Tag: Street Photography

Categories
City Life

When The Smile Fades

Worn advertisement with the words "Chocolate Cone" appearing on a ribbon above a portion of a face that excludes the mouth.
SW corner, Wellesley & Yonge, Toronto

Take a letter-sized page and fold it in half, then fold the result in half again. As a theoretical construct, like the point or line in Euclidean geometry, you can fold such a page indefinitely, because it has no width, no imperfections. But in the imperfect world of real paper, you can complete no more than six folds (seven with tools) before the exercise comes to its necessary end.

As the Louvre’s Chief Conservation Officer, Lisette faced a similar problem in her efforts to protect La Joconde. Taken as a theoretical construct, the Mona Lisa’s smiling face would last forever. But every year in the real world, she lost a little more of her substance, a molecule here, an atom there. Perhaps a gust would issue through the gallery and dislodge a few wisps of paint.

To guard against such mishaps, early conservators had replaced her with a clever copy and hermetically sealed the original in a protected vault. But even there they could not guard her from the ravages of cosmic radiation and the force of Earth’s gravity. It does not seem like much, a molecule here, an atom there, but in our imperfect world, such a diminution leads to a calculable end, as it does for the body, as it does for the Earth itself.

Over the millennia, Earthly powers had risen and fallen. First, there was the Europe of the Renaissance that had given rise to this most famous of paintings. Then the British Empire. Then revolutionary America. From its ashes rose the Canadian Empire which soon gave way to China which in turn surrendered its prestige to the Sub-Saharan Coalition. We compare the ebb and flow of power to the tides, but that is a strange analogy because, one day, even the tides will cease.

In all this ebb and flow of historical power, Lisette happened to be the person, a real person, not a theoretical construct, to preside over the passing of one of its great symbols. Whatever else Art might be, it was a symbol of power. It had grafted itself to Earthly longings and had turned itself into a standard bearer for the march of time. Lisette was convinced that the Mona Lisa’s smile was no great mystery: it had about it a sly mix of mockery and contempt that the privileged always bear for those who stand outside their circle.

Lisette stepped into the shattered remains of the Louvre’s glass pyramid where media waited for her announcement. She had memorized a carefully prepared speech, but worried that her emotions might unsettle her words:

Friends of the press, Citizens of the World—

she introduced herself and her colleagues, their offices and credentials, then went on

—it grieves me to announce that our beloved masterpiece, La Joconde, is no more. The last strands of canvas have crumbled to dust. The smile has faded to nothing. For thousands of years, this institution has presided over the care of this great work by an unknown master whose name is lost in a murky past. However—

In the silence, as Lisette struggled to recall what came next, a voice from the press shouted: Failure. You had one thing. One thing. And you failed.

As swiftly as the rise of a summer storm, Lisette’s demeanour changed from grief to anger. Failure? she cried. You may as well direct that accusation at yourself for allowing yourself to die. And I assure you: you will die. There are many extinctions that are a failure. A failure of stewardship. From the dodo to the white rhino. The African elephant. The honey bee. But this is death by a natural process. By your logic, we should blame the mortician when a man ends up on his slab because of old age.

Lisette stormed from the presser and locked herself in her office where she cried. She couldn’t say precisely why she cried, whether from grief or from anger, or perhaps from some as yet unnameable feeling her enigmatic painting represented.

Categories
Street Photography

There is a Difference Between Fact and Fiction

A woman texts with her left hand while holding a tray of Starbucks drinks in her right hand.
Coffee Run on Bloor Street West at Bedford

I had submitted the story, as requested, so it came as shock when the editor texted me that they absolutely COULD NOT USE IT along with an autocorrect that (presumably) converted my given name to “miscreant” and a link to a video call in 20 minutes unless I was immediately available in which case I should just FaceTime with them RIGHT NOW (again with the caps) all while I was struggling to pour coconut milk into my Starbucks.

Depositing my coffee on the nearest counter, I found the editor’s number on my FaceTime app and called. Too bad I’d left my ear buds at home because the people standing to either side of me discovered that I was an amoral pervert and purveyor of porn who was trying to wrap smut in literary pretensions and pass it off as the musings of the reasonable man on the Clapham bus with all that the Clapham bus entails.

Well fuck me! I shouted into my not terribly smart phone. I have no fucking clue what you’re on about.

Your piece, asshole. The one with the penis. And the things the penis does. Degradation. Defilement. Penetration.

Well, what can I tell you? Penises have a tendency to do that sort of thing when they’re attached to men who are, you know, complete shits.

No subtlety. No metaphor. No discretion. Just bald-faced description.

Well, like my mother always told me: call a thing by its proper name. Besides, how can you possibly find my writing shocking? We live in a world where the POTUS says worse every fucking day of the week.

That comes to us through reportage. You submitted fiction. There’s a difference.

Really!

I mentioned my Abraham Lincoln spoof: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers grabbed their women by the pussy.” But it fell flat. I blame my delivery.

The exchange devolved into something more civil and, at times, more esoteric, but the other patrons had left the coffee shop by then so there were no witnesses. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it turned into an intellectual debate about reader sensibilities and whether we should have a different regard for them depending on whether the subject matter is fact or fiction. However, in practical terms, the debate came to nothing.

I knew I wasn’t getting paid because my editor held firm to her view that, unlike reportage, a story carries the additional burden of having to edify its audience. If you read in the news that the POTUS brags his own daughter is supremely fuckable, that’s one thing. But incorporate that into a work of fiction, and the rules change. Rules? Really? Back and forth we went but neither of us would give any ground.

Knowing I wouldn’t get paid, I grew frustrated. Oh, the things I would have done. They would’ve been beyond the pale. Almost unthinkable in their depravity. Unfortunately, because these things never passed beyond fantasy, they were fictions and (at least according to my editor) unprintable. One day I’ll act on those things. And when I do… Oh, when I do … You’ll be the first to read about them. I promise.

Sticker on a utility pole on Toronto's Bay Street which reads: Dump Your Porn Addicted Boyfriend.
Sticker on Utility Pole, Bay Street, Toronto
Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: A Ghost Story with a Scary Ending

A black and white photo of a man walking past a steam vent while a cement truck passes in the background.
Temperance Street Steam Vent, Toronto

When he showed up at the office ten minutes late on a Monday morning, everyone noticed. They didn’t notice that he was ten minutes late; they noticed his general appearance. No one came right out and said: Geez, dude, you look wasted. Instead, they stabbed him with their judgmental, Puritanical stares and that was as good as coming right out and saying what he already knew. He’d seen it reflected back at him in the subway window as he rode to work: the bags under the eyes, the coarse stubble that made him look apathetically desperate, the tie that never quite settled into place. All in defiance of the office ethos and its strict professionalism. But most striking of all was the shock of white hair. On Friday afternoon, he’d left the office with a thick head of dark brown hair, and on Monday morning, he’d shown up with the scalp of a man thirty years his senior.

His office colleague (the one people assumed was his friend) approached and put an arm around his disappointing shoulders: Geez, dude, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

That is precisely what had happened, but he was afraid to say anything. The ghost had arrived at midnight, teetering on the fulcrum between Sunday and Monday. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake when the disparate wisps coalesced at the foot of his bed or whether he’d been dreaming when it first assumed its form. He had thought the ghost was there to scare the bejeezus out of him since scaring people seems to be the point of ghosts. But things didn’t play out that way. They shot the shit for a while—this and that—and things grew comfortable enough that he excused himself to get a beer from the fridge. When he returned, he found that the ghost had cracked a cold one, too, and was lounging with its feet up on the spare night stand.

He wasn’t Roman Catholic, so he couldn’t be sure, but he’d say the ghost was in a limbo situation. At one point, the ghost mentioned the bardo, but that could’ve been the brand of beer. Limbo. Bardo. Whatever you call it, the ghost had unfinished business on this plane and he expected that, as the night progressed, the ghost would ask for help concluding whatever it had to conclude in order to release itself from its entrapment in the netherworld. But the request never came. The ghost had another drink, and then another and another. The ghost was having too much fun to ruin it with talk of unfinished business, preferring instead to ramble on about the joys of a full life, the love of a good woman (or man, as the case may be), the passionate pursuit of interests, a deep curiosity about the world at large.

As the earliest light began to unfurl itself across the city, he interrupted the ghost and asked: but aren’t you going to frighten me, you know, say boo or something?

The ghost laughed and swung its feet from the night stand: Really? You want me to say boo?

The ghost excused itself to take a piss and when it came back it said: You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked and, to be honest, you don’t need me to say boo. You have enough to be afraid of as it is.

As the first light slipped through the cracks in the window shade, the ghost vanished. He was angry. This was the best the ghost could do? He’d stayed up all night, talking, drinking, baring his soul to an apparition. And this? This? He slapped on a rumpled shirt and didn’t bother to shave. He skipped breakfast and ran to the subway station. Riding into the office, he stared at his reflection and noted that he looked like hell. He rode the elevator to the 33rd floor, coffee in hand, and steeled himself for his office job, noting the semantic detail that he didn’t actually work in an office, but in an interior cubicle with no view of anything except a stupid screen saver of his employer’s corporate logo jittering across the monitor.

Categories
Street Portrait

Street Portraits at Toronto’s Pride Parade

Street portrait of a man wearing sunglasses and a cannabis decorated fishing hat.

Pride events offer the perfect opportunity to shoot street portraits. This is especially true on overcast days when shadows are soft and natural sunlight is kind to photographers. But the enemy here is not light so much as time. Interactions are so fleeting that you may have only a second to make a connection and take the shot. Everything has an ADHD vibe to it. Catch someone’s eye; raise the camera as if to ask “mind if I take a shot”; get the nod; frame the shot; click; move on to the next person.

This year, there was only one person who declined to pose. That’s exceptional. Most years, the number is zero. In the fenced-off portions of Church Street, consent is assumed, although that consent is given to Pride Toronto and not to the thousands of unofficial photographers roaming at large. The release notice says that “you consent to the use of your image” etc. for eternity. That strikes me as optimistic. Eternity is a long time. A lot can happen between now and eternity.

For example, on some views of inflationary cosmology, the universe expands forever and the distribution of energy within an infinite universe means that the average temperature approaches absolute zero. In other words, eventually it will become too cold to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.

But there are other issues to consider before it ever gets to that. For example, after about 5 billion years, our sun will become a red giant, expanding well beyond Earth’s orbit, which means that our home planet will be consumed in a great ball of Jerry Lee Lewis. In that scenario, assuming our genetic progeny still exists but hasn’t figured out how to migrate elsewhere, it will become too hot to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.

Somewhere between hot and cold, there is a lukewarm position occupied by smaller stars that consume their fuel more sparingly. Although the universe is too young for us to gauge the potential lifespan of such a star, it is plausible to suppose it could continue to burn for hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions, of years. Assuming we escape our solar death trap and migrate to one of these smaller stars, we could carry on for a long time. But somehow I think that, after evolving for the next trillion years, we might grow bored of staring at old photos of pride events from those early days when we’d barely learned to walk upright.

Categories
Street Photography

Using black and white to silence the noise of Toronto Pride

Black and white photograph of people sitting on scaffolding against a white background, most of them watching something in the distance.
West side of Yonge Street, south of Bloor, Toronto

For the first time since the beginning of the global pandemic, the city of Toronto has not cancelled Pride celebrations. We so needed a party! For one thing, the city needed a reason to cut loose. Just because. For another thing, it gave us a chance to celebrate the fact that we enjoy freedoms here that the rest of the world seems hellbent on demolishing.

The festivities were mercifully free of the freedom rhetoric that our gaslighting friends from the anti-mask, anti-vax, trucker convoy movement have been tossing around so flippantly. It was such a relief to shut out all that noise, even if only for a few days, and to fill the city with noise of a different sort, the pumping bass of dance music and people cheering and laughing and filling the air with a positive energy.

It’s a funny thing, all that noise. While I like the idea of noisy celebration, and while I like to lose myself in the crowds, I do have my limit. I am, after all, an introvert, and if I spend too much time in dancing screaming throngs, I go mental. So I go out for a few hours, and then I retreat to my fortress of solitude to recover a sense of equanimity.

This tension between celebration and solitude finds its analogy in my photographs. Pride is about rainbows and glitter cannons and wild splashes colour. But the auditory overwhelm that finally drives me to silence has its correlate in the visual field. The colour fills my eyes and my answer, in the quiet of my post-production space, is to desaturate my photographs. It calms my senses.

During Sunday’s parade, people had climbed the scaffolding around the construction site on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. Behind them was a broad white swath that served as an obvious background for a photograph. For a black and white photograph. Although colourful (for example, a person in the front row sits on a trans flag), the image plays just as well without colour.

This gives me pause for one last thought: does the act of desaturating a photograph have a political dimension? A rainbow flag means something. A trans flag means something. But in a context where colour is an important signifier, can the removal of colour be construed as a hostile act? I remove colour for a cognitive reason, to avoid overwhelm, but my benign intentions may be a pale excuse.

Categories
Street Photography

The Front of Things

A man in overalls steps up onto the curb beside a fire hydrant while in the background are stores fronting a city street.

I’m surprised at the number of fledgling street photographers I follow on social media who complain about being nervous when they shoot strangers. They’re reluctant to shoot them straight on. They’re afraid something bad might happen. The person they’re trying to shoot might get angry or punch them out.

I think of the scene in The Godfather when Johnny Fontane, the Vegas crooner, is speaking to Vito Corleone. He whines to the Don that his voice is getting weak; he’s all washed up; a Hollywood director has passed him over for a good part. Don Corleone yells at him that what he can do is act like a man, then he smacks Fontane in the face and mocks him. That’s what I want to do to people who complain that it’s too hard to stand in front of people and take their photo.

Act like a man, godammit! You think you’re somehow unique because you feel nervous? Everybody feels nervous. Feeling nervous is a good thing. Only psychopaths don’t feel nervous. If you feel nervous, at the very least, it means you’re not a psychopath. More than that, feeling nervous puts you on edge. It gives you a heightened sense of your surroundings and a greater feeling of immediacy in the moment. You make better images when you feel nervous.

As for making people angry, it happens. Some people will regard you with suspicion, as if you plan to do something nefarious with their image. It’s a fact of contemporary life that a strong strand of paranoia winds through our public engagement. As a photographer, it’s part of your job to allay those feelings of paranoia. If you find yourself channeling Vladimir Putin, maybe you should find other ways to spend your time.

And as for fears that someone might beat you up, exercise common sense. Don’t shoot late at night outside the local Hells Angels clubhouse. Personally, I’ve never found myself in a situation I couldn’t talk my way out of. In my experience, some of the meanest scariest looking people have proven to be some of the most receptive to my photographic overtures. I suspect their appearance means most people avoid them and so these mean scary looking people are excruciatingly lonely. The minute I express interest in their lives and demonstrate that I’m not afraid, they open up to me and are happy to pose for my camera.

https://youtu.be/idP5-vtkhBE
Categories
Street Photography

The Back of Things

A man walks south down Yonge Street with his left hand pressed to his hip.
Yonge Street south of College Street

Shooting street photography, I feel a tension between shooting from the front and shooting from the back. This tension has its correlate in the wider world of social relations. Most of us are conflict averse and would rather not face people head-on even though we know we should. Maybe somebody slights us and we feel we ought to stand up to them. It’s a matter of principle. It’s a matter of personal dignity. But when the time comes, we feel nervous. We hesitate and the moment passes.

Something similar happens with a camera in hand. We know that, at least in street photography, the best images happen when the subject approaches us. We get to look them in the eyes and examine their expression. If we shoot them from the back, it’s only because we’re cowardly. We tell ourselves we haven’t got the right stuff. Our inner critic yammers on until it makes us feel two inches tall and we wonder if we’ll ever be any good at our chosen craft.

And yet, as with any rule-bound practice, we discover that the rules take us only so far. There are occasions when it’s best to break the rules. Sometimes the view from the back offers its own interest, as it does here with the hand pressed to the hip, the posture of discomfort, the four rings on the left hand, the rumpled texture of the shirt. The scene from the back raises enough questions in its own right to sustain our interest.

I find the same situation arises with buildings. The front of a building has an obvious interest. But sometimes, the back of a building tells a story all its own and I would miss that story if I didn’t duck around the side and explore what lies behind.

Categories
Street Photography

Statistical Photography

Black and white photo of a woman wearing ear buds and smoking while texting on her cellphone.
Shot on SE corner of Queen St W and Bay St, Toronto

I’ve noticed that in the curation of my own photos, there’s a statistical process at play. I go out and I shoot and I shoot and I shoot. When I’m done, I dump my images into a folder and do a preliminary cull. Typically, half my photos go into the trash right at the start. I load the rest into Lightroom and begin a closer examination of my shots, flagging those I like best for post-processing adjustments like colour correction and cropping.

So far this year, 1 in 14 of these images have made the cut. That’s 1 in 28 of my total. In any given year, that leaves me with a thousand or so images of a certain quality which I then cull to a hundred or thereabouts, those I regard as suitable for print. In other words, I end up with 1 in 10 of the 1 in 28. If my math is accurate, that means that, on average, I make 280 images for every one that really satisfies me. That ratio is pretty consistent year over year.

No doubt other photographers function differently. Some take greater care at the moment they capture the image, making sure they release the shutter only if they know the image is good. For them, the ratio of satisfying images is higher. But that isn’t me. I can’t afford to be so precious. I subscribe to the Wayne Gretzky school of photography: the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t make 100% of the shots I don’t take. So I shoot and I shoot and I shoot.

As odd as it may sound, the global pandemic has provided affirmation of my approach to photography. The pandemic has made me daily mindful of statistical thinking and its importance to public health policy. No one action will guarantee that I avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but if I wear a mask and get vaccinated, and if others do the same, then collectively we improve the odds that everyone will avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus. It’s all a matter of statistics.

Applying the same kind of thinking to my photographic practice … no one photo may be a great photo, but if I keep shooting, and if I do my best with each shot, then, statistically speaking, at least a few of those shots are going to be good. The real trick is recognizing them when they happen.

Categories
City Life

History of Violence

Tow-Away Zone sign on a bent metal pole with tall buildings in the background.

One of the things the Black Lives Matter #BLM movement has tried to do is expand the meaning of racism. In the past, white people like me tried to exempt ourselves from responsibility by saying: “What, me racist? I haven’t got a racist bone in my body.” And, in a way, we were right if, by racist, you mean we don’t run around engaging in overt acts of racism.

The #BLM movement struggles to communicate the idea that racism is more than overt acts. It invites people who look like me to see beyond the obvious: to acknowledge that many institutions were designed from their outset to discriminate (and to commit racist acts on our behalf); to identify passive aggressive behaviours and microaggressions that neatly evade allegations of racism but commit such acts all the same; to own our failures to intervene when others do engage in overt acts of racism. People find it difficult to accept that simple omissions can be acts of racism too.

We can understand racism as a category of violence. If we look to violence generally, we find the same dynamic at play. It’s easy for most of us to avoid allegations of violent behaviour because we aren’t prone to engage in overt acts. I don’t physically abuse my wife. I don’t lose my temper and hit people when I don’t get my way. I don’t cut people off on the highway then get out of my car and threaten them with a baseball bat. So, no, I am not a violent person.

As with the #BLM movement, I get to avoid charges of violent behaviour only if I hold to a narrow definition of violence. But violence is more than overt acts. I can abuse my wife without laying a finger on her; it’s possible to engage in all sorts of manipulations that subtly wear her down. And I can do injury without ever striking a person; I can engage in implied threats or utter indirections that are nevertheless demeaning.

Further expanding my definition of violence, I see violence embedded in urban planning. For example, when infrastructure fails to accommodate increases in pedestrian and vehicular traffic, everyone grows frustrated and that frustration leaks out as anger. The people on the receiving end of that anger didn’t cause the frustration. They just happen to be convenient targets.

And when public services fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, not only does that do violence to those vulnerable people—the mentally ill, the homeless, the different—, it heightens the anxiety of everyone else and produces conditions ripe for moral panic: let’s round them up and warehouse them out of sight. This, too, is a form of violence and it implicates us all.

Then there is the violence implicit in our built environment. When we build in ways that fail to account for the human scale, we say in effect that people—all people—are incidental to the late modernist project. Concepts trump people. Ideologies transcend humans. Putin is not extraordinary. This kind of violence has been at work on us for decades.

Categories
City Life

Arrow

A woman pushes a bundle buggy along the sidewalk while, overhead, an arrow points off at an inclined angle.
Walking west on Scollard Street, Toronto

Speaking of clichés … arrows are a great favourite in street photography. I’m not sure why that is. A Freudian thing, maybe? Or maybe arrows imply a sense of direction which viewers find reassuring. At least it’s reassuring until the arrow points in a direction that isn’t terribly helpful.

What do we make of an arrow that points at an inclined angle? I’m inclined to think the people who installed this arrow had Elon Musk in mind. It points the way to Mars. Or maybe city planners put it there to remind us which way the skyline is headed.

Personally, this arrow makes me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t fill me with existential dread or make me doubt my fundamental beliefs. It causes a feeling of discomfort more on the same order as when I’m at a church wedding and the officiant goes on too long and the hard pew presses against my tailbone and I have to shift in my seat every two minutes to relieve the twinge. It’s that kind of discomfort.

I can tolerate an arrow pointing off into space, but I don’t want to take that as a prescription for my life’s philosophy. If I had my druthers, I’d turn the arrow the other way around. Instead of staring off at the heights or beyond into space, I’d encourage people to stare down at themselves and their rootedness in the ground they walk.

Dreaming and star-gazing are fine. But balance these impulses with self-examination and a regard for our own place. We can ill-afford to neglect the ground we walk.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographic Clichés

A woman cleans the interior face of a store window, holding a bottle of window cleaner in one hand and a white cloth in the other.
Window Cleaning on Spadina Avenue

I remember hearing a story about a university student taking an English Lit course. The class had been assigned Shakespeare’s Hamlet and on the first day of lectures the professor asked: “So what did you think?” The student put up his hand and said: “It was great, but there were too many clichés.”

I have no idea if the story is true. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, it’s becoming a bit clichéd in its own right. But the story points to the fact that every cliché was once an original thought. Before there were new age self-help gurus, there was Polonius saying to his son: “To thine own self be true.” And before we had hedge fund managers standing on ledges, we had Hamlet saying: “To be, or not to be. That is the question.”

Although photography hasn’t been around quite as long as classic literature, it has explored huge swaths of what it is possible to say with images. It has developed a canon of “great” images and these images have produced a kind of stylistic grammar. Want patient suffering? Look to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Want the 1000 yard stare of collective trauma? Look to Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. Want puddle jumping? Look to Henre Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazare.

Tourism has added to the range of our stylistic grammar. For example, if you Google “holding up the leaning tower of pisa” you end up with enough visual cheese to make a thousand pizzas. And, of course, there’s the selfie. Here I am in Times Square. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. And here I am at the Taj Mahal.

As evidenced by today’s featured photo, I am a great practitioner of the visual cliché. In fact, I am absolutely shameless in my taste for visual cheese. I have a couple thoughts on this. First, trying to put my own spin on what the masters have done before is a great way to hone my craft. Second, let’s be realistic. With eight billion people on this planet, the majority of whom now walk around with cameras in their pockets, the chances of me coming up with anything original are minuscule. Even if I do come up with an original idea, it’s likely that other people are coming up with the same idea simultaneously.

In such an environment, it makes more sense simply to revel in cliché. Own it. Roll around in it like a pig in mud.

Categories
Street Photography

The Migraine Dress

A woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress.
Woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress

I get migraine headaches. They are textbook classic migraine headaches. Most of the time, they follow the same pattern. First, I see a hole. A spot goes missing from my visual field. Maybe I’m reading, and as I move my eyes from left to right, the words on the right disappear as I shift my gaze. It’s as if all the words tumble into a black hole. Or maybe I reach for something and I notice that my hand has disappeared. It’s an odd feeling to lose track of your body parts.

Next up are the fortification hallucinations, jagged lines shaped like the parapets of a medieval fort, but unlike fortifications, these lines shimmer, and they’re lit up like electric arc lights. When the fortification hallucinations start, the whole world lights up and quivers. The woman’s dress shown above, looks a lot like the start of a migraine headache. Clearly, this woman does NOT suffer from migraine headaches; if she did, she would avoid this dress like the plague.

These preliminary stages are called the aura. There is speculation that they are the source of stories about poltergeists. Many people, myself included, report an extraordinary sensitivity to sounds and strange auditory sensations. While this is probably caused by a sudden rush of blood through the ear drums, I can understand how premodern migraine sufferers might have thought they were hearing ghosts. At the same time, I experience a taste/smell of icy mintiness. And let’s not forget about the numbness that typically affects my left hand and the left side of my face (because the migraine headache affects the right side of my brain).

Of all the preliminary stages, my favourite is transient aphasia which typically lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. I use the word favourite loosely. It’s such a weird experience to hear words inside my head but find myself unable to communicate them. The experience makes me feel horribly for those (like Bruce Willis) who have permanent aphasia because of a brain trauma or progressive dementia.

On a couple of occasions, I have had a journal close at hand when I happen to be entering the aphasic stage of migraine and so, as an experiment, I have recorded whatever happens to enter my head as I pass into and out of my aphasic state. The results are odd and I have shared them on my other site, nouspique.com.

Then comes the headache proper. Most of the time, medication keeps the worst of it at bay. But there are times when nothing helps. It feels like somebody has taken knitting needles and a hammer and has pounded the needles up my nostrils through my brain and out the top of my head. The next day, it feels like I have a hangover from the bender of the century.

Why would anyone wear a dress that looks like that?

Categories
Street Portrait

Curiosity

A woman with a heavily tattooed arm, and wearing strong makeup and a hairnet, sits in Toronto's High Park.

Curiosity is a mental posture worth cultivating in the pursuit of street photography. There is something to be said for revisiting the mind of a three year old and asking Why? Why? Why? wherever we turn our gaze.

I’m not a Roman Catholic, but curiosity has led me to delve into Roman Catholic theology. I am particularly taken by the writings of the Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, whose monumental work, Insight, rests on a simple observation: all human beings are born with an unrestricted desire to know. Curiosity.

For Lonergan, curiosity is the default condition of human consciousness. At one time or another, virtually all of us stray from that default condition, pulled by what he describes as distortions in our thinking. Many of these distortions happen because of the socializing process we call growing up. Adulthood has many things to commend it, but sometimes its demands can stifle curiosity.

Street photography (or any photography for that matter) can be a wonderful antidote to the dangers of growing up. It stimulates curiosity by encouraging us to look at our world in fresh ways. This is especially important when we encounter people as the subjects of our photographs. Curiosity pushes us to see beyond those habits that distort our seeing, habits like the impulse to judge and the entrenchment of personal bias. Curiosity demands that we see the more that rests inside each person we encounter.

Alongside curiosity, I find a delight in difference. This delight doesn’t find expression in a salacious voyeurism: look at this strangeness I’ve captured. Instead, it’s more an expression of relief. It’s such a relief that people don’t look or think like me. What a dull and narrow world that would be!

Categories
Street Portrait

Handling Dark Skin in Post-processing Software

Candid street portrait of a Black person wearing decorative earrings.

It’s well-established that film was optimized for light-skinned subjects. Manufacturers dodged allegations of racism by arguing that the principal market for film was light-skinned purchasers. They were simply meeting demand. If racism accounted for the fact that there was less demand from dark-skinned purchasers, that was a social problem. Not something that companies like Eastman Kodak could do anything about.

Except that they could. Part of the problem was that white photographers were complacent and simply assumed there was some immutable technical reason why film was the way it was. A notable exception came in 1977 when Jean-Luc Godard went on assignment in Mozambique and refused to use Kodak film.

It turns out manufacturers could address the issue if given the right incentive. For example, the vintage ID-2 Polaroid camera came with a boost that enhanced the flash by 42% which is exactly the additional level of light that black skin absorbs. The reason for the boost was to meet the requirements of the South African government. At that time, the apartheid regime required Blacks to carry a passbook and the photographs had to accurately reflect the skin colour of the subjects. It seems manufacturers were happy to meet the demands of apartheid but not the demands of a Black family trying to make a photo album.

Despite claims that the shift to digital photography has solved the problem, that isn’t universally true. Facial recognition algorithms have a persistent problem accurately detecting darker skinned faces. And since the principal function of these algorithms is to assist law enforcement and border controls, current shortcomings continue to promote the racial biases historically embedded in these roles.

For an individual photographer, or even someone wielding an iPhone, post-processing apps have made it easy to accurately correct for different skin tones. In my own work flow, I rely on programs like Lightroom and Nik Effects. There are still challenges, especially when people with radically different skin tone appear in the same frame. For the time being, I have adopted the practice of optimizing for the person with the darkest skin. It’s a bit like the practice news agencies have adopted of capitalizing the word Black. It’s one small step on a path to right relations.

Categories
Street Photography

The Naked Truth

A man stands naked on a busy street corner.
Butt naked at the intersection of Church & Bloor, Toronto

I could stand butt naked (or is it buck naked? I’m never sure) on a busy street corner, and nobody would notice.

That seems to be the way it is for me. I write. I photograph. I create. But I attract very little attention to myself.

In the world at large, it seems as if people are scrabbling over one another for attention. Despite talk about cancel culture and deplatforming, never have so many of us had so much access to tools designed to amplify our voices. In fact, our apparent anxiety about cancel culture and deplatforming implies that we regard widespread attention as a right. We have the right to develop a personal brand. We have the right to carry media studios in our pockets to promote that brand. We have the right to be famous.

I regard myself as a bit contrarian and, certainly when it comes to digital culture, I feel like I’m forever walking into a serious headwind. Still, I feel that my time has come. No, I don’t think I’m on the cusp of becoming famous. Only that I’m better prepared for an inevitable and impending oblivion.

In her Norton Lectures: Spending The War Without You, Laurie Anderson has this to say about our creative impulses:

We’re also the first humans who face the possibility, some say the probability, of our own extinction. And we’re the first humans who are trying to find the words for this. But here’s the thing about stories. A story is usually something you tell to somebody else. And if you’re telling a story to nobody, is it still a story? And this is our awesome job. We are the first humans to try to do this: to tell a story to nobody.

I’ve pulled the quote from the second of the CBC Ideas broadcasts starting at 36:20.

Laurie Anderson gives me hope because she makes it clear that I’ve devoted my whole life to the bleeding edge of our latest (ultimate?) cultural trend: I’m seasoned in the art of telling stories to nobody. I have no expectation of fame or even of a modest reputation, and I have no confidence in a posterity to receive my creations.

That isn’t as depressing as it sounds. It’s simply to note that I act on interior motivations. I do what I do because I have to. Obsession. Compulsion. Call it what you will. I prefer to think that I am motivated by the immediate pleasure I feel at the very moment of creation. It is a quiet and private satisfaction and it is enough.