Tag: Street Photography

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Street Photography

Too Old To Fail

Shadowy outlines of the words "Hudson Bay Company" remain on the wall of the former Bloor/Yonge retail location after the sign has been dismantled. People pass on the sidewalk underneath.
Hudson Bay Company, Bloor Street East, Toronto

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve grown accustomed to the phrase “too big to fail” as a justification for using government funds to prop up large corporations. The rationale is that certain companies are so large that if they collapse, the consequences will ripple throughout the national or even global economy and take everything down with them. For example, if a bank defaults on its obligations to its depositors, they will then default on their obligations, too, and so on. Never mind that the people who lobby for government money by crying “too big to fail” are the same people who, at any other time, would declare themselves neoliberal small-government libertarians. But that’s a rant for another day.

It strikes me that the phrase “too old to fail” has some traction too, though maybe for different reasons. I feel no sentimental attachment to the Royal Bank of Canada, but I feel very differently about the Hudson Bay Company. As a boy, I read about how Henry Hudson and his son were set adrift in the spring of 1611 by a mutinous crew who were tired of masking wintering in the newly discovered Hudson’s Bay. They floated off, never to be seen again. I read, too, about the adventures of Radisson and Groseilliers and imagined myself paddling alongside them as they explored uncharted territories.

In 1670, a group of wealthy courtiers obtained a Royal Charter formally establishing the Hudson Bay Company. And in 1869 the HBC sold the region known as Rupert’s Land to the recently formed government of Canada (rejecting an American offer).

However, recent transactions have sucked most of the romance out of The Bay and remind us that it’s now just another company, as subject to the logic of free-flowing capital as any other. For example, in 1978, it acquired Zellers. Zellers for fuck’s sake! But that wasn’t the last shit discount retail store it acquired. It bought Towers in 1990 and Kmart in 1998. Holy crap! In 1979, billionaire Kenneth Thompson acquired a 75% stake in the company and, like an unsexy version of Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, proceeded to break it apart.

But the nail in the coffin of HBC romance came in 2008 when an American private equity firm bought the company for $1.1 billion. In 2020, they took the company private and that, as they say, is that. Earlier this year, they announced that they were closing the local retail outlet at Bloor and Yonge. The place where I buy all my underwear! Gone with the snap of a finger. Earlier this month, a crew came and pulled the sign off the side of the building and turned one of Toronto’s shittiest stretches of sidewalk into an even shittier stretch of sidewalk.

But I should have known better. As I boy, I could be forgiven for getting swept away by a romantic telling of the Hudson Bay story. But what took me so long to revisit the story with the critical eye of an adult? What took me so long to recognize that this is just another example of capital, whether in 1670 or 2020, deployed to make a handful of people obscenely wealthy at the expense of whole nations of people and the natural resources that sustain them?

A stain on a wall is easy enough scour away. But other stains endure.

Categories
Street Photography

The Advantage of Photographing Scenes that Disappear

A woman walks through a sliver of morning light on Yonge Street while behind her is a shop called Mind Games with a bolt of lightning above the woman's head.
Woman walks through the morning light on Yonge Street

One of the great advantages of living in a place where the cityscape is disposable and buildings are routinely demolished, rebuilt, and demolished once again, is that if you get a decent shot, the light just so, a person passing through the light just so, a thunderbolt above the person’s head just so, no one else can replicate your shot. The building that served as your backdrop is now a 60 story condo. And another 60 story condo across the road forever blocks that perfect sliver of morning light. Condo killed the photo star. Or something like that.

Fuck Ansel Adams and his photos of eternal natural majesty. El Capitan and all those other enduring scenes from the American southwest. Now, tourist photographers from all over the world show up at these sites, pick out the three holes in the ground where the previous photographer set up their tripod, and set up a shot that exactly replicates all the shots that have gone before. Boring. Worse than boring. All that tourist traffic to popular photographic sites is posing an environmental threat to the natural landscape. At least when I’m tramping through the city streets, there’s not much I can do to make the environment worse than it already is.

That’s why I say fuck Ansel Adams. Not because I dislike his work. I like it very much. But because we need only one Ansel Adams. We don’t need 20,000 tourist Ansel Adams. Be something else. Be you. It’s easier to clarify who you are in a landscape that changes before anyone else can replicate your shots.

Categories
City Life

The Human Scale

A tiny construction worker stands in front of a large upright slab of concrete as the last of a building is being demolished.

There’s a story—I can’t remember where I heard it and I have no idea if it’s true—about loggers in the late 1800’s cutting down trees in an old growth forest, maybe in California or the interior of British Columbia. They fastened guy wires to the top of an enormous tree, at least a couple hundred feet high with a trunk of such girth that it took a dozen loggers holding hands to circumvent its girthness, and they used block and tackle rigging to pull down the tree.

Once the tree was laid out on the ground, the loggers took up their enormous saws and set to work cutting it up, starting at the trunk. It took all morning to make a single cut, but when they were done, they had freed the tree from its upended root ball. Time for lunch. The loggers gathered in the shade of the root ball, made themselves a little fire for their tea, pulled out their sandwiches or whatever it is that late 19th century loggers ate for lunch, stretched out their legs, settled in for a short snooze. Ah!

The problem with pulling down a tree is that half the roots are still in the ground, bent at a 90º angle, but not broken. Those roots are under enormous pressure, but held in place by the weight of the tree. When the loggers cut the tree at the trunk, there wasn’t much left to hold the roots in place. Without warning, the roots snapped back to their original position, flipping the root ball flush with the ground and effectively swallowing all the loggers underneath it. Lunch. An entire logging crew vanished beneath an enormous redwood root ball.

When I heard this story, I think the teller intended it as an environmental parable, a case of tree revenge. The moral of the story was that, ultimately, we must pay for the ravages we inflict on the natural world. Something like that. But I was a kid at the time and didn’t care for parables with environmental messages. I evaluated all stories by their gross factor. By that measure, this was a good story. Almost as good as a dead baby joke.

Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920
Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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Abstract

Our Digital Legacy

A blurred figure in a red hooded coat walks behind a glass screen as water pours down the surface of the glass.
View through falling water, Yorkville, Toronto

There is a generational divide between the things my parents will leave behind for me and those things I will leave behind for my children. I’m not talking about the stuff that gets listed in a last will and testament. I’m talking about the other stuff. The sentimental stuff. The photos in the drawer. The family albums. The scrap books of summer vacations. The letters from dearly departed great aunts. My father, now 86, has gone one further, writing anecdotes and childhood stories that he’ll stitch into a more formal memoir to share with his children and grandchildren.

Although my parents now take digital photos and record their anecdotes on laptops, they make physical copies of everything. The photos and stories they pass on to us aren’t real if we can’t grasp them in our hands.

I on the other hand have crossed a generational/technological divide. People my age and younger tend to accumulate our memorabilia in virtual space. Our photos end up on Instagram or Flickr. Instead of letters, we have threads buried in gmail accounts or texts littered with LOL’s and emojis. For memoirs, we have posts moldering on long-abandoned blogs and forgotten rants on Facebook and Twitter.

Web sites like LifeHacker advise us to preserve our digital assets in much the same way as our parents have preserved their analog assets. In this regard, there are a few basic rules to remember:

  1. Don’t save digital documents in proprietary formats. Instead, use open-source digital formats. For photographs, save RAW images in DNG format. Alternatively, use .tiff and .jpg for uncompressed and compressed images respectively. Save text as .txt. If you want something with precise layout, save as .pdf but also extract text and images and save them separately.
  2. Store redundant copies of digital files because drives fail and digital files can degrade. Make sure one of those redundant copies is on a physical drive stored off-site or on a cloud-based server (or both).
  3. And don’t forget to tell people what you’ve done with your assets.

But let’s be realistic here. Part of what makes old photos and letters from earlier generations so valuable is their comparative scarcity. Now, each one of us generates so much information about ourselves that we can expect succeeding generations to drown in our digital assets. They won’t have the time to examine any of it. It will be useful only as fodder for algorithms that uncover stories about us in the aggregate, social memoirs expressed as statistical trends.

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
City Life

Disposable People

Torn missing person poster on a utility pole
Torn missing person poster on a utility pole

It’s 10 years since we moved from Toronto’s suburbs to the downtown core and while, for the most part, we are glad for the change in lifestyle, one thing I find disturbing is the endless succession of posters pleading for help to find missing people. Most of the stories are tragic. One of the first posters I saw when we settled downtown turned out to be a victim of serial killer Bruce McArthur. The appearance of Covid-19 has brought no abatement in this epidemic of missing people.

I don’t like to confess such a thing, but I note a shift in my personal attitude to these posters. I’ve grown inured to their presence. It reminds me of the fire and police sirens that blare at all hours of the night. After years of exposure to them, I’ve grown used to the sound and often don’t even notice anymore.

But I think the issue runs deeper than that. It’s not simply a matter of growing so accustomed to something that we cease to notice it anymore; it’s also a function of a broader cultural trend. People have becomes units of labour, fungible cogs in the neoliberal machine. Marx and Engels had documented 170 years ago how a nascent industrialization was changing the relationship of capital and labour. Their problem was that they suffered from a failure of imagination. Today, their jaws would hit the floor if they learned about cryptocurrency and the gig economy. And it would astonish them to witness the manipulations we apply to persuade people that today’s forms of work belong to reasonable social arrangements.

People do express outrage. For example, Twitter exploded when somebody leaked a supreme court opinion on abortion that cites with approval a CDC report that addresses the “domestic supply of infants.” It suggests that maternity wards are production lines in a factory. But the outrage dissipates because the most active Twitter accounts are managed by gig peons. Nobody pays them enough to sustain their outrage.

Like our bottled of water, like our masks and hair clips, like our myriad plastic widgets, our people are disposable.

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
Street Photography

Continuity Is For Wimps

A middle-aged woman with glasses carries a plastic tray with some plants and wears a white T-shirt with the words: "Continuity is for wimps"
Woman buys plants in Kensington Market, Toronto

I don’t know what it means to say that continuity is for wimps. I do know that I am capable of reading a four word sentence—almost any four word sentence—and egregiously overinterpreting it. Sometimes what makes a sentence great is that it provides fertile ground for overinterpretation. Without that possibility, it would be just another boring sentence.

In the context of words, continuity may have something to do with flow. In turn, flow may be related to the passage of time. When we read a good paragraph, we say it conveys a sense of continuity to the extent that it carries us seamlessly through time from start to finish. The conjunctions and, but, and or (language’s logical operators) contribute mightily to that sense of flow. But the use of conjunctions by itself isn’t enough; their use has to be apt. “Montezuma shouted at Mary, but the dog had died.” This may be a fine use of a conjunction. However, we can’t know this without context. The dog might have no connection whatsoever to the relationship between Montezuma and Mary. A dishonest author may have tried to falsify the existence of a relationship.

The word but can anticipate a reservation, too: “I like you, but … ” Nobody wants to hear the second half of that sentence. In situations like this, we cry out to the speaker: if you feel a compulsion to make your sentences flow, now would be a good time to resist; chop things up like a fresh green salad.

Speaking of fresh green salad, I think of all the times during Trump’s term in office when I heard people complain about how the orange wonder’s speech came off sounding like word salad. America’s foremost pussy-grabbing toupee wearer has a mind remarkably untroubled by concerns for continuity. The stuff in his brain at the beginning of a sentence may not be the same stuff in his brain at the end of a sentence. Pit him against a consummate prose stylist, Julian Barnes, for example, and the difference is stark. Reading Barnes is like drinking a smooth 21 year old single malt. Listening to Trump is like drinking screech scraped from the sides of a barrel and boiled in a tin bucket.

Even if we suppose continuity is for wimps, I’m inclined to think it still depends on who’s pulling the levers. There are extraordinarily discontinuous writers—most notably poets—who still manage to produce compelling work. It’s not so much that they’ve turned their backs on continuity so much as that they’ve foisted responsibility for it onto their readers.

Categories
City Life

Red Dress Project

A red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher's Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus
Red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher’s Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus

Five years ago, in 2017, the University of Toronto’s Women & Gender Studies program invited artist, Jaime Black, to bring her REDress installation to the U. of T. campus. She hung red dresses from trees along the path of Philosopher’s Walk (Taddle Creek) where they were exposed to the early spring weather. The purpose of the installation was to draw attention the staggering loss of life associated with missing and murdered Indigenous woman.

As with everything in the city, the installation had its moment in the sun, and then it was gone. So much clamours for our notice, and we have such short attention spans, and our memories fade as fast as we can turn the channel. Then, of course, there’s Covid. Covid has sucked our attention from everything else until we’re sick of it. All we want is to be left alone.

Like the bodies themselves, the dresses vanish. As do their memories. Historically, Indigenous women have sat at the bottom of every social hierarchy, and that has invited others—mostly notably white men—to treat them as disposable. I can’t say that a shift to a late capitalist consumerist society offers us the finest model to REDress this wrong. When we have grown used to talking about a gig economy where people are no longer reduced even to units of labour, but to subslivers of time/labour, and when the only line advertising blurs is the line between exploitation and indoctrination, and when we smile at quaint notions of distributive justice and say they properly belong in a museum, it may not be so unreasonable to suggest that any progress for MMIW isn’t going to happen without dismantling the existing system.

I get tired of the same conversations that goes nowhere. And I get tired of the same political promises that produce no concrete action. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for those who have lost someone they love.

Categories
City Life

Empty Parking Lot in Downtown Toronto

A plastic bag blows across a dusty gravel parking lot while in the background is a graffiti mural on a wall.
Plastic bag blows past mural southeast of the Church/Dundas intersection, Toronto

Maybe you remember the scene from the 1999 film, American Beauty, the scene where the boy next door, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), videos a plastic bag as a breeze buffets it no place in particular. Ricky Fitts is utterly transported by the beauty of the moment and in the background we hear Thomas Newman’s haunting “Any Other Name.”

Ricky intuits that the beauty of the moment is somehow related to the fact that it is fleeting. I have been reading the novellas and short stories of Thomas Mann where he poses questions about the relationship between beauty and decay. In a cruder form, Milan Kundera wonders if, in the absence of shit, beauty is nothing more than kitsch. The film, American Beauty, holds to a similar line; the passing moments we stitch together to make a life would come to nothing without the certainty of death.

A few years ago I found myself standing in an empty parking lot on the southeast corner of Dundas and Church Streets in Toronto staring at a scene chock full of ephemera and wondered if I hadn’t stumbled onto the set of an American Beauty sequel. A breeze kicked up the dirt and, with it, a plastic bag. The bag never got very far before the breeze changed and blew it in the opposite direction.

On the wall behind, a mural, itself a piece of ephemera. Etched on the wall, the outline of a building that had once stood where there was now a parking lot. Even the wall turned out to be a piece of ephemera. Shortly after I made this shot, a demolition company enclosed the lot with temporary fencing and tore everything to the ground. After that, a construction company took over, excavating and putting in footings to support a condominium tower.

Now, everything is gone and I can scarcely remember what stood there before.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographs of what was but is no more

Shirtless man covered in chalk sits on bench with a balloon that says: Happy Birthday!
Man sitting outside the Bloor/Yonge subway station, Toronto.

As is my habit, I start each month with a fresh theme. For the month of May, I will feature images that represent things / people / buildings / neighbourhoods / objects / ideas that were but are no more. All photography seeks to freeze time. All photography fails in this because time carries on; we gaze at the frozen photograph and can’t help but note how much things have changed. Far from freezing time, our photographs underscore how quickly it flows.

Nothing alerts me to this flow quite like a visit to the local archives. For me, that means the City of Toronto archives, but most cities have an archival service. What shocks me is the speed at which my own photographs become “archival.” The word “archival” calls to mind old black and white prints of people wearing dated fashions and crossing streets where the only mode of transportation is horse-drawn carriages. But my own photographs are quickly becoming archival because the world they portray is vanishing, and at an accelerated pace.

Part of it may have to do with a cultural shift. Once upon a time, we were outraged to learn that General Motors had adopted a principle of planned obsolescence as a way to guarantee a future market for its products. But we’ve grown complacent, allowing the practice to drive consumer demand for everything from new clothes to new phones to new intimate partners. This cultural shift has even crept into municipal planning so that now we treat large buildings, even entire city blocks, as if they were disposable. As a result, it takes only a few short years for our urban geography to become unrecognizable.

I pass a homeless man I’ve seen at different corners throughout the downtown core. Shirtless. Body covered in a chalky white powder. A helium-filled foil balloon says Happy Birthday and reminds me that another year has passed me by. At the man’s bare feet are a dozen or so shopping bags—the universal symbol of consumerism—stuffed with all his belongings. In the background I see scaffolding at a construction site. Today, this is the site of a 76 story condominium residence. I can’t remember what stood there before the demolition.

Most troubling of all is the fact that, today, 7 years after making this image, I no longer see this man anymore. Even people are disposable. Some more than others.

Categories
Street Photography

Saying goodbye to a month of candid photography

Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto. The woman wears a bright red dress, the man wears a baby blue suit. Both are blessed with ample buttocks.
Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto

This is the final post in a series of candid photos that ushered us through the month of April. This is by no means the last word on the matter given that the possibilities for candid photography are as varied and as interesting as the people on this planet.

As I see it, there are only two circumstances in which I run out of candid photos. The unlikely circumstance is that the government passes legislation prohibiting this kind of photography. At least in Canada, this is improbable because the ability to photograph in public is intimately tied to constitutionally protected conduct. One day, we might become the creatures of an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel constrained by constitutional principles. Trump could get re-elected and decide, like his buddy Putin, to invade a neighbouring country. But until such a day arrives, I view the opportunities for candid photography as limitless.

The more likely circumstance that could put an end to my candid shooting is that deep fakes become so widespread they render photography meaningless. I see that a year old video of Bill Gates sporting breast implants has retrended on Twitter. Snopes declares that the video is digitally altered, but debunking it isn’t enough to make it go away. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more unreliable our digital ecosystem becomes in its documentation of the real world, the less likely we are to believe anything is true.

As people assume digital manipulation as their default approach to online images, those like me who make such images will move on to other kinds of image making. Maybe we’ll manufacture backdrops for dystopian sci-fi virtual reality games. Or we’ll produce animal porn. But it’s a losing game. In time, even these specialized areas will be taken over by AI image-making engines.

Eventually, we old-school documentary photographers will grow old and tell tall tales of the amazing and improbable things we’ve seen. No one will believe us, of course. Anything we’ve seen, AI can do better. So we’ll drink ourselves into oblivion instead.

Categories
Street Photography

Health Care Worker on the way to his next shift

Health care worker in hospital greens crosses the street
Health Care Worker heads to Saint Michael's Hospital, Toronto

Throughout the pandemic, my wife has been able to work from home. But every so often she has to go into the office to handle something that can’t be handled virtually. She’s required to carry a laptop with her wherever she goes, but it’s heavy, so I serve as her personal pack mule. I walk down with her early in the morning, carrying her laptop and my camera gear, then I go on from there with a morning photo walk.

Back in the spring of 2020, when we first started doing this, the downtown streets were all but empty. There was no traffic coming into the downtown core and the only pedestrians were either essential workers or, oddly enough, street photographers like me documenting the emptiness. I caught this health care worker arriving for a morning shift at St. Michael’s Hospital as we were standing at the Queen/Victoria intersection. I note the Blue Jays baseball hat, a reminder of a life outside the job even as the job was beginning to overwhelm our health care workers.

Do you remember how, every evening at 7:30 pm, people leaned out their windows and banged on pots and pans to celebrate the dedication of front line workers? When did that stop? It seems our energy petered out, maybe falling victim to Covid fatigue. Two years on, it strikes me that our front line workers need the celebration and encouragement more than ever. Instead, they have to deal with a government that dickers over trivial wage increases. They have to confront incessant denialism and disinformation from a subculture of ignoramuses. And, because so many end up exposed to Covid-19, they find themselves understaffed and unable to deliver the level of care to which they are committed.

I suspect the best way we can support health care workers is to do our best to ensure that we don’t need their services. That way, they are free to offer their services to those who truly need them. That’s my subtle way of saying: wear a damned mask when you’re indoors, self-isolate when you’re sick, and take all other prophylactic measures you possibly can.

Categories
Street Photography

Is that a bullhorn? Or are you just happy to see me?

A man with a bullhorn walks down the sidewalk with a man carrying a flag.
Man with Bullhorn, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Early in the pandemic, before I had figured out that anti-vaxx anti-mask anti-government anti-everything protesters were meeting every Saturday to stage their little marches, I would see people scurrying along the sidewalk who seemed out of place. For one thing, they were walking with purpose. Nobody walks with purpose on a Saturday in downtown Toronto except if it involves shopping. But these were no shoppers. I didn’t understand then that they were rushing to their rallying point where they would get themselves whipped into a frenzy before they took their message to the streets. For another thing, they came in their dozens with flags and signs and bullhorns. What good is a message if you can’t shout it loud to a shopping public?

Ah, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the basic freedoms that buttress a healthy democracy. Even though I vehemently disagree with these people, and even though I think their notions of civic engagement have all the subtlety of a collision with a planet-sized asteroid, I celebrate these moments. They remind me that I share these basic freedoms and, if I so choose, I can stand on a street corner and speak my mind without reprisal. They also remind me that, as part of the social contract, it is my responsibility to ensure that these people feel free enough to continue without reprisal as well.

My daughter went through a stage where she would ask me what things I grew up with that we don’t have anymore. Typically, I would answer with things like rotary phones and vinyl. If I had thought more closely on it, I might have flipped her question on its head and told her about things that didn’t exist then that exist now. Social media would top the list and, with it, certain ideas about civic engagement that have changed since we all became so attached to our iPhones. In particular, I am mindful of cancel culture, an idea that didn’t exist when I was my daughter’s age.

Forget for a minute that cancel culture is something people on the left do to people on the right or vice versa. Instead, abstract yourself from specific political leanings and view cancel culture as a structural problem. When people complain that they have been cancelled, they are telling us that they have been deplatformed. They still enjoy their freedoms; they just have no way to enjoy them. A classic example from 2021 was Twitter’s decision to cancel Donald Trump’s account. We’ve encountered similar events on a smaller scale closer to home. When anti-vaxx protesters tried to enter Toronto’s CF Eaton Centre, private security personnel enforced a mask requirement and prevented them from entering. It seems almost an incidental fact that Toronto police arrested two protesters for assaulting the personnel.

Both incidents illustrate that the constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms that safeguard a democracy apply only to the relationship between citizens and the state. They aren’t binding upon private enterprise. Twitter owes nothing to Donald Trump. Cadillac Fairview owes nothing to the shoppers (or protesters) who enter its premises.

The problem with a world where civic engagement happens increasingly in privatized spaces (especially privatized virtual spaces) is that it is increasingly vulnerable to cancellation. Democracies, and the political thought that underpins them, hasn’t been able to keep up with this strange shift.

But I assure you, me and my camera will be there, tracking the moat that protects our ever-dwindling freedoms.