we have the stomach to do anything about it even if there is a 7th wave. While I understand that people feel frustrated and worn out, I also recognize that what we have faced—a pathogen—does not reason, does not negotiate, and does not favour one ideology over another. All we have in answer to it is a commitment to apply public health principles and a willingness to learn as we go. For me, that means getting all the vaccinations to which I am entitled, wearing a mask indoors where necessary, and avoiding large indoor crowds of unmasked people. Ideally, I place myself in proximity to people who share my approach so that we can be mutually supportive.

Unfortunately, a pathogen is the least of our worries. There are things we do to ourselves that pose a far greater threat. However, these other things play out on a timeline that allows us to be distracted by more immediate concerns. Consumerism is a fine example of a threat that routinely stymies our collective imagination. We are smart people, aren’t we? It should be no problem to apply our lessons about exponents and statistics. It’s a straightforward thing to extrapolate from a few bags of consumer waste to a situation in which the oceans bloat with plastic and microplastics circulate in the bloodstreams of every living creature on the planet, including you and me. This doesn’t even take imagination. All it takes is a pencil and a calculator.

You think wearing a mask is an inconvenience? Jesus fucking Christ, wait’ll you see what’s coming 20 years from now. We’ll remember these as the good old days.

Categories
Street Photography

Will public libraries become a distant memory?

Night shot of a woman walking past the entrance to the Yorkville Public Library in Toronto
Toronto Public Library, Yorkville Avenue

Carrying on with my May theme of “things that were but are no more” I give you public libraries. With the approach of Ontario’s June 2nd provincial election, incumbent Doug Ford has announced that he will be halving provincial support for both the Southern Ontario Library Service and the Ontario Library Service-North. Ironically, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have learned how to pronounce them. Instead, he routinely abuses our ears by calling them libarries.

This isn’t the first time Doug Ford has exhibited hostility towards libraries. More than 10 years ago, as a Toronto City Councilor, Ford found himself in a war of words with Margaret Atwood over his attempt to chop municipal funding to local libraries. Again, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have found himself better armed for the battle. Then, as now, he went on about libarries and said of Atwood: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” In the same CBC article that disclosed this nugget, we learned that his brother flipped his middle finger to a woman who yelled at him for driving while talking on his cellphone. Ah, Robbie, R.I.P. as you float around in the Elysium Field of witty ripostes.

The problem with defunding libraries is part practical and part symbolic. Libraries provide countless non-obvious benefits to a community. People who foster a social democracy cast of mind have little difficulty noticing these benefits. But for those more politically keyed to believe that people should get only what they deserve or have paid for, such benefits pass mostly invisible. That’s shorthand for: I don’t feel like listing the practical benefits of libraries because, if you don’t know what they are or don’t believe they’re real, then I’m not writing this for you in any event. Persuasion is a waste of time.

In symbolic terms, libraries represent a commitment to learning, literacy, research, and perhaps most importantly, to the written word as a shared resource. Politics aside, knowledge is inherently social, and if you hamstring its social dimension, it withers. The body politic withers. Civil discourse withers. We are all diminished.

Although Doug Ford can’t find the minuscule sum in his budget to ensure that his libarries thrive, he has no difficulty pledging $1.2 Bn for a new prison in northern Ontario. Let’s be blunt, this is just an overpriced housing scheme for Indigenous people. I wonder if Ford has the imagination to see how public institutions like libraries serve a prophylactic function, disrupting the path that leads to a prison’s front doors. For $1.2 Bn, the new prison better have a top notch libarry.

Categories
Architecture

Deer Park United Church is now the site of a Condo

Night photograph of a backhoe behind the remnants of a demolished church.
Excavation for new condo on the site of the former Deer Park United Church, St. Clair Avenue West, Toronto

Five years ago, I froze my keister while trying to capture the early stages of ground-breaking for a new condo in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood. The Blue Diamond Condominium project was going up on the site of the former Deer Park United Church at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. Demolition crews had lopped off the back half of the church building, but the new design would incorporate the front half of the church and the bell tower into a shiny glass structure. We call this practice façadism and it seems to be Toronto’s go-to solution whenever the city wants to claim it cares about heritage buildings without impeding the work of property developers.

While the newly constructed condominium tower sits toward the rear of the lot, the former church, or at least the remaining front half of the church, will become The Imperial, a luxury event space which opens this fall. The Imperial’s web site landing page shows a long dining table laid out for a formal dinner, as if waiting for the guests of the last supper, while in the background is a restored stained glass window. I wonder if anyone gave any thought to the name, The Imperial, and the historical ironies that name imports into this space.

The church is gone and, with it, a particular dream of what it means to be church. Deer Park began its life in 1881 as a Presbyterian congregation and constructed the building at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. in 1913. Twelve years later, most of the congregation voted to join of the United Church of Canada. At that time, the UCC had aspirations of becoming a national church, the religious equivalent of Tim Hortons. While it might seem like a wonderful thing, spreading happiness and unicorns all across the nation, such aspirations come with a cost. All through the post-war boom, with Sunday Schools bursting at the seams, churches had no incentive to think about that cost. But beginning in the 70’s, as membership numbers began a long slow decline, the UCC had to face serious issues like its role in the residential school system and its overwhelming whiteness in the midst of an increasingly diverse culture.

It seems problematic to rename this site The Imperial. At the very least, it ought to come with a plaque that offers an honest account of what went before. Although I was raised within the UCC, I feel no regret for its decline; on the contrary, I feel this is a just outcome. So it bothers me that what we choose to preserve of this “heritage site” is a vestige of its colonial and colonizing past. Wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate the dismantling of our colonial past with symbols that carry us into a more equitable future. Instead, we create a space that celebrates the cannibalistic tendencies of late capitalism. I wonder what kind of meals they serve at The Imperial.

Categories
Architecture

Buildings that were but are no more

Night shot of a low building illuminated by a single street light.
Algoma Street South at Night - Thunder Bay

When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.

There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.

As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.

Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.

For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.

The Finnish Labour Temple and Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario
The Hoito, Thunder Bay, Ontario (2015)
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
Country Life

Shoveling the Pond

Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

A 13 second exposure on the evening of a full moon while the clouds scud overhead. My brother-in-law is shoveling the pond so the kids can go skating. He wears an LED head lamp and, when I ask him to hold still, miraculously manages to keep the head lamp still for the full 13 seconds. When he’s done shoveling, he’ll augur a hole in the ice and pump water from underneath to create a smooth glassy surface. This is how you do it when you don’t have a zamboni.

It strikes me that this is an entirely northern scene. I have cousins who grew up in Florida. I remember one of them telling me how she had never seen snow until she was in grade 5 or 6 and there was a cold snap and freak snowfall. Her school let the kids out so they could play in the snow. I don’t imagine there was any accumulation, but at least the kids could run in it and catch flakes on their tongues.

I’m amazed at how easy it is to take for granted my own view of things. That’s one of the reasons I like to follow other photographers on social media. They shake me out of my complacency and remind me that mine is not the only way to see the world.

Shoveling the pond at night
Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON
Categories
Street Photography

How will we look back on the 20’s?

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?

Categories
City Life

Pandemic Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Skating in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square

It’s interesting to compare public skating pre- and post-vaccine. Last year, people were skating before we had secured any vaccines. That meant that protocols were overly cautious. The city allowed only 25 people on the ice at a time while others waited in line behind a fence. When those 25 people had finished their skate, marshals directed them to a separate area where they could take off their skates. Only after the ice had been cleared did the marshals allow the next batch of 25 onto the ice. After the people in the changing area had left that space, the marshals went over and disinfected the benches. It was a slow process, and even though the city got to say that skating was open to the public, in practical terms, almost nobody got to skate.

This year, it’s different. We know that transmission happens almost exclusively by aerosols, so disinfecting benches is a waste of time. We also know that the risk of infection outdoors is low, so going maskless in wide open spaces isn’t such a big deal. As a result, people are moving more freely through Nathan Phillips Square this year. Even so, there are obvious signs that we are still in pandemic times. The band-aid in the final “O” of the Toronto sign reminds people to get vaccinated. A sign of the times?