Author: David Barker

Categories
Country Life Still Life

Minimal Winter Photos

One of the things I love about photographing in the wintertime is that if you angle your camera downward against a rising slope, you can isolate the subject and produce an absolutely simple shot. Call it what you like—minimal, clean, uncluttered, Zen—the effect is the same: an image that calms the spirit and settles the senses.

I wonder if Marie Kondo gives photography workshops. Declutter your images. Leave in only those parts that give you joy. It’s not surprising that a contemporary “influencer” of the uncluttered space should happen to be Japanese. Traditional Japanese aesthetics lists seven principles necessary to achieve Wabi-Sabi which is a state of mind that emerges in the presence of beauty. One of those principles is Kanso which means simplicity or clarity. Kanso might also be understood as a process to the extent that it engages us in the practice of removing things from the frame until only the necessary remains.

Snow helps in this process by removing clutter in the background. In the case of the photograph above, that clutter includes dirt, grass, and shriveled wildflowers. In the case of the photograph below, that clutter includes a pond and the line of the far shore, all of which has turned to ice and been covered by a deep layer of snow.

Cattails
Categories
Street Photography

Don’t stick your hand in a snow blower while it’s running

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.

Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Categories
Street Photography

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: the case of the flying man

Man Runs to Union Station, Toronto

On a wet snowy afternoon, I went to the southwest corner of the Front/Bay intersection to catch people rushing down to Union Station to catch the train. I positioned myself a couple steps down where the stairs on the corner follow the slope of the street. That way, I could shoot lower to the ground which had turned wet with a light snowfall. I was after reflections of people walking across the reflective surface. That’s when I caught a man running so fast that he had enough lift to fly across the pavement. I have the proof. I captured a photo of it. A pox on your house if you try to refute the evidence of my unaltered photograph.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting photos of Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s. Speaking of UFO’s (or UAP’s as the US “Intelligence” community calls them), I note that 2021 was a banner year for unexplained sightings. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (US) released a report on 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (sic) which it has assessed. Of the 144 sightings, the intelligence community has explained only one. It remains open to the possibility that these were sightings of airborne aliens. You can read more on CNN’s web site.

In November, defense officials announced that they would be establishing a new task force to investigate these and other related phenomena (wood faeries? bridge trolls?). Although this appears to have happened under the aegis of the Biden administration, in fact, it was the Trump administration that imposed the requirement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit a report to Congress. Is anyone surprised?

Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a period, after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, of interminable Trump sightings (think Elvis) supplemented with seances licensed of course by Ivanka & Co., the hereditary grifters.

In the meantime, I offer this image to the new task force as its 145th UAP. A man hovers above the ground. How is this even possible? Unless … maybe this is an alien disguised as a man.

Categories
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
Country Life

Snow-covered railway tracks in Thunder Bay

Rail marshalling yard, Hardisty Street, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In Thunder Bay, the railway tracks come up alongside Hardisty Street North which is where I was standing when I made this shot. I was struck by the high contrast of white ground, dark rails running to the horizon, and dark utility pole set off against a gloomy sky. When I was done making the shot, I collapsed my tripod, strapped it to my pack, and walked over to Simpson Street. I was heading down to the Fort William side of town.

Because of the light, I made a lot of good photos that morning. Perhaps the most memorable photo was nothing special, at least not from a photographic point of view. I saw what I took to be a small derelict theatre and, without looking too closely, assumed that somebody had bought the building and converted it into a retail space. It wasn’t until after I made my shot that I noticed it was the local Hells Angels club house. I quickened my pace and hoped nobody had been watching me. I worried that if they saw my camera, they might think I was from a law enforcement agency. I’d vanish and people would later find my body in a boxcar off Hardisty Street.

As happens to so many buildings in Thunder Bay, somebody torched the Hells Angels club house almost exactly two years after I made this shot. The CBC article says the cause of the fire was unknown, but come on. This is the Hells Angels we’re talking about.

When I heard about the fire, my lawyer brain immediately wondered if the Hells Angels had insured the place. Given their efforts in recent years to carry on legitimate business enterprises, I don’t see why not. Even so, I tried to imagine the first time an insurance broker met with a Hells Angels rep to discuss insuring their place of business. How would an actuary even begin to go about evaluating potential risk?

Finally, I note that the street address is a fractional number, like the platform where aspiring wizards catch the train to Hogwarts. It seems that fractional numbers lead us into magical realms where we can alter our reality by eating gillyweed or shooting heroin.

Hells Angels Club House, Thunder Bay, ON
636 1/2 Simpson Street, Thunder Bay, ON
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
Country Life

Winter Scenes: Snowmobiling in Rural Ontario

Elliiott Side Road, Wybridge, ON

This is a recent photograph, shot while walking on a Sunday morning along Elliott Side Road near Midland, ON. It’s in Tay Township which got its name exactly 200 years ago when Lady Sarah Maitland, wife of then Governor General of Upper Canada, General Sir Peregrine Maitland, thought it would be cute to name some towns after her pet dogs. Now, besides Tay, people race their snowmobiles through Tiny and Flos. Before the English, it was the French who laid claim to the region. Like most colonizing enterprises, it was the Bible that led the way. In 1639, Jesuits established a mission that lasted all of 10 years when Iroquois decided they’d had enough and killed them all. Before the Jesuits, the land had been occupied for nearly 10,000 years by the Wendat-Huron people.

The first time I rode on a snowmobile, I was all of four or five. My grandfather had sold his farm south of London, retaining just enough land that he could make a good run from the road to the woods and back on what I presume was an expression of his midlife crisis. Why else would a man in his mid-fifties buy a snowmobile? When I visited in the wintertime, he’d take me for a little spin. My parents raised me as a city boy, so I’ve had little contact with snowmobiles since then. Whatever crisis my grandfather had suffered quickly subsided and his snowmobile gathered dust under a tarp for a few years until he sold it to a neighbour.

Except for indigenous people who live in remote communities, I don’t understand why anyone would need a snowmobile. Every year, we hear fresh stories of people decapitated running under fence wires or sinking through the ice as they make their last run of the season out to the fishing hut. People answer that they’re perfectly safe if you drive them sensibly. But the whole point of a snowmobile is to drive fast; nobody in a midlife crisis wants to drive sensibly. The fact that my grandfather survived his midlife crisis is more a case of god playing dice with the universe than sound planning on my grandfather’s part.

So there I am, a city boy out for a walk with my camera, when several groupings of snowmobiles come roaring down the road in quick succession. My brother-in-law, who lives there, explains that they pay a $300 fee for a permit. Among other things, that permit gets them nicely groomed trails and, implicitly, the assurance that there are no low wires hanging across those trails.

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
Landscape Photography

February Photography Series: Winter Scenes

Tree in Blowing Snow, Wyebridge, ON

For the month of February, I’ll be presenting a series of photographs featuring winter scenes. Fitting given that, at least in the northern hemisphere, February tends to be the most wintery month of the year. Fitting, too, given that I’m Canadian and winter is intimately bound to the Canadian identity. Urban, rural, people, landscape, macro, sport, wildlife, anything goes so long as it’s obvious from the image that I shot it in the wintertime.

To kick off this series, I offer a landscape image, tree trunk in the foreground of a snow-covered field, line of trees in the background. Blowing snow adds an atmospheric effect. Whenever I’m out in blowing snow, I wrap my camera in a plastic zip lock bag with a little hole cut out for the view finder. Basically a camera condom for extra protection. When the weather gets extreme, I have a fancier “official” condom made from thick clear plastic. It’s like the difference between Saran Wrap and a Trojan.

As with virtually every landscape image I’ve ever made, I used a tripod for this one. However, I’ve discovered something interesting about using a tripod in snow. The guy who sold me my fancy Manfrotto carbon fiber tripod told me it would be the last tripod I’d ever own, implying that the materials are virtually indestructible. Guess what? I found a way to destroy a carbon fiber tripod.

Not far from the site of this image, I drove the legs of my tripod into a snowbank and the legs splayed, driven outward by a layer of ice hidden under a light dusting of snow. I heard a crack and one of the legs went wonky. On examination, I discovered that, no, you can’t crack a carbon fiber tripod transversely like a broken leg, but if you jam it just right, you can crack it lengthwise in line with the fibers.

Incidentally, I don’t want to be taken as dissing Manfrotto products. I immediately went out and replaced my tripod with another Manfrotto. However, don’t believe anyone who tells you carbon fiber is indestructible.

Categories
Street Portrait

Man Sitting Outside Sultan Mosque, Singapore

Portrait of elderly man wearing glasses and white cap

As the title of this post indicates, I shot this impromptu portrait as I was walking along Muscat Street outside Singapore’s Sultan Mosque. This gentleman was happy to pose. As always, the key is to screw up the courage to ask. Even though he didn’t speak any English, my camera made it obvious what I was asking of him.

Revisiting this image, I’m reminded of why I never travel on tours. To capture an image like this takes time, or at least the illusion of time. It’s important for me to present as someone with all the time in the world, or at least as someone who has the time to pay attention to the person sitting right in front of me. Tours are frenetic affairs where a guide whisks you one place for five minutes and then the next and then the next with hardly time to get your bearings. In a situation like that, I could never relax enough to establish a connection with a subject. I prefer to plop myself in a city and then work things out in my own time. Part of that is just me: I’m slow and methodical. To be honest, when I have a camera in my hands, I’m frustrating to be around. Just ask my wife. I lose myself in the process.

This wraps up a month of street portraits. On to a new project. While portraits are by no means the mainstay of my practice, for personal reasons, I regard them as essential. Portraits force me to do what makes me most uncomfortable. I am an introvert and, years ago, found myself overtaken by a paralysing anxiety. The combination of introversion and anxiety militates against spontaneously striking up conversations with strangers. For me, the practice of street portraiture serves as a form of desensitization. Go gently at first, doing only what feels comfortable, rewarding myself for my successes, taking it easy on myself for my failures, and gradually pushing myself into increasingly uncomfortable situations. Looking back over the years, the results of this strategy have been startling. Now, the biggest impediment to taking good street portraits is the fact that so many people obscure their faces with masks.