Street photography is a protracted series of interrogations. One of those interrogations looks to the way people move through built environments. Although we might once have constructed our buildings in service of people, it’s not apparent to me how that is true anymore. Our urban spaces have assumed an internal logic that has flipped the standard assumptions and now places people in service of buildings. But I’m not certain of this. Me and my camera pose our questions and have begun our investigations.
The global pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the investigations. I was preparing to file a definitive report on the way our urban spaces have enslaved the people who use them, like the victims of an alien invasion movie, when the arrival of the Sars-Cov-2 virus undid my working assumption. For months, hectares of office space lay empty. Shops that served the office workers went bankrupt. Without foot traffic, custodians stopped mopping the floors. In certain sectors, new technologies have obviated the need for in-person work. In the blink of an eye, people abandoned their built environments, or at least those built environments tied to work.
I had thought my images of people passing through steamy cityscapes spoke to the fleeting nature of the human presence in built environments. But the global pandemic has changed the meaning of those images. The human presence is fleeting, not because the overbearing logic of built spaces renders humans insignificant, but because the overbearing logic of digital spaces has asserted primacy over our built spaces. Humans aren’t vanishing from built spaces so much as evaporating into the ether.
Woman leans over a stroller and a baby stares up at her wondering: what the fuck?
There was a meme circulating 15 or 20 years ago, back in the days when people thought memes were clever. Maybe you remember it. It was a series of infant photos and a series of famous adults and you had to try and match the infant face to the adult face. One of the adult faces belonged to Adolph Hitler and the point of the meme was that, based on appearance alone, we have no way to predict which innocent children will grow up to be genocidal megalomaniacs.
I look at this infant’s face and I see a generic plasticity to its expression. It has an undifferentiated innocence that makes it both delightful and dull. Delightful, because all infants return us to a time when the world was bright and simple. Dull, because innocence is an amoral state and therefore not particularly interesting.
Like the infant shown here, I’m inclined to direct my attention to the woman gazing down into the stroller. Life in the stroller is constrained; not much happening in there. But out in the world! Look at all those people walking past. And that woman looking down. What has she done to her lips? And her eye lashes? Why does she need to accentuate them like that? Will I have to do that someday? And that coat! Who dresses her in the morning? Who changes her diaper? Maybe, when you’re grown up, you get to drop your shit wherever you please. Wouldn’t that be amazing!
Couple walks up Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, Toronto
In fact, I’m more than a little behind.
As a general rule, I take my street photos head on so that I can see the subject and the subject can see me. A subject’s face is usually the most interesting thing about them. However, as happens again and again, I discover that the rules I set for myself have exceptions. Sometimes the face is the least interesting feature of a subject.
The same thing is true of buildings. My first impulse is to photograph a building by shooting its official entrance. We recognize the New York Public Library by its staircase flanked by stone lions. We don’t recognize it by the grand sweep of its service entrance. However, a careful eye will discover that the service entrance has its charms too.
Someday I may publish a book about photography. I’ll call it “Fundamentals of Photography” and this image will appear on its cover. An important lesson in my Fundamentals is that one should never ignore the backside. A subject’s visual interest can reach out and grab you in unexpected ways and you must always be prepared to capture that moment.
Woman smokes cigarette in crowd that's overflowed onto University Avenue waiting for the arrival of the Toronto Raptors
A keyword in the technical jargon of street photography is the French word flânerie which attempts to get at the state of mind of someone who idles in crowds. As it was first conceived in 19th century Paris, it described an aimless wandering coupled with the mentality of a connoisseur. In today’s world, a street photographer who engages in flânerie might be described as a sommelier of the streets.
Unfortunately, thanks to the global pandemic, flânerie has fallen out of fashion as it violates social distancing rules. Although, technically, many jurisdictions have chosen to relax protocols, the fact of the matter is, we are in the midst of a 6th wave and it would be foolish for us flâneurs to resume our old habits.
For now, we satisfy our compulsion by diving into our archives and dredging up images from happier times. Today’s images come from the 2019 Toronto Raptors NBA Championship celebration when more than 2 million people crowded into the downtown core. Things got so densely packed that it took me half an hour to walk across University Avenue. During my crossing, I held my camera at shoulder height or over my head and took shots of people as we jostled shoulders. Despite the discomfort, everyone was in a good mood and nobody minded that I (and thousands like me) were taking photos of them.
One of the appeals of flânerie is that it is accompanied by a feeling of invisibility. I suspect some people who practice the subtle art think of themselves as undercover agents who takes photos surreptitiously. But that isn’t my approach. I don’t take steps to hide the fact that I have a camera and am actively using it. For me, the feeling of invisibility has more to do with a dissolution of the ego. I lose my self in the crowd in the same way that someone might lose their self with psychoactive drugs or meditation or gazing at the stars. It gives me a short relief from the pressures of my own internal monologue, that yammering inside my head that rarely does me the favour of shutting up.
Homeless woman sleeps on sidewalk across from Dundas Square, Toronto
One of the insoluble debates that regularly tears through the street photography community relates to the ethics of photographing vulnerable people like those living on the streets. The challenge here is that both sides of the debate are right. On one side are those who say that these photographs are an affront to the dignity of the subjects. On the other side are those who say we need to photograph suffering in order to hold accountable those responsible for producing the social inequality that generates this suffering.
Without resolving anything, I offer a couple more considerations:
First, there is a danger that the entire conversation will assume a patronizing tone insofar as both sides of the debate sit over and above the situation and talk from a “we know what’s best for these people” point of view.
Second, it is tempting for photographers to aestheticize the scenes they encounter. Instinctively, they worry about things like composition, catching the scene in a sweet light, making sure the scene is properly exposed. There is a risk that this temptation will result in homeless kitsch or homeless porn or, god forbid, the Trisha Romance homeless print available for $14.95 on Etsy.
Personally, I don’t feel equipped to address let alone resolve this debate. The best I can do is consider matters on a case by case basis. I think it would be an especially craven thing to sell decorative homeless prints. At the same time, documentation is important. I think it’s incumbent upon me to challenge the self-congratulatory talk that local politicians spread like so much manure whenever some ridiculous survey-for-hire announces that we live in one of the world’s most livable cities. I point to the evidence I trip over every day and ask: but what about this person? and this person? How can we say this is livable if it isn’t livable for everyone?
I offer this post as a counterpoint to yesterday’s post in which I seemed to be saying that I prefer candid photos of people doing stuff. Today, I celebrate candid photos of people not doing stuff. In particular, I offer a photo of a man wearing a red T-shirt and waiting at a crosswalk. In the immortal words of Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I photograph multitudes.)
Well, maybe he didn’t say those exact words, but he said something close to those words, and I take them as permission to be human instead of consistent.
I want to share this photograph because I like the way the red T-shirt creates a single block of colour that dominates the image. And I like the way the left arm juts out at an angle that matches the angle of the crosswalk line. Finally, I like the way the late afternoon light washes the image in a yellow that shifts the blue just a little to green; it gives the image a faintly nostalgic feeling as if I had shot it with film. However, the image doesn’t show a person doing something. Nobody is doing anything. The man is just standing there, waiting.
What I love most about photography is the opportunities it gives me to embrace inconsistency, contradiction, and paradox. Introductory photo workshops will sometimes take a rule-based approach to making a good photograph: apply the rule of thirds, the golden-mean, remember foreground, middle-ground, background, visual tricks that more or less guarantee a decent result. Then there are the personal rules I impose on myself, like the rule of yesterday’s post: only shoot people when they are doing something.
The challenge of a rule-based approach is that, in a world where AI is reaching a critical mass, there’s little we can do in terms of image-making that an algorithm can’t do better. Our only advantage is our capacity for irrationality. Intuition, holy unreason, the embrace of irreconcilables. These are things we do with ease that would short-circuit a microchip. Increasingly, I think we will find that our most successful creative work ignores those rules that are reducible to algorithms.
Cleaning Windshields on Bay Street at Bloor, Toronto
“Hey, let’s go outside and take photos of people doing stuff.” When I’m shooting candid photos, I prefer to capture people doing stuff. “People doing stuff” seems like a simplistic description and it takes in a broad range of actions. People working. People shopping. People arguing. People enjoying themselves. People eating. People kissing.
What kind of stuff do I want people to be doing when I take their photos? The answer is: absolutely anything just as long as they’re not “not doing stuff.” Most photos of people not doing stuff are boring. A surprising number of photos that people try to pass off as street photography in my social media feeds is photos of people not doing stuff. The photographer stands on the street corner and shoots somebody walking across the street. Or they walk down the sidewalk and shoot from the hip as someone approaches them from the opposite direction. Yawn.
I don’t want to rule out the possibility that a few of these photographs might be interesting. Sometimes people cross streets in interesting ways. Or they wear brightly coloured clothes. Or the light strikes them in a special way. But most of the time, random shots of people standing or walking in public spaces are randomly dull.
I prefer to capture people as they are engaging their world. Their way of being in the world raises questions for me. I imagine myself crawling inside their skin and I wonder: what would life be like if I occupied their space? Saw through their eyes? Felt with their skin? Would I be tough enough? Would I have their courage? I want to create images that open the viewer to fresh stories of what it’s like to pass through this life.
Firemen climb down ladder on the northwest corner of the Sherbourne/Bloor intersection, Toronto
Sometimes getting there first is everything. I’d been sitting on the couch in front of my TV when the phone rang. A friend who lives in a building south of me was calling while he gazed out the window of his 33rd floor apartment. “Uh, Dave, is your building on fire?” I hadn’t heard any alarms. “There are these huge clouds of black smoke but I can’t tell from here if it’s your building.” I stepped to the window and, just as my friend had said, there were huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky, but to the east of us. I said, “I’ve gotta go.” And then I did what comes naturally. I threw on a coat, slipped on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my camera.
I live in an interesting neighbourhood. Interesting in the sense that there’s always something happening here. The Indian consulate across the road is subject to continual protests, as is the Israeli consulate down the road. Extinction Rebellion protests on my doorstep. Psychotic screams in the middle of the night. Smashed windows in the shops across the road. Last fall, we were in lockdown, not because of a virus, but because of a suspicious piece of luggage outside our front door. The bomb squad detonated it and the concussion rattled my ribcage. The downside of living here, especially during a global pandemic, is that a sense of unease wafts through the air at all hours. The upside is that, if you’re a photographer, the opportunities for interesting shots are limitless.
On this particular occasion, our illustrious mayor, John Tory, whose only distinction from his predecessor is that he doesn’t smoke crack, had ordered a sweep of the homeless from Rosedale Valley. A few days later, someone retaliated by dousing old tires in gasoline and setting the south end of the Sherbourne Street bridge on fire. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a gasoline fire. Arson. Firetrucks were still arriving and fire fighters were running hoses to hydrants. Police had just appeared on the scene and were sorting out how best to contain the situation. I took advantage of the chaos to get close to the scene for my best shots, and then the police pushed me back down the street. You can see me, camera in hand, in the second photo of this CBC article.
Chaos is my friend. Chaos stirs up the conditions of an essential creative foment. Without chaos, I’d stagnate.
For me, perhaps the greatest motivation for engaging in street photography is curiosity. Not a salacious voyeuristic curiosity (at least not always). I would like to think that my curiosity is driven more by empathy than by a desire for some weird sense of gratification. I want to know what other people are doing. I want to know what makes them tick. Inevitably, I find myself imagining what my life would be like if I gave my world a quarter degree turn. Or woke up occupying a different body.
A black car pulls to the curb. A man gets out and runs around the corner. Five minutes later, he returns with a wheeled rack of garment bags. He pops open the trunk and begins laying out the garment bags one by one. I wonder what he’s doing. It’s Friday. Maybe he’s picking up clothes for a Saturday wedding. Is he the best man?
But there’s steam and steam gives the scene a vaguely sinister aspect. Maybe these clothes aren’t for a wedding. Maybe this man is a funeral director and he’s picking up clothes to dress his “clients.” Maybe he’s the leader of a cult and needs to dress up his followers before he doles out the Kool-Aid.
Or maybe he’s a co-conspirator in a planned heist. He and his friends are going to do a high-end casino and they need tuxedos so they can look like high rollers. A fine idea except for the fact that Toronto doesn’t have any high-end casinos.
I should apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the true account of the situation. Obviously, each garment bag holds a dehydrated alien and the man has been summoned to dispose of the remains before conspiracy theories leak and run amok through the city. He’ll run the bodies to a nearby construction site and encase them in concrete before anyone notices.
Since the Oscars aired last weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with one thing and one thing only. Never mind that another wave of the Sars-Cov-2 virus may be sweeping the globe. Never mind that a lunatic with his hands on a stockpile of nuclear weapons continues his mission to “liberate” the people of Ukraine. All anyone can talk about is how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when Chris Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Some people defend Will Smith, saying Chris Rock crossed a line when he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, alopecia areata. Other people defend Chris Rock, saying he was the victim of an assault and Will Smith ought to be charged with the commission of a criminal offence. Some people analyse the incident from the perspective of race. Other people analyse the incident from the perspective of masculinity. Pretty soon, pundits throw so many opinions into the blender that nobody knows where to fall on the matter.
I choose to sidestep the matter altogether by using it to illustrate something about a marginally related concern. The infamous slap is an exchange between two men who are, by vocation, comedians and wildly successful comedians at that. What makes them so successful in their respective roles is that they are unafraid to explore that liminal space between the socially acceptable and the taboo. They do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
There is no absolute line that defines for all time the limits of acceptable behaviour. It is a matter of perpetual negotiation and most of us rely on others to do that work for us. Like the court jester, Chris Rock’s role is to say things others think but are afraid to utter. He may not always be right, but there is a rightness in the need to drag certain conversations kicking and screaming from their murky corners, like the the conversation about the way the red carpet supports our collective habit of fetishizing women’s bodies.
Candid photography sometimes functions in the same way. The limits of the acceptable shift over time. What stood in the past sometimes deserves to be re-examined today. Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Kiss in Times Square for example. Originally understood as capturing the jubilation of a particular historic moment, it has subsequently been reinterpreted as emblematic of rape culture. What we can say for certainty about Eisenstaedt’s photograph is that it thrusts us into a liminal space and nearly 80 years later continues to engage us in an important conversation.
New contexts demand new conversations. Sometimes it falls to street photographers to use the photographic equivalent of a slap in the face to get them started.
Asleep at the 2022 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Toronto
My theme for April is taking candid photographs. Candid shots are a mainstay of street photography. What makes a photograph candid is the absence of reciprocity in the interaction between photographer and subject. Where, in the case of a street portrait, there is almost a contractual exchange, in the case of a candid shot, the encounter is emphatically one-sided. The photographer takes the shot without the subject’s permission because, most of the time, the subject is unaware that anything has happened.
Obviously, I am a practitioner of candid photography. However, I acknowledge that, for many, it is an ethical quagmire. For many, especially for those who catch me in the act, the candid photograph is an invasion of privacy.
The answer to the privacy objection is that it depends on the circumstances. The legally protected right to take photographs varies from one jurisdiction to the next, so there is nothing I can say that is universally applicable. For example, I once had a woman tell me I was in violation of the Canada Privacy Act to which I responded that the Canada Privacy Act has almost nothing to say about photography in any circumstance. However, she didn’t believe me, just as she didn’t believe me when I told her I used to practice law in the Province of Ontario so I might actually know what I’m talking about.
In general, Canada’s Anglo-speaking provinces (Québec is a different matter) treat photography as a right if it occurs in public space because nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space. In fact, most Canadian jurisdictions go so far as to treat it as a constitutionally protected form of speech. Like all rights, it’s not absolute, but as long as you’re not a pervert or a terrorist, your photographic habit is probably protected. That means that, in law, if I am standing on a street corner, I don’t need your permission to take your photograph.
Law and ethics are two different beasts, and the fact that I may be legally entitled to take your photograph doesn’t mean it’s right for me to do so. This leads to the next objection: public photography is protected by Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence which means that, in effect, it is a creature of our colonial history. In keeping with our colonial history, a photograph can be construed as a form of exploitation. That exploitation can happen along any number of axes: age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, class. Some, like Susan Sontag, go further and suggest that taking a photograph is an act of violence.
A possible answer is that there are countervailing values at play, like the importance of representation and documentation, that offset concerns about exploitation. If we can’t provide our progenitors with a rich visual account of their past, then we impoverish the imaginative ground they tread as they move forward. The trick, from a photographer’s perspective, is to balance competing concerns in a way that preserves the subject’s dignity while keeping one eye on the context in which the photograph will appear.
Matters of photography and ethics are beyond the scope of a single tiny blog post. My inclination is to hold ethical concerns in abeyance, bringing them to bear on each fresh situation, but resisting the temptation to suppose that these matters will ever be resolved with finality. Even with the passage of a few short years, we see how our frame of reference, and the language we use to give it shape, reform themselves beneath the pressure of changing social expectations. If we supposed that we had finally resolved the matter now, we’d only look like fools 20 years from now.
So I proceed provisionally. The images I offer this month I offer as provocations with the hope that they prompt considered reflection on the purpose and value of photography.
Note: Nothing in the foregoing may be construed as legal advice. If you have concerns about photography-related privacy issues, retain the services of a legal professional.
I gave up cycling in the city after three run-ins with vehicles. The third time, I was passing a bus that had stopped to pick up some passengers. A tow truck tried to pass me while I was passing the bus and it clipped me with its wide rear view mirror, striking me between the shoulder blades. The glass in the mirror exploded all around my head and the impact shot me forward out in front of the bus as it was starting up. Two things worked in my favour: first, I was able to stay upright until I reached the curb; second, the bus driver saw me and stopped the bus, otherwise he might have run me down. But that was enough for me.
My previous run-in had been more serious, resulting in an overnight stay in an emergency ward and a major concussion. I wanted to get back to riding my bike. After all, cycling is one of the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It has the further benefit of taking up little space, an important consideration in urban settings. However, a third hit coupled with an increasingly confrontational attitude from many drivers sent my levels of anxiety through the stratosphere. I hung up my wheels and started walking everywhere.
I haven’t given up on cycling entirely. Not long ago, my wife and I went on an extended cycling tour of County Cork in the Republic of Ireland. In preparation, I had purchased a sexy pair of skin-tight shorts with padding in all the right places, and not wishing my purchase to go unused after our tour, I started wearing the shorts to the gym where I regularly sit on a stationary bicycle (which is technically a unicycle) and pretend I’m fleeing a horde of rabid zombies. I pedal like the wind, not that there’s any wind in a gym, but it gives me a good cardio workout. Most importantly, I haven’t crashed the stationary bicycle, not even once.
Nowadays, everything is disposable. Diapers are disposable. Phones are disposable. Cars are disposable. Buildings are disposable. Even thumbs are disposable.
Weather is no impediment to building demolition, as illustrated by the above photograph of a parking garage on Yorkville Avenue in mid-town Toronto. Developers will replace it with a pro-forma glass tower 60 or 70 stories high where people will huddle in 500 square foot units, 8 to a floor. To be honest, I’m not opposed to intensification in Toronto’s downtown. It produces a vibrant pedestrian life which is the opposite of ghettoization and promotes safer streets.
I’m more concerned about the fact that many of these building are, in effect, landfill-in-waiting. Development becomes a way to defer the transfer of raw materials from their sources (mines and factories) to dump sites. I’m further irked by the fact that many of these temporary waste transfer sites (otherwise known as condominiums) take their blueprints from the same boring-as-fuck cookie cutter design mill. Toronto has become a glass tower yawn.
To change the subject, here’s a joke. An architect points to a condominium in downtown Toronto and says to his friend: “There’s a building I designed. It has 59 floors. It used to have 60 floors, but that’s another story.”
Person takes a selfie on Bloor Street East, Toronto
I’ve noted in a preview post that when people encounter one another during a snow storm, they tend to be happier, friendlier. Snow storms elicit another (possibly related) response. People love to take selfies against a snowy backdrop and then share them with friends and on social media accounts. Almost invariably, they don’t post the photos to complain about how miserable the snow makes them feel; they post to share their excitement.
Snow does that to people. For me, snow draws up feelings of nostalgia. It reminds me of my childhood, especially my winter visits to my grandparents. One set lived in Montreal and the other in London and both locales got far more snow than my hometown (Toronto). We built forts, and went tobogganing, and poured rinks in the back yard. One year, my parents even took us to Quebec City Carnival and we got to watch people drunk on Caribou fall unconscious into snow banks. Ah, memories!
Years later, whenever it snows, I find myself drifting back in time to childhood moments of sheer joy and, like everyone else around me, I want to capture that feeling. Spread it around. The world can always use more joy.
When I was little, I was fascinated by the fact that my uncle Bill had lost his ring finger. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories about how he lost his finger. That side of my family is full of storytellers, gossips, and bullshitters, so I have no idea which of the stories is true. Instead, I’ve opted to believe the best (i.e. most gruesome) of the stories and truth be damned. In the spirit of bullshit, Bill is not his real name.
The story goes that my uncle Bill served in Korea as part of the US medical corp. Yes, he was in a M*A*S*H unit or something like that. One day, they had to bug out because they were under fire from the commies. My uncle Bill leapt onto the back of a moving truck and caught his wedding ring on something. So there he was, dangling by his ring finger with his feet dragging along the ground and the commies in hot pursuit. One of his fellow medicos grabbed his free arm while another pulled out a pocket knife and cut off his finger. They hauled him into the truck and escaped to safety. I reiterate that I have no idea if this story is even remotely factual. All I know for certain is that my uncle served in Korea and came home minus one finger.
Not to be outdone, his older brother Jeff lost three fingers. Incidentally, Jeff told everyone he was in the Navy; it’s even there in print in my aunt’s obituary. Despite that, I remember Bill rolling his eyes and saying it was just the Coast Guard. Jeff never saw any real action, not like Bill who also did a tour in Vietnam. Ahh, what fond childhood memories I have of my uncles engaged in military service pissing contests!
Again, the story comes to me like a game of broken telephone played by pathological liars, so I have no idea what really happened. Not even his name is real. Still, there are certain things I know to be true. For one thing, Jeff lived in New Hamphire where there is lots of snow in the wintertime. For another thing, he really did lose some fingers. The story goes that he fired up the snowblower during a storm and it jammed. Just to look at it, he couldn’t say why the snowblower had jammed. You might say it was a problem that stumped him. Without turning it off, he reached in to clear whatever was jamming it and that, as they say, was the end of his career as a concert pianist.
I can’t help but speculate here. Given that my uncle Jeff ultimately succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wonder if his tussle with the snowblower wasn’t one of its early symptoms. It’s the sort of thing I think about on a cold winter’s night as I wrap all eight of my fingers and my two intact thumbs around a mug of hot chocolate.
