Tag: Street Portrait

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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
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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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Street Portrait

Merry Booster!

Dressed for the season at the corner of Front & Church Streets, Toronto

I went downtown and joined my wife for a booster jab at the pharmacy in the building where she works. Fewer people are going in to work these days, which means some downtown pharmacies have more supply of vaccines than arms to stick them in. It doesn’t hurt that my wife is on a first-name basis with everyone behind the counter. She chatted them up and before you could say “omicron sucks” they had me in on my wife’s coattails, baring my arm for a shot of Pfizer. My first two shots were both AstraZeneca, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’ve since learned that AZ is effectively useless at preventing infections of the omicron variant.

Afterwards, I went for a bit of a photo walk through the downtown core while the dull day fell to dull twilight and local businesses turned on their lights. Gazing through the doors of the St. Lawrence Market, I saw a masked couple dressed in holiday regalia, wandering through the market and chatting with vendors. I didn’t bother to go inside; I didn’t feel like fumbling with a mask. By chance, I found myself following the same couple down Front Street and when they stopped at a red light to pet a dog, I asked if they’d mind me taking their photo.

I said: Everyone’s so glum; it’s nice to see people spreading some cheer.

I thought maybe they were drunk or crazy. But no. They were regular people doing their best to lighten the mood and lift flagging spirits.

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Street Photography

Extinction Rebellion

A protester carrying a flag blocks Bloor Street East between Sherbourne & Huntley, Toronto

Went to the gym and when I went back upstairs to shower, somebody was setting up in the road below, testing a megaphone. I could see the Extinction Rebellion flags. After my shower, I found my daughter had arrived and she wondered why police were blocking off the street at Sherbourne to the east and Huntley to the west. The last time they did this, they detonated a suspected bomb in front of our building.

The guy with the megaphone had moved into the middle of the street along with maybe ten other people. They weren’t making much noise but they were disrupting traffic along Bloor Street. I ate my lunch then got ready to go out. My plan was to walk up Yellow Creek to St. Clair and pop in to Book City to buy a Christmas gift for my mom.

I packed my camera bag with a view to taking macro shots in Yellow Creek, but when I got downstairs, realized the Extinction Rebellion people presented a different kind of opportunity. I paused to pull out my camera while a passing woman yelled at them in her prim English accent: “Get a life! You don’t even understand what you’re protesting. Do some research.” A girl holding a flag bore the yelling with equanimity and smiled at a second girl, another of the protesters. Meanwhile, three men engaged with a passerby who seemed sympathetic to the cause. They stood by a ladder that straddled the centre line and supported flags and signs. I approached the girl and asked if she’d mind me shooting some photos. She said that was fine but pulled up her mask with its discreet message: “Fuck the RCMP.” I observed that the pandemic was convenient that way, giving the protesters an extra reason to conceal their identities. I shot quickly, then headed for Yellow Creek.

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Street Portrait

Morning Drink on Sauchiehall Street

Man sitting on a bench, drinking on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland

At the risk of overgeneralizing, it seems to be a thing in Scotland to start the day with a good stiff drink. I remember taking the train from Lenzie into Edinburgh for breakfast at a gloriously refurbished bank-turned-restaurant and watching a man seated alone at the next table. Dressed in a business suit, he ate a traditional bangers and mash breakfast but, instead of coffee and orange juice, he washed it down with a couple pints. With the last gulp, he stood and ambled off to work. In Toronto, thanks to our straight-laced prohibitionist heritage, such a breakfast would be impossible. Liquor licensing laws prohibit serving alcoholic beverages until 11:00 am.

I made the photo here as I was walking one morning down Sauchiehall Street. Judging by this man’s speech and by his difficulty sitting upright, this was not his first drink of the day. Interestingly, his was not the stereotypically slurred speech of a town drunk; it was the trained speech of a Shakespearean actor reciting a soliloquy. He carried three books in his pocket. The outermost was that most Scottish of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth.

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Street Photography

Purple Prose

Woman leans over a stroller and a baby stares up at her wondering: what the fuck?

The colour violet has the shortest wavelength on the visible spectrum (380-450 nm) and, given its high frequency, it has the most energy of any light that enters our eyeballs.

Violet—or its low class stand-in, purple—is a lavish, extravagant colour. Overblown writing is called purple prose. Overdressed musicians produce movies called Purple Rain. And people who think they’re better than us (i.e. royalty) use purple to reinforce that very rotten idea.

Most edible tubers can be purple. Beets are an obvious example. Despite our belief that carrots should be orange, that’s really a matter of marketing. Carrots would happily be purple if we let them. The same goes for potatoes.

If we fall down and hurt ourselves, a phenomenon called bruising turns our skin purple. And if our lover strangles us, we turn purple for pretty much the same reason (lack of oxygen in our blood).

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Street Portrait

Are the Eyes the Window to Anything?

Street portrait of Ben.

We’ve all heard that the eyes are the window to the soul. I can’t find a source for this cliché, but both Shakespeare and the New Testament offer passages that suggest we can know a person truly by gazing into their eyes. I base my street portraiture on this supposition, and when I post these photographs, I do so on the assumption that you, the viewer, share this supposition too. You gaze into the eyes of my subject and feel you know something about them.

Nevertheless, I find this supposition problematic for several reasons:

First, like most people, I’ve had the unsettling experience of being deceived by a convincing liar. I look into a grifter’s eyes and see nothing but sincerity. Part of what makes this experience unsettling is that it undermines a basic assumption I have about human interaction: I can know a person just by looking at them.

Second, the cliché obviously favours sighted people. And yet people with low vision or with injured eyes manage quite nicely to know and to be known. They demonstrate that my basic assumption is not so basic after all.

Finally, new technology shows how easy it is to fabricate faces. This person does not exist is a web site that generates a face you would swear belongs to your next door neighbour. You gaze into their eyes and impute to them a lifetime of experience when, in point of fact, those eyes have existed for only a couple seconds.

The photo featured above belongs to Ben who posed for me on Yonge Street a few years ago. He is very real, but you’ll have to take my word for it.