Tag: Toronto

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Street Photography

Hug in a Snow Storm

Greeting in a snow storm, Carlton & Church Streets, Toronto

I’ve noticed something paradoxical about snow storms. Although people like to complain when a snow storm rolls through, if they’re actually out in it, most people I observe tend to be happier and friendlier. I find that strangers are more inclined to start up spontaneous conversations with me and, as illustrated by the photograph shown here, they tend to be more expressive.

According to an article in Vice, there may be psychological research that supports my observation. However, in reading the article, I find it doesn’t say anything explicitly about snow storms. So, for example, it mentions the positive feelings generated by the white noise effect of rainfall. But despite their colour, snow storms don’t produce white noise. Unless accompanied by howling winds, snow storms produce the opposite of white noise, more a muffling effect that creates a sense of intimacy.

Maybe it’s like a mild version of a shared trauma that, for a brief time, invites strangers into a connection based on their experience. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, maybe it’s like a mild version of a local sports team victory. In my hometown, the most recent victory was the Raptors NBA Championship in 2019 when millions of people crowded into the downtown core and shared their joy. That’s what a snow storm is like. For whatever reason, people find joy in it.

Categories
City Life

Dead Animals in Winter

Dead Raccoon - foot of the Chorley Switchback on the Beltline Trail, Toronto

Winter can be challenging for local fauna, and, for some, it isn’t survivable. As a matter of evolutionary biology, most animals have met the challenge of winter by developing migratory patterns. However, wherever humans have settled, they have disrupted those patterns, either by deliberately feeding animals or by generating enough garbage to sustain scavengers. Now, Covid-19 has disrupted the disruption. Where widespread lockdowns have been imposed, animals dependent upon humans may have to adjust to a sudden scarcity of expected food.

Or maybe nothing. Changes in human behaviour are temporary and short-term. Although difficult to measure, it is unlikely that Covid-related changes in human behaviour will have any lasting effect upon animal behaviour.

As for the photograph above, who’s to say why this raccoon died? Maybe it couldn’t find its usual heap of human generated garbage, or maybe it was diseased, or it was old, or it committed raccoon seppuku.

I think it’s worth noting that, in terms of the information they convey, virtually all photographs are anecdotal. This is a feature intrinsic to the medium. At the same time, perhaps for the first time in human history, we have been forced to engage in what might be described as an epistemological reckoning. While conflicts emerging in the context of Covid-19 present as political or ideological conflicts, if we step back from the fray, we find that they are really conflicts about how we know what we claim to know. We’ve never had to do this before, not as a global collective.

If you peel away the labels, the anti-vaxxers aren’t anti-science; they’re pro-science, but theirs is a science of the Newtonian variety. Cause and effect. Discrete interactions. All behaviours, whether on a cosmological or a subatomic scale, function like billiard balls in the rec’ room. Meanwhile, the WHO, epidemiologists, and public health advocates subscribe to a post-Newtonian science of probability where interactions are evaluated in the aggregate and discrete events are meaningless.

Photography is always a discrete interaction and, at least when deployed as a means to communicate information, has nothing to say about matters in the aggregate. A photograph of a dead raccoon doesn’t tell us anything about raccoons, or winter, or death, or disease.

In point of fact, I didn’t make a photograph of a dead raccoon to convey information in any of the ways we customarily think about information. I made the photograph for its affective force. How does it make you feel? Affect is another way we know what we claim to know, but it tends to get ignored in most of our public conversations.

Dead cat in snow, Lower Don Trail, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Snowmobile Parked in Front of Louis Vuitton, Bloor Street

Snowmobile in front of Louis Vuitton, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Here’s something I’ve never seen before: a snowmobile parked in front of Toronto’s Louis Vuitton flagship store. I include this image as a companion to the snowmobile image I posted earlier in the month as part of my “Winter Scenes” series. This snowmobile sat on a flatbed trailer hitched to a pickup truck that was (obviously) not from the city but had come into town to support Truckers in their so-called Freedom Convoy protesting vaccine mandates.

Typically, when we see photos that place something (e.g. a homeless person’s tent) against the backdrop of a high-rent retail shopping district, we tend to interpret the contrast as some form of social commentary. Wealth vs. poverty. Indifference vs. need. Style vs. substance. However, given the context of this shot, I’m not sure the usual interpretations apply.

What I see here may not be a contrast at all, just two different manifestations of the same tendency. This scene reminds me of my favourite book, or what was my favourite book until the age of five: Mushmouse and Punkin’ Puss, the tale of a city mouse who visits his more practical country cousin where he learns a thing or two about how to manage an aggressive cat. While the mice are very different, they find renewed kinship where cats are concerned. While a purveyor of haute couture may seem very different from a snowmobile owner, at least in this instance we can see how their interests might be aligned.

As I see it, this image is not a commentary of the style vs. substance variety. It shows us one style against the backdrop of another style. I don’t see anything of substance here. All I see are two different expressions of entitlement, one urban, the other rural, but cousins all the same.

Categories
Street Photography

Should there be a moratorium on umbrella photos?

Umbrella in Snowstorm, Bloor/Yonge intersection, Toronto

I recently read, although I can’t remember where, an established street photographer’s rant about all the visual tropes he felt had grown tired and tiresome. He made a list of all the things he would no longer shoot and he urged fellow street photographers to join him in his little boycott. One of the items on his list was photographs of people carrying umbrellas. In general, I agree that, as with good writing, so with good photography: avoid clichés. That said, I offer a couple exceptions.

First, aspiring photographers learn by shooting clichés. If you turn your rule against photographing clichés into an absolute prohibition, then nobody plays, nobody has any fun, and nobody discovers anything new. So hop to it. Make hay while the sun shines. Take no prisoners. Be your best self. Be a photography thought leader.

Second, there is no such thing as a photograph of an umbrella. I’m not flogging Magritte’s dead pipe (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) which I take to mean that a representation of a thing should not be equated with the thing itself. I’m getting at something more straightforward. The fact is: most photographs of umbrellas are not photographs of umbrellas; they’re photographs in which umbrellas happen to appear. They’re photographs of scenes in which the umbrella may have an important place, but most likely the umbrella is only one of a constellation of features that coalesce to produce the photograph.

In the case of the photograph featured here: is this a photograph of a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman holding a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella while a red car approaches from the opposite direction? And so on.

Categories
City Life

Pikachu Lamborghini

Bloor Street West in front of Holt Renfrew

This is a followup to my previous post which featured a photograph of a tent on the Mink Mile, with its juxtaposition of conspicuous wealth and extreme poverty. I was walking along the same stretch of road during an ice storm when I saw twenty-something shoppers exit Holt Renfrew while a valet pulled to the curb in their bright yellow Pikachu Lamborghini. In light of the fact that a two minute walk to the south will take you to multiple shelters and community hubs while a five minute walk to the west will take you to a soup kitchen, I find moments like this obscene. And on this particular day, when an ice storm produced hazardous driving conditions, the moment descended from obscenity to idiocy.

It came as a surprise to me to discover that not everyone shares my worldview. At the time I made the photo, I posted it on Twitter, and unlike my usual practice, I poked the hornet’s nest (which, it turns out, is the only way you get any traffic on that or any platform). I wrote: “Trust brats take their Pikachu Lamborghini out for a spin in an ice storm.” A sample of the comments that came back:

“brats” just because of their choice of car in this weather? smh. #CheckYourselfBeforeYouWreckYourself

Wow, the comments on here. Some people obviously are VERY wealthy. It happens, and good for them. I LOVE Pikachu #Pokemon

Haters gonna hate

Some comments were more neutral, observing that a Lamborghini has all wheel drive and a low centre of gravity so handles well in adverse weather. Not really on point but, hey, this is social media.

There is something missing from the thread, perhaps because it’s difficult for people to identify what isn’t represented in a photograph but nevertheless present. In this case, what isn’t represented but nevertheless present, is the great horde of the exploited which necessarily hovers in the shadows just beyond the light that shines on conspicuous wealth. If you squint your eyes and look a little more closely, you will see it.

Categories
City Life

Winter Scenes: The Precariously Housed in Toronto

Winter tent on Bloor Street, Toronto

Winter is always a difficult time for people whose housing arrangements are insecure at best. Whenever the temperature goes below -10ºC, the city of Toronto issues a cold weather alert for the benefit of those who ordinarily live rough. This triggers the opening up of additional temporary shelter space. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, there are always some recalcitrant souls who won’t place themselves in the shelter system. For some, there are mental health issues. For others, there is the fear of violence. And Covid-19 has added another dimension to the sense of bodily threat.

During a snow storm, I shot this tent on the stretch of Bloor Street West known as the Mink Mile, one of the most expensive shopping districts in the world. You can see the Cartier sign in the background. Nearby are flagship stores for Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Burberry, and Hermès. With talk of rentals at $300 a square foot generating sales of $2000 a square foot, the disparity of wealth this suggests is stunning, and yet those of us who live here grow inured to it.

The other day, I made the mistake of tumbling down the rabbit hole of a Twitter thread where somebody suggested this was nothing we should be concerned about; it’s for the homeless to take responsibility for themselves; let them get proper jobs. Maybe I was being trolled. Maybe the person posting this wanted own the libs. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Even so, I suspect the people who post these things are far less ironic in their views than they’d have us believe. They don’t want only to provoke a reaction; they really mean what they say.

In the past, I might have responded with some variation of a chat about the fact that the proportion of those living on our city streets while struggling with a major mental health issue is north of 70 percent. I’d go on from there to describe some of the more concrete ways in which mental illness hamstrings a person and makes talk of getting a job utterly beside the point.

But I don’t engage in those kinds of chats anymore. Life’s too short to waste talking to people who have already foreclosed the possibility of compassionate regard for those around them. I don’t care if people want to troll me or own me or stomp on me and thump their chests like silver backed mountain gorillas. This conversation isn’t about me, so owning me accomplishes nothing.

Homelessness and its attendant demons, mental illness and an outrageous housing market, are matters of social responsibility. You either commit to that view or you don’t. But if you don’t, your world view takes you ineluctably to the assertion that people who suffer aren’t human. This is the view shared by the person who refuses to participate in the well-established protocols that keep people safe during a pandemic because they lack the imagination to see how their rights are safeguarded by everyone else’s commitment to social responsibility.

The intractability of such a view, the refusal of give and take, the impossibility of reason, is not simply immature, it veers into cultism which, ironically, is a mental health condition.

Thus endeth my rant.

Categories
City Life

How many words for snow are there and who cares?

Leaping over slush at the intersection of Yonge & Dundas, Toronto

According to they (as in: “they say”), there are 52 different words for snow in the Inuktitut language. Always, “they” trot out this fact as evidence for a linguistic observation that we tend to develop our vocabulary according to our need. If we are Inuit, snow is important to our lives and so we develop a more nuanced account of snow.

If, on the other hand, we live in Toronto, where urbanization has changed the local climate into an urban heat island, snow doesn’t really dominate our lives anymore. People outside Toronto tend to think our vocabulary has developed more nuance in describing financial instruments and ways to flip real estate investments. As for snow, if the temperature is below freezing, we call it fucking snow. If the temperature is above freezing, we call it fucking slush. That’s about as far as our vocabulary goes.

As for the 52 different Inuktitut words, it turns out “they” were just making shit up. In fact, there are only a dozen Inuktitut words for snow and another ten for ice. For example, qinu is the word for “slushy ice by the sea” and fucking qinu is the word for “fucking slushy ice by the sea.”

Categories
Street Photography

Winter Scenes: Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Couple kissing at Nathan Phillips Square

I was standing on the observation deck above the snack bar at Nathan Phillips Square. The marshals had cleared the ice so the zamboni could come out. Most people were bored and wished the zamboni would hurry up so they could get back to skating. But not everyone. At least one couple found a way to pass the time as the zamboni traced its loops around the rink. The woman pulled back, looked up, and saw me with my camera trained on them. She smiled then tapped her partner on the shoulder. He turned and together they waved at me. By then, the zamboni had turned and was making its way to the far end of the rink.

It wasn’t until I was at home processing my day’s captures that I noticed the tagline on the zamboni: “The Passion That Unites Us All.” I’m amazed at how the gods of photography contrive to lend a little something extra to so many of my photos. I couldn’t have timed this shot better if I had tried.

As for the tagline … I’m not sure what I feel for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Although one of the most valuable franchises in the NHL (ranked #2 in 2021 at US $1.8 B), it hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967 and routinely doesn’t even make it to the playoffs. It’s an infuriating club: no matter how badly it does, the fans display an unshakeable loyalty. The club/fan relationship is like one of those increasingly rare relationships that sticks it out no matter what.

Maybe that’s what lies behind the tagline: the passion that unites us all is not a passion for winning but a passion for honouring marriage vows (or whatever the sports equivalent is) for better or worse. As for this couple, who can say what unites them? However, I think it’s heartening they can find ways to pass the time that don’t involve whipping out iPhones and taking selfies.

Couple kissing at Nathan Phillips Square
Categories
Street Portrait

My Name Is Earl

Shot in front of the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge Street

I had just bought my first full-framed mirrorless camera and was anxious to take it for a test drive. Within minutes, I had made this image of Earl who was standing outside Toronto’s Rosedale Library and immediately I was sold on the idea of the mirrorless camera.

There are drawbacks to the mirrorless system. For example, swapping lenses is a problem because it’s so much easier for stray dust particles to find their way onto the sensor. If I’m outdoors on a windy day and I want to switch lenses, it’s almost guaranteed I’ll end up with a dust spot on all my subsequent images. And then there’s the whole issue of hand size. Mirrorless cameras look like they were manufactured in a workshop owned by dainty-fingered elves. Finally, there’s the issue of heft. If I’m tramping around in the woods, I want a camera body that can get knocked around a bit without giving me grief.

On the plus side … A mirrorless camera isn’t likely to cause curvature of the spine. And travel! I can’t believe all the gear I used to haul onto an airplane. But most of all—and this is what I realized when I met Earl—, a mirrorless camera is unobtrusive, so people are more likely to feel comfortable when you frame them in your viewfinder. Never mind that the Sony A7 Mark IV is a 60 megapixel beast. The camera is easy to mistake for a simple point-and-shoot.

So I struck up a conversation with Earl. The conversation wasn’t going anywhere, partly because he mumbled so I heard only every third word, and partly because the words I did hear made no sense. To save the situation, I held up my new camera and asked if he was okay posing for a shot. He smiled and nodded and mumbled something incomprehensible and the rest, as they say, is photography.

Categories
Street Portrait

Pachycephalosaurus

Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto

It was in Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto City Hall. A guy in a suit with an open collar had stepped outside for a break and sat at a picnic table. On the picnic table, there was a green plastic dinosaur, a friar tuck, as the hunter in Jurassic Park II calls it or, as his more knowledgeable companion corrects, a pachycephalosaurus which literally means “thick-headed lizard.”

There are many mornings, before I’ve had my first cup of coffee, when I feel like a thick-headed lizard. Maybe that explains why I was drawn to this scene. The man was texting on his cell phone, apparently oblivious to the dinosaur lurking nearby. I thought to myself: this is a photograph! I knelt on one knee and set up the shot, focusing on the dinosaur in the foreground, blurring the man behind. Then, when I was ready to release the shutter, I called out: “You realize there’s a dinosaur on your table, don’t you?” He looked up from his cell phone: “Huh?” Click.

What you can’t see from this image is the grin that followed. He immediately saw the humour of the situation and was fine with me taking the shot. I showed him the result in my viewfinder just to certify that I hadn’t caught him looking foolish. No tongue stuck out, eyes closed, boogers, zits, that sort of thing. Only the plastic pachycephalosaurus.

Categories
Street Portrait

Minnie Mouse Bow

When I first say this woman locking up her bicycle, my impression was that the Minnie Mouse bow on the helmet looked silly. But later, it struck me as eminently practical, at least from an urban cycling point of view. Yes, she shouldn’t have to make herself more visible, and yes, victim blaming should have no place in our public conversations about urban traffic. For the latest iteration of this, we have the December 26th rollover in downtown Toronto that injured 8 pedestrians, killing one of them. Toronto police const. Tony Macias drew flack when commenting on the accident and advising pedestrians to “keep their eyes open.”

But given that many drivers don’t pay attention, and given that the cars they drive can be lethal to those who aren’t in them, and given that existing infrastructure favours those lethal cars, I can understand if someone wants to use a Minnie Mouse bow to make themselves more visible. Certainly, Toronto’s Vision Zero program isn’t doing any good.

I’m disinclined to say Tony Macias engaged in victim blaming. Criticism here strikes me as misplaced. It’s the same form of argument that was leveled against John Lennon when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. When the media pressed him to recant for being disrespectful, his response was: but it’s true. We may not like that pedestrians need to “keep their eyes open.” But they do need to keep their eyes open, and we can’t very well hold Tony Macias responsible for that. If we want to assign responsibility, we need to look at this from a broader perspective that takes into account matters like urban design and social attitudes towards transit. For now, put a bow on your helmet.

Categories
Street Portrait

Meet The Touchi Artist

Standing in the middle of Yonge Street at Dundas, Toronto

With taglines like Be Hap2py! Sexy@Work and Jucy in Bed, how can the Touchi Artist go wrong? I’ve run into the Touchi Artist on numerous occasions as I drift through the intersection of Dundas and Yonge where he spends a lot of his time flogging his ideas. While I don’t know his name (yet), I can point you to his web site which is the next best thing: https://touchiartist.wordpress.com/

There, in addition to discovering his favourite taglines, you can learn about his obsession with an idea he calls blockclerk which, as far as I can figure out, is a mashup of blockchain and local politics. He also promotes meditation and yoga. For good measure, he scribbles his ideas on just about every utility box in a 2 km radius of the Dundas/Yonge intersection.

The thing about the Touchi Artist is that he’s a pretty amiable guy. Whenever I raise my camera and point in his direction, he offers a broad smile and is happy to pose. I suspect he regards himself as a proselyte of his revolutionary breakthrough ideas, so it’s in his best interest to put on his best face and do whatever he can by way of self-promotion. I’m happy to help him in his cause. I have no idea what the cause is, but I’m sure that in his mind it all makes perfect sense.

The Touchi Artist in Dundas Square, Toronto
Categories
Street Portrait

Street Portrait of Ben

Man wearing backward baseball cap and with tattoo on his face.
Just hitchhiked from Brockville. Does graffiti – bubble letters. Walks 20-30 mi. each day.

I was standing at the curb on Yonge Street just south of Dundas. I’d done my research beforehand and knew this was on the route of the World Naked Bike Ride. By my estimate, the naked cyclists would be turning from Dundas onto Yonge any minute now. I planned to use that most phallic of lenses, the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, fast and long, like the cyclists who’d soon be whizzing past me.

That’s when Ben stepped up beside me. He’d just bused into town from Brockville and looked like he was trying to get his bearings. Meanwhile, I looked like I was waiting for something. I told him about the naked cyclists; he thought that was cool so he waited with me. I had nothing much to shoot until the cyclists arrived, so I asked if he’d mind me taking some shots of him while we waited.

In my do-over life, or in an alternate universe where the human lifespan is long enough to let us get degrees in 25 different areas of study, I’d like to learn more about cultural anthropology. For now, I have to resort to intuition about what I suspect might be the case. For example, I suspect it might be the case that Western cultures find face tattoos problematic. But I have no data to back this up. All I have is an image of mother losing her shit if, when I was younger, I had come home with a tattoo covering half my face: What did you do that for? I can barely look at you now? What will the neighbours think?

I suspect it might be the case, too, that the Western bias against face tattoos is partly a prejudice we carry with us from colonial days: this is something “primitive” peoples do, but not us. It sullies our whiteness. It makes us more like “them”. This is pure speculation on my part, and it all vanishes from my mind when a glorious parade of flesh zips down the road.

Categories
Street Portrait

Eveready Freddy

Homeless man rest with elbow on knee
Allen Gardens, Toronto

I have written at length on my other web site about my encounter with Eveready Freddy. If you go there, you’ll note that I processed all my photos of him as black and whites. It was a phase. It’s what people were doing then. A street aesthetic. Make it grainy. Make it gritty. Make it black and white.

The fact is: when I met him, Freddy was in trouble. He had no money. He’d been beaten up. And although he insisted he was all right, I had a suspicion he was bipolar and in a manic phase, so of course he would say he’s all right. I don’t think it helps someone who is suffering to take the images you make of them and process them in a way that conforms to your “house aesthetic.” It ends up romanticizing their suffering or minimizes it. This reminds me of domestic violence victims who cover the bruises with makeup. Only, in this instance, it’s me and not the victim who applies the makeup.

So here we have Freddy in colour. Grey stubble. Split lip that looks raw in a way that black and white masks. There’s still an element of artifice in the portrait insofar as he’s posing. But that’s something he chose to do and not something I directed.

For the time being, I have adopted a new rule when it comes to black and white images: present the image as shot. So if you’ve shot in colour, then present the image in colour. Process the photo in black and white only if you can clearly articulate the reason for your decision, and always be sure that your reason favours the subject.

Categories
Street Portrait

World Naked Bike Ride Day

Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto

On what could prove to be the coldest day of the year, I offer up an impromptu portrait I shot in Nathan Phillips Square during the 2018 iteration of the World Naked Bike Ride. It was a warm June day, which meant there were no shriveled walnuts; everyone was loose and relaxed. Warm your hands by the gentle heat of this image and look forward to better days.

A confession: I tried my best to approach this subject with gravitas, but sometimes keeping a straight face can be painful, and so I may have laughed out loud once or twice. I fully endorse the WNBR’s lofty aims: promoting body positivity, discouraging the sexualizing of the body (in the manner of the Slutwalk), encouraging healthy living, drawing attention to car-centric urban development. But it does make me laugh. I don’t want my laughter to be taken as a comment on the issues it addresses. It’s just that when you’re carrying on a conversation, trying your level best to focus on a man’s face, and all the while he’s waggling his schlong at you, it gets to be a challenge. For one thing, it’s hard to hold a camera steady when you’re laughing.

Naked man on a bicycle.