Tag: Street Photography

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Street Portrait

Street Portrait: Eyrish

Shot by the entrance to the LCBO on Yonge St south of Wellesley

I spoke with Eyrish on a cold January evening outside the LCBO at Yonge & Wellesley. I don’t think Eyrish is his legal name, more a nom de guerre. When I think of it, there’s no reason each of us shouldn’t have 20 different names, each name for a different mood. When I’m feeling depressed, you can call me Clem; and when I’m feeling anxious, you can call me Walter. In any event, the man shown here was feeling cold and maybe a bit manic and he asked me to call him Eyrish.

For some of the shots, he posed with an empty beer can, but I don’t like those shots as they play to a homeless trope that doesn’t serve anyone, least of all Eyrish who didn’t appear to be drunk, empty beer can notwithstanding. I prefer a simpler shot. He looks up and to the right from his seat on the ground. He’s wearing a hoodie under a leather jacket, and a toque to keep his head warm. I kneel across the sidewalk from him and catch him in a pause from his frenetic banter.

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Street Portrait

Street Portrait of a Street Portraitist

Woman in beforetimes wears mask, not to prevent disease, but to conceal identity

There’s an unwritten code of street photography, and article one of that code is this: you can’t shoot photos of people if you aren’t willing to be shot yourself. In keeping with that code, I saw this woman out in a snowstorm lugging a pack full of gear; although we exchanged no words, I raised my camera and motioned towards her; in answer, she nodded, so I pointed and shot.

I made this photo in before times when a mask seemed an exotic thing, and I congratulated myself for such a rare capture. Now, it’s a rare capture to photograph a bare face. It’s odd how circumstances have flipped. Then, a mask seemed somehow subversive; it signaled an outlier wary of surveillance. Now, a mask signals a conformist wary of contracting and transmitting pathogens.

What is common to mask-wearers in both situations is the fact that obscuring the face closes us off from certain connections that facial expressions would otherwise facilitate. Now, as a diligent mask-wearer, I find it more difficult to make eye contact with the mask-wearing people I pass in the street. Even if I do make eye contact, I rarely present the kind of openness that makes strangers feel comfortable posing for photographs. They can’t see my smile. They can’t tell whether I’m a creep or someone they can trust.

This isn’t really a street photography problem. It is part of a broader social problem, a heightened sense of alienation and atomization that the pandemic experience has inflicted on us. Paradoxically, the fact that we all share in this experience may offer us a fresh point of connection.

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Street Portrait

Mike invites me to a sexy party

NE corner of Dupont & Bathurst

This is Mike. He was waiting for a bus on the northeast corner of Bathurst and Dupont. He was sitting with his back to the window of the Vesta Lunch shop. A low November sun shone full in his face. There was a backlight, too, reflecting from the shop window.

Mike invited me to a party. He said there’d be a girl there. The whole thing would be recorded on video. Streamed on the internet. I could wear a mask if I liked. I don’t know why, but while he told me this, I was wondering who he voted for in the last federal election. I didn’t ask, of course. I didn’t want to make him feel awkward.

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Street Portrait

Street Portrait – Graffiti Alley

Graffiti Alley, Toronto

I was wandering through Graffiti Alley when a woman stepped outside for a cigarette break. For reasons unknown to me, I happened to be shooting with a proper portrait lens, my Canon 85mm f/1.2 so how could I not ask if she’d pose for a shot or two? And, of course, the graffiti makes a great backdrop.

In a way, it’s harder to do street portraits of women. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first relates to the power dynamics between a photographer and the subject. If I approach a man like Scott and he doesn’t want to pose, he won’t hesitate to tell me where to shove my camera. But it isn’t necessarily the same when approaching a woman. I have to be sensitive about how I present myself. Do I come across as intimidating? Does she feel free enough to tell me to take a hike? The exchange should feel natural, comfortable. Otherwise it shouldn’t happen at all.

The other reason is more practical. There are far fewer women out and about. The people with the most time to spare for a street portrait are the homeless. But almost always they are men. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it has something to do with the way social supports are administered, offering more protection to women and keeping them off the streets. Whatever the reason, my portraits of the homeless are almost invariably portraits of men.

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Street Portrait

Street Portrait – Sonny

I was framing a shot on Cumberland Avenue when Sonny popped in front of the lens. “Take my picture! Take my picture!” So I did. Simple as that.

I’m amazed at how varied the range of attitudes towards street photography. At one end of the spectrum sit the paranoids who think you’re spying on them or plan to do nefarious things with their image. At the other end of the spectrum sit the extroverts who are happy to pose for you and then give you their email address and IG handle so you can send them links.

I wonder if the range of attitudes is symptomatic of the paradoxical state of contemporary photographic practice. Now, almost everybody has a high-quality camera in their pocket and, collectively, we shoot more than a trillion photos each year. Yet this burgeoning freedom to shoot makes it easier than ever to watch us.

The strange things is: the spying doesn’t happen from above. There is no Orwellian Big Brother looking down on us. Instead, we are all complicit in our own surveillance, as I learned the hard way when I discovered that I had unwittingly allowed some of my photographs to “train” new facial recognition software in development by IBM.

Interestingly, the people most complicit in the rise of surveillance are the ones running around taking selfie’s all the time. I foresee a day when some poor schmuck is going to sue themselves for failing to obtain consent when they took a selfie.

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Street Portrait

Street Portrait – Scott at Tim Hortons

Victoria Street north of Dundas

I made this portrait of Scott on November 29th, 2015 outside the Tim Hortons on Victoria Street just north of Dundas. Scott’s job was holding open the door as people went in and out from the Tim Hortons. He shared a shift with some of his friends, and they took the work seriously. He wasn’t about to give his shift to somebody who didn’t bother to show up. They made their wages from the change patrons handed them as they left with their coffees.

Scott liked the photo and asked if I would print a copy for him. I did, but it took a while for me to track him down because he and his friends liked to change things up, moving from one coffee shop to the next. I caught up with him at the same franchise on April 4th, 2016. He looked different and I asked if he’d lost weight.

Yeah, he said, seventy pounds.

That’s good, isn’t it?

Not really. It’s happened so fast and it’s not like I went on a special diet or anything. I think maybe something’s wrong.

I’d been carrying the print in my camera bag ever since I’d seen him in November. I pulled it out and gave it to him.

That was five and a half years ago and I haven’t seen him since.

Scott holds open the door at the Tim Horton's on Victoria Street, Toronto
Scott holds open the door at the Tim Horton’s on Victoria Street, Toronto
Categories
Street Portrait

Street Portrait – Jim from Taos, NM

South Plaza, Taos, NM

I’ve decided to devote the month of January to street portraits. By street portraits, I mean something specific. What I don’t mean is stalking somebody, or playing the flaneur, or taking somebody by surprise. Instead, I mean a photograph I’ve taken after I’ve spent time chatting with a person, maybe hearing something of their personal story and learning their name.

By that standard, this is probably the first street portrait I ever made. This is Jim and I met him when I was visiting Taos, NM. He was sitting in the shade to the south side of the town Plaza, watching as they set up for a festival. He was holding a point-and-shoot camera in his hand and told me he liked to take photos of things that looked interesting to him. I said I understood the impulse.

He said he’d served in Viet Nam, but was shot in the head as was obvious from looking at him. He said, too, that the local police were always giving him a hard time, but he wasn’t going to let that deter him. He’d keep moving around the square, watching what was going on, taking photos.

Part of my motivation for sharing street portraits is that, especially in the midst of a pandemic, there’s a tendency to withdraw from close interaction and to retreat into a self-imposed loneliness. I revisit these photos to remind myself—and hopefully others, too—of the closer connections we enjoyed in the past and will doubtless take up again in the near future.

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City Life

Good-bye 2021

E & N Railway Trail, Victoria, B.C.

Tonight we show 2021 the door. A year ago, people made jokes about saying good riddance to 2020. By implication, 2021 had to be better because nothing could be worse than 2020. And then 2021 came along …

To be fair. It’s not a competition. Each year has turned out to be shit fucked in its own special way.

This image nicely captures how I feel about 2021. I identify with the skeleton playing the mandolin. I didn’t even bother to interrogate the year or give it a fair trial. Instead, I chopped off its arm and ran a sword through its chest. Then I sat on a log and played a madrigal. They call them madrigals for a reason. If you sang them when you’re happy, they’d call them gladrigals.

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City Life

A bottle in front of me

Empty vodka bottle on a garbage can on Yonge Street, Toronto

Dorothy Parker once famously said: I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. A logician would say that, strictly speaking, this is what is known as a false opposition. But our logician would also be missing the point.

Traditionally, the holiday season is the time of year when we tend to put more bottles in front of us. That impulse may be compounded this year by the fact that, thanks to the omicron variant, more of us are alone and/or bored. Alcohol seems like a reasonable antidote, especially after we’ve already had a few.

However, thanks to the fact that, in Ontario, most of our alcohol comes through a single pipeline (the LCBO), we are at its mercy to keep us well stocked. And this year, that’s a problem. There are rumours swirling around, like olives in a martini glass, that the LCBO is having supply chain issues. Their advice is to buy early and try new things. People have been using the Hunger Games to describe the scramble for booster shots. I think it’s a more fitting description of the scramble for jello shots.

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City Life

Party Line

When I was kid, my mom and my grandma spoke on the phone almost every day. My grandma worked at the Eaton’s offices in London and they had a trunk line to Toronto, so the calls were free. It was a different matter when my grandma called from home. She and my grandpa lived on a farm on the 5th concession near Nilestown to the south of London. There, they had a party line with the farm across the road which would have been fine except that it was a family of 8 children who lived there, most in their teens, and they kept the line perpetually busy. My grandparents complained, but secretly they enjoyed the entertainment. They’d pick up the receiver and overhear one of the teen-aged girls spilling her heart to a friend. When my grandma retired, it came as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there were no more free calls to Toronto. On the other hand, there was more time to listen in on the family across the road.

A few years later, after I was married, my wife and I drove to London to visit my grandma. By this time, change had overtaken her. For one thing, my grandpa had died, leaving her alone on a large rural property. For another thing, the neighbours across the road now had a phone line of their own which forced my grandma to do the same. I think she missed keeping up with all the kids.

At the same time, my wife had gotten herself a cell phone. (I was still a bit of a Luddite and resisted the trend.) One afternoon, we took my grandma for a drive to visit family, but because we were late, I suggested my wife use her fancy new cell phone to call ahead and let them know we’d be a few minutes late. From the back seat, my grandma said: “Why don’t you use mine.” And she passed her phone to my wife in the front seat. It was cordless phone. Before we left, she’d pulled it off its cradle and put it in her purse. She didn’t know there was a difference between a cordless phone and cell phone. She thought she could use her cordless phone to call from anywhere.

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City Life

We’re all in the same basket

My parents have resumed their usual habit of wintering in Florida with hundreds of thousands of other retired Canadians who’ve had enough of winter living. Recently, my dad told how he went to a meeting of the local camera club and was the only one wearing a mask. They met in an enclosed space. They didn’t enforce any distancing protocols. Meanwhile, the news tells of omicron ripping its way through European countries as a portent of things to come in North America. But people in Florida have had enough of Covid-19 protocols and all the accompanying talk of vaccinations. They want to get on with their lives the way they lived them back at the beginning of 2020. And so my dad sat by himself, masked and triple vaxxed.

My dad’s account offers an interesting reversal of an already interesting reversal in the narratives people tell about mandated protocols. Here, in Toronto, where vaccination rates are some of the highest in the world (86.2 % fully vaccinated among those aged 12 and up) the anti-vaxxers take to the streets, marching through the downtown core every Saturday and telling onlookers to stop being sheeple, to start thinking for themselves. (I call this an interesting reversal because, before the pandemic, the same protesters insisted on wearing masks because they feared government surveillance.)

The situation in Florida illustrates a further reversal. When the anti-vaxxers dominate the public discourse, they lose the advantage of their usual arguments. They can’t accuse people like my dad of being sheeple anymore. And they can’t say that he isn’t thinking for himself because, obviously, he’s asserting his independence of thought when he’s the only one choosing to wear a mask.

Context is everything. In the context of an unmasked majority, we see them clearly for what they are: people who have cast aside all pretense of argument and will do what they want to do for no other reason than that they want to do it. But we can’t very well call this libertarianism, can we? Not when everyone is doing it. I’m more inclined to call it sheepleism.

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City Life

The white stuff

TD Centre, Wellington Street, Toronto

I love it when the white stuff falls during the holiday season. By white stuff, I don’t mean snow; I mean salt. Whenever our weather apps send out even the hint of a whiff of a chance of snow, people afraid of attracting personal liability scatter bag loads of rock salt onto the sidewalks while city plows scatter it everywhere else. Never mind that it corrodes everything from cars to concrete. And never mind that saline runoff damages the local watershed. Still, after it’s done its work melting the snow, it leaves behind fascinating patterns etched into the underlying surfaces.

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Street Photography

How will we look back on the 20’s?

Two masked women pass windows on Bloor Street, Toronto

I imagine a time a few decades from now, say the 2060’s, when in all likelihood I’m dead and buried or planted or repurposed or whatever they do to corpses in the future. Someone, maybe an archivist or social historian, stumbles on one of my old photos and immediately recognizes it as a photo from the early 20’s. Maybe it’s the masks or the look of anxiety in the eyes, or the uneasy way the subjects carry themselves. There’s just something about it that screams pandemic.

A hundred years ago, the 20’s were the Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age, the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald and flappers, libertine excesses and bottomless champagne glasses. Those were the 1920’s. How will we remember the 2020’s? What will we call them? And what feelings will those epithets evoke?

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Still Life

Life is but a dream

Temperance Street steam vent at Bay Street, Toronto

When I was a small child, my mother used to sing the well-known nursery rhyme to me:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, it made its first appearance in 1852.

Close on its coattails is the Lewis Carroll rhyme, an acrostic poem which spells Alice’s full name (Alice Pleasance Liddell) and ends with this stanza:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

The idea that life is indistinguishable from a dream is at least 2,500 years old, dating back to Plato’s Theaetetus, when early philosophers were first laying the groundwork for epistemology, the discipline that asks how it is possible to know anything for a certainty. (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the Philosophy of Dreaming for more.)

Most recently, we have witnessed a blurring of the lines between philosophy and neurobiology to further elucidate (or obfuscate) the problem. See Anil Seth’s latest book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. While he doesn’t specifically address this philosophical problem, his basic claim—that our perception of reality is a shared hallucination—clearly shows us which way neurobiology points. To the extent that both waking and dreaming are perceptual states we all participate in, they share in the basic features of all human perceptual states. Waking or dreaming, it’s all the same. Collective hallucination all the way down. Life is indeed but a dream.

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Street Photography

When narrative leaks from an image

Streetcar on King Street, Toronto

Photography and writing go together like hand and glove. Some people decry the use of text in or around images; the image should speak for itself, they say. I’m not such a purist. That should be obvious from the fact that I offer text alongside every image I share on this web site.

I look at this tableau, three people riding a streetcar in downtown Toronto as darkness falls across the city, and I can’t help but see narratives leaking from the image. The image sets my imagination adrift. It’s no coincidence that the word “imagination” has “image” as its root. The same process can happen in reverse, too. Sometimes I read a story or a novel and it stimulates my visual imagination. I can’t help but turn the words into a tableau.

Here, all three riders wear masks and all three have their heads bowed into their cell phones as if engaged in a liturgical rite, a confession, say, or the reading of a holy text. The two men wear toques while the woman is bare-headed. Maybe, in the enclosed fish-bowl world of the streetcar, head-coverings have some significance.

Are they going home after a long day at work? What sort of lives wait for them when they get off the streetcar at their respective stops? A dinner alone, poured from a tin can into a pot and heated on the stove? A night streaming shows on Netflix while thumbing through social media feeds? A spouse? A partner? Someone to save them from the pandemic’s forced isolation?