Tag: Toronto

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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.

Categories
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
City Life

How do you pronounce Toronto?

Construction Crew, Toronto

One of the things I love about Toronto is that a majority of the people living here weren’t born in Canada. What’s more, a majority of the people living here identify as belonging to a visible minority. That means there are huge opportunities for personal and cultural enrichment. If I let people in, they can shake me from my complacency and show me fresh ways to engage the world around me. This is a gift.

As a middle-aged white male who was born here, I acknowledge that bias inevitably creeps into my impressions of Toronto’s multicultural life. For example, I tend to regard Toronto as a place which, relative to other places, puts far less pressure on newcomers to conform to some hegemonic view of local culture. Then again, as I’ve never been a newcomer, I could be mistaken.

However, there is one matter which demands absolute conformity. If you want to claim you’re from here, you have to pronounce the name of this place without the second “T”. Nobody is from Toronto. We are from Trawna. I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. You can find a good example of this in the hit song by The Kings, The Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide. There, they rhyme Trawna with wanna and Donna.

Another way to pronounce Toronto is “construction.”

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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?

Categories
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.

Categories
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?

Categories
City Life

Pandemic Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Skating in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square

It’s interesting to compare public skating pre- and post-vaccine. Last year, people were skating before we had secured any vaccines. That meant that protocols were overly cautious. The city allowed only 25 people on the ice at a time while others waited in line behind a fence. When those 25 people had finished their skate, marshals directed them to a separate area where they could take off their skates. Only after the ice had been cleared did the marshals allow the next batch of 25 onto the ice. After the people in the changing area had left that space, the marshals went over and disinfected the benches. It was a slow process, and even though the city got to say that skating was open to the public, in practical terms, almost nobody got to skate.

This year, it’s different. We know that transmission happens almost exclusively by aerosols, so disinfecting benches is a waste of time. We also know that the risk of infection outdoors is low, so going maskless in wide open spaces isn’t such a big deal. As a result, people are moving more freely through Nathan Phillips Square this year. Even so, there are obvious signs that we are still in pandemic times. The band-aid in the final “O” of the Toronto sign reminds people to get vaccinated. A sign of the times?

Categories
City Life

I love the smell of urine in the morning

Urine on sidewalk, Yonge & Dundas, Toronto

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve developed a theory. I call it Dave’s Law, although I don’t expect it will ever make me famous. It goes like this: there is a direct relationship between infection rates and the presence of homeless people on city streets.

There may be any number of reasons for this:

For instance, when infection rates go up, more people work from home. While this doesn’t mean the number of homeless people goes up, it does mean that homeless people account for proportionately more of the people moving through public spaces, and so they are more visible.

Another reason may have to do with the possibility that the number of homeless people really is going up. With each spike in infection rates, the precariously employed and the precariously housed become increasingly vulnerable. The government can offer all the assistance it likes, this is only a band-aid approach to more fundamental issues. As many have observed, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed fundamental flaws in the way we organize ourselves as social beings.

Every morning, as I walk through our city streets, I smell the consequences of our flawed approach.

Categories
Street Photography

No One in the Streets

Early days of the pandemic: news reports from all over the world said there was no one in the streets. Thanks to lockdowns, urban cores had been hollowed out. Everything fell silent. In my hometown (Toronto), I walked the streets to see for myself if they were as empty and quiet and the news reports said they were.

It reminds me of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass. The White King wants to know where his messengers have gone and asks Alice to look for them. We end up with this exchange:

“Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

That, in turn, sends me back to an even earlier example of the same game. It’s the exchange between Odysseus and Polyphemus, the cyclops:

“‘Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.’

“But the cruel wretch said, ‘Then I will eat all Noman’s comrades before Noman himself, and will keep Noman for the last. This is the present that I will make him.’

After Odysseus gets the giant drunk and pokes out his eye, Polyphemus cries out to all the other cyclopes.

“… [S]o they gathered from all quarters round his cave when they heard him crying, and asked what was the matter with him.

“‘What ails you, Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise, breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?’

“But Polyphemus shouted to them from inside the cave, ‘Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.’

“‘Then,’ said they, ‘if no man is attacking you, you must be ill; when Jove makes people ill, there is no help for it, and you had better pray to your father Neptune.’

“Then they went away…

I wandered the city streets, but I couldn’t find no one anywhere.

Categories
Street Photography

Great Advice Pays Off

Sleeping on a warm vent at King & Bay, Toronto

Capturing a moment of cognitive dissonance is like shooting fish in a barrel. A lot of times, I barely notice how one element of a photograph is at odds with another element. In this instance, I noticed a man lying on a vent in the heart of Toronto’s financial district and thought I should capture the moment as part of an ongoing effort to document the obvious rise of homelessness during the pandemic. It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the sign overhead: Great advice pays off. There is an obvious incongruity between the tagline of a financial institution and a man with no more security than the coat over his head.

We used to call this sort of thing cognitive dissonance, but I don’t think the world has much use for that term anymore. The idea of cognitive dissonance used to be that we could throw competing values into the same space to produced a radical clash. This was a strategy that critics could deploy to expose a lie. Now, there are a lot of disillusioned critics wringing their hands and wondering why bother when we live in a post-truth world. Never has this been so evident than in the age of Trumpism which has ushered in a celebration of alternative facts, narratives unhinged from referents in the real world, and a willingness to stare lies squarely in the face and adopt them as truths.

Trump didn’t invent any of this, of course. He merely honed it into an art. Before him, there was Bernie Madoff who sold Ponzi schemes as legitimate financial practices, and George W. Bush who continued to rationalize a war with a lie even after the lie had been exposed, and before Bush there was Thatcher who insisted that the deregulation of financial markets would make life better for working class men and women even as misery spread all around her.

We don’t even wink anymore. We don’t even worry that a revelation will ruin our career. We’ve grown so inured to the lies that we face them straight on and continue on our way, as I did when I saw this lie and set up the shot without even thinking about it.

Categories
City Life

Coming and Going

Man pushes a hand truck loaded with boxes through a blast of steam from a vent in the road.

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is fraught with supply chain issues, a concern as the holiday shopping frenzy takes hold. We hear stories of goods sitting for weeks in shipping containers. I wanted to buy flowers for friends but when I visited the local florist, I found the shelves picked bare. All that remained were a few unwanted plants with their withered leaves, a sight that filled me with sadness. My wife tells me that, at her office, they’re running low of the usual supplies, paper, staples, sticky tabs, that sort of thing. Bars can’t offer exotic drinks for the holidays because delivery of liqueurs like Compari and Schnapps is delayed by up to six weeks.

So it’s a surprise to watch a guy push a hand truck loaded with boxes. Evidently, not all supply chains are created equal. The gears of commerce still grind on. Minutes later, the same guy passes through my frame minus his boxes. He’s like Santa Claus, and somewhere up the street, a local retailer is dancing a jig.

Speaking of Santa Claus, I wonder how the man in red manages supply chain issues for his workshop. Is he going to be skimping on his deliveries this year? Or does he have a dedicated pipeline to source materials?

Man pushes an empty hand truck through a blast of steam from a vent in the road.
Categories
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.

Categories
Street Photography

Scary Hallowe’en Photo

Hauling a clothes rack up Augusta Avenue in Toronto's Kensington Market.

I shot this photo in beforetimes. You can tell. No one is wearing a mask.

It was just before Hallowe’en in 2019. Ah, we were so young, so naive. We didn’t have a care in the world. We had no idea what scary things lurked just beyond the horizon.

This year, I’m dressing up as an anti-vaxxer. I’m leaving the mask at home. That’s the scariest costume I can think of.