Author: David Barker

Categories
Street Portrait

Street Portraits at Toronto’s Pride Parade

Street portrait of a man wearing sunglasses and a cannabis decorated fishing hat.

Pride events offer the perfect opportunity to shoot street portraits. This is especially true on overcast days when shadows are soft and natural sunlight is kind to photographers. But the enemy here is not light so much as time. Interactions are so fleeting that you may have only a second to make a connection and take the shot. Everything has an ADHD vibe to it. Catch someone’s eye; raise the camera as if to ask “mind if I take a shot”; get the nod; frame the shot; click; move on to the next person.

This year, there was only one person who declined to pose. That’s exceptional. Most years, the number is zero. In the fenced-off portions of Church Street, consent is assumed, although that consent is given to Pride Toronto and not to the thousands of unofficial photographers roaming at large. The release notice says that “you consent to the use of your image” etc. for eternity. That strikes me as optimistic. Eternity is a long time. A lot can happen between now and eternity.

For example, on some views of inflationary cosmology, the universe expands forever and the distribution of energy within an infinite universe means that the average temperature approaches absolute zero. In other words, eventually it will become too cold to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.

But there are other issues to consider before it ever gets to that. For example, after about 5 billion years, our sun will become a red giant, expanding well beyond Earth’s orbit, which means that our home planet will be consumed in a great ball of Jerry Lee Lewis. In that scenario, assuming our genetic progeny still exists but hasn’t figured out how to migrate elsewhere, it will become too hot to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.

Somewhere between hot and cold, there is a lukewarm position occupied by smaller stars that consume their fuel more sparingly. Although the universe is too young for us to gauge the potential lifespan of such a star, it is plausible to suppose it could continue to burn for hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions, of years. Assuming we escape our solar death trap and migrate to one of these smaller stars, we could carry on for a long time. But somehow I think that, after evolving for the next trillion years, we might grow bored of staring at old photos of pride events from those early days when we’d barely learned to walk upright.

Categories
Street Photography

Using black and white to silence the noise of Toronto Pride

Black and white photograph of people sitting on scaffolding against a white background, most of them watching something in the distance.
West side of Yonge Street, south of Bloor, Toronto

For the first time since the beginning of the global pandemic, the city of Toronto has not cancelled Pride celebrations. We so needed a party! For one thing, the city needed a reason to cut loose. Just because. For another thing, it gave us a chance to celebrate the fact that we enjoy freedoms here that the rest of the world seems hellbent on demolishing.

The festivities were mercifully free of the freedom rhetoric that our gaslighting friends from the anti-mask, anti-vax, trucker convoy movement have been tossing around so flippantly. It was such a relief to shut out all that noise, even if only for a few days, and to fill the city with noise of a different sort, the pumping bass of dance music and people cheering and laughing and filling the air with a positive energy.

It’s a funny thing, all that noise. While I like the idea of noisy celebration, and while I like to lose myself in the crowds, I do have my limit. I am, after all, an introvert, and if I spend too much time in dancing screaming throngs, I go mental. So I go out for a few hours, and then I retreat to my fortress of solitude to recover a sense of equanimity.

This tension between celebration and solitude finds its analogy in my photographs. Pride is about rainbows and glitter cannons and wild splashes colour. But the auditory overwhelm that finally drives me to silence has its correlate in the visual field. The colour fills my eyes and my answer, in the quiet of my post-production space, is to desaturate my photographs. It calms my senses.

During Sunday’s parade, people had climbed the scaffolding around the construction site on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. Behind them was a broad white swath that served as an obvious background for a photograph. For a black and white photograph. Although colourful (for example, a person in the front row sits on a trans flag), the image plays just as well without colour.

This gives me pause for one last thought: does the act of desaturating a photograph have a political dimension? A rainbow flag means something. A trans flag means something. But in a context where colour is an important signifier, can the removal of colour be construed as a hostile act? I remove colour for a cognitive reason, to avoid overwhelm, but my benign intentions may be a pale excuse.

Categories
Abstract

Spiral Galaxy

A bicycle rack casting a shadow in late afternoon sunlight and receding into a shaded distance.
Bicycle Rack at TD Centre, Toronto

If I were a multi-billionaire who chaired the board of a company that was developing a privatized space program, I wouldn’t bother launching cars into orbit around the sun or sending people to Mars. Instead, I’d develop my own Voyager probe with my own Golden Record. That, I think, is a safer bet for achieving immortality.

Under the leadership of Carl Sagan, a team developed The Golden Record, a durable greeting that included music, maps detailing its origins, voice recordings in many languages, images, and of course technical drawings that would allow alien creatures to decode The Golden Record. Sagan’s brainchild was fixed to the two Voyager probes and launched in 1977. Voyager I has now traveled 155 astronomical units making it the first human-made object to exit the solar system. Someday, technically advanced aliens might retrieve one of the Voyager probes and decipher our greetings.

What interests me are the images Sagan’s team selected. Puzzling (at least to me) is the fact that the images include a photo of Terminal One at what was then Toronto International Airport. It was a Brutalist hunk of concrete that has since been dismantled. Theoretically, the image could last for 2 billion years or more, while the structure represented in the image lasted all of 40 years. Only 45 years after the launch of the two Voyager probes, it has become painfully obvious how politically fraught and culturally contingent the Sagan team’s photo selection process was.

But if I was a multi-billionaire and not beholden to committees, what kind of photos would I select to introduce myself to an alien civilization? Would I load my selection with selfies and photos of the people and things I care about? Or would I make some effort to represent the wider world I inhabit. In other words, would I be motivated by narcissism? Or would I hold to loftier aims?

Another question I might ask myself is: how much do I care that my photos make sense to an alien civilization? Do I take a Mark Rothko approach to image making and include only images that require a deep immersion in human culture to understand? Or do I make things more obvious, like the house on the fridge with mommy and daddy and the dog?

Take for example today’s featured image. I would suggest that it sits somewhere midway between abstract and obvious. A human looking at the image might understand that it represents a bicycle rack casting a shadow in late afternoon sunlight and receding into a shaded distance. But we might not notice all that the image assumes. It assumes bicycles even though bicycles don’t appear in the photograph. How would an alien infer the existence of bicycles from an image of a metal spiral?

Beyond that, the image assumes the idea of property. The purpose of a bicycle rack has as much to do with security of property as it does with bicycles. And further beyond that are ideas of manufacturing and economy and social organization rooted in ownership. We assume all of this when we read the photograph. But we have no reason to suppose that aliens would be able to access any of these ideas. Alien social organization may have no concept of property at all.

Given that metal spirals are probably indecipherable, it’s not the sort of image I’d include in my personal Golden Record. In fact, a selfie might be as meaningful as anything else: “Hey, look at me, a white guy, the only person on this planet to accumulate enough property that he can afford to fling meaningless crap into your corner of the galaxy.”

Categories
Architecture

Mid-Life Crisis

Black and white photo of an apartment building from the 1950s that incorporates mod cinder blocks.
Apartment building on Douglas Street across from Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, B.C.

We celebrated the end of the pandemic with a trip to visit family in Victoria, B.C. That was last November just days before the omicron variant arrived and forced us to rethink the idea of an “end” to the pandemic. For a brief few days, we got to pretend life had returned to normal. Our worries were restricted to minor issues like flooding, washed out infrastructure, and food and gas shortages. Ah, those were simpler times!

On my second morning there, the rain let up so I walked down to Ogden Point where I caught the sunrise. To get back to the hotel, I went up Douglas Street with apartment buildings to my left and Beacon Hill Park to my right. About half way along the park, I paused to admire an apartment building probably built in the 1950s. In particular, I found myself mesmerized by a simple retro design feature: square white-washed concrete blocks with a star motif in the centre, stacked to form a low wall in front of the building and repeated on each of the balconies. Apart from UFOs and drive-thru burger palaces served by bobby-soxers on roller skates, I can’t imagine anything more emblematic of the 1950s.

I paused to take a shot, then continued along the sidewalk where a sign came into view: Beacon Tower, a 55+ building. I stumbled a little. You see, it isn’t so long ago that I passed that 55+ threshold. I turned back to the building and stared at the retro blocks. Christ, I thought, I qualify to live in an “adult lifestyle” building.

The fact is: I graduated from high school only two or three years ago. Mentally at least (my wife insists I’m far more immature than that and have only graduated from junior high). Because I’m still in reasonably good shape, don’t suffer inordinate aches and pains, and don’t experience shortness of breath when I exert myself, I’ve never come up against anything that challenges my admittedly distorted view of myself. My rational brain tells me I need to grow up which means I need to worry about cholesterol and book an appointment for a colonoscopy. But my rational faculties have always been the smallest part of my brain.

I wonder if the posted 55+ threshold isn’t an artifact from the days when the apartment building first opened its doors. Our perception of what counts as old has changed. In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887 imagined life in the year 2000 where workers retire at the age of 45 so they have at least a few good years left to enjoy life. No doubt, Bellamy’s threshold was influenced by the deplorable working conditions in Victorian England and their impact on average life expectancy. In the 1950s, we could push that figure along by 10 years. Now, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at 55 and drifting from there into my sunset years. In fact, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at any age.

The gradual deferral of what counts as old age also finds a correlation in changing expectations about when one should start a family. That decision determines how old an infant’s grandparents are. When I was born, my grandmother was 41. When my son was born, his grandmother was 50. As for me, I’ve surpassed them with no prospect of becoming a grandparent. That’s just as well, as I’m only a couple years out of high school and hardly fit for the task.

Categories
City Life

Economy of Outrage

Black and white photo of a bright railing angling diagonally to the lower left corner against a backdrop of small wall tiles illuminated by a shaft of light angling diagonally to the lower right corner
Stairs to Sheppard WEst Subway Station, Toronto

The global pandemic has given me object lessons in mathematical concepts like exponential growth (as when people go maskless to indoor settings and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen rises above one) and exponential reduction (as when people follow basic protocols like mask-wearing and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen drops below one). We see it, too, in situations where people lose their jobs but have to carry consumer debt at exorbitant interest rates. Seemingly small increments end up having huge consequences.

We can apply the same concept to feelings of well-being on social media platforms. Take Twitter for example. A tweet only gets traction to the extent that it deals in outrage. A politician says something beyond the pale so you tweet a video clip of the offending comment plus a few words about how outrageous this is and before you can say “your mama is a woke bitch” you’ve got a thousand retweets and ten thousand likes. Meanwhile, Gandhi tweets about non-violent resistance and Martin Buber posts a thread about the value of engaging one another with a loving gaze, but these tweets attract zero attention and soon the @gandhi and @martinbuber accounts wither and die.

From the very outset, programmers gamed Twitter to reward engagement that deals in outrage. Whether they mean to or not, users adjust their habits to optimize their role in the game. More likes. More retweets. And, of course, more followers. @jesus had only 12 followers. What a loser. No wonder. His message was boring. Love one another? Give me a fucking break.

It may not seem like a big deal. A few “idiot” and “moron” comments scattered throughout a day’s posts. What difference could that make? But scale that up by the number of daily active Twitter users (206 million at the beginning of 2022) and these seemingly insignificant expressions of disgust and outrage take on a force of their own. They become our cultural norm.

But as with reproduction rates below one, it is possible to reverse a trend. Don’t like or retweet posts that fuel further outrage. Don’t follow people except as they deal in kindness. Post images that make you feel happy. Promote a different economy of social exchange.

Categories
Street Photography

The Front of Things

A man in overalls steps up onto the curb beside a fire hydrant while in the background are stores fronting a city street.

I’m surprised at the number of fledgling street photographers I follow on social media who complain about being nervous when they shoot strangers. They’re reluctant to shoot them straight on. They’re afraid something bad might happen. The person they’re trying to shoot might get angry or punch them out.

I think of the scene in The Godfather when Johnny Fontane, the Vegas crooner, is speaking to Vito Corleone. He whines to the Don that his voice is getting weak; he’s all washed up; a Hollywood director has passed him over for a good part. Don Corleone yells at him that what he can do is act like a man, then he smacks Fontane in the face and mocks him. That’s what I want to do to people who complain that it’s too hard to stand in front of people and take their photo.

Act like a man, godammit! You think you’re somehow unique because you feel nervous? Everybody feels nervous. Feeling nervous is a good thing. Only psychopaths don’t feel nervous. If you feel nervous, at the very least, it means you’re not a psychopath. More than that, feeling nervous puts you on edge. It gives you a heightened sense of your surroundings and a greater feeling of immediacy in the moment. You make better images when you feel nervous.

As for making people angry, it happens. Some people will regard you with suspicion, as if you plan to do something nefarious with their image. It’s a fact of contemporary life that a strong strand of paranoia winds through our public engagement. As a photographer, it’s part of your job to allay those feelings of paranoia. If you find yourself channeling Vladimir Putin, maybe you should find other ways to spend your time.

And as for fears that someone might beat you up, exercise common sense. Don’t shoot late at night outside the local Hells Angels clubhouse. Personally, I’ve never found myself in a situation I couldn’t talk my way out of. In my experience, some of the meanest scariest looking people have proven to be some of the most receptive to my photographic overtures. I suspect their appearance means most people avoid them and so these mean scary looking people are excruciatingly lonely. The minute I express interest in their lives and demonstrate that I’m not afraid, they open up to me and are happy to pose for my camera.

https://youtu.be/idP5-vtkhBE
Categories
Street Photography

The Back of Things

A man walks south down Yonge Street with his left hand pressed to his hip.
Yonge Street south of College Street

Shooting street photography, I feel a tension between shooting from the front and shooting from the back. This tension has its correlate in the wider world of social relations. Most of us are conflict averse and would rather not face people head-on even though we know we should. Maybe somebody slights us and we feel we ought to stand up to them. It’s a matter of principle. It’s a matter of personal dignity. But when the time comes, we feel nervous. We hesitate and the moment passes.

Something similar happens with a camera in hand. We know that, at least in street photography, the best images happen when the subject approaches us. We get to look them in the eyes and examine their expression. If we shoot them from the back, it’s only because we’re cowardly. We tell ourselves we haven’t got the right stuff. Our inner critic yammers on until it makes us feel two inches tall and we wonder if we’ll ever be any good at our chosen craft.

And yet, as with any rule-bound practice, we discover that the rules take us only so far. There are occasions when it’s best to break the rules. Sometimes the view from the back offers its own interest, as it does here with the hand pressed to the hip, the posture of discomfort, the four rings on the left hand, the rumpled texture of the shirt. The scene from the back raises enough questions in its own right to sustain our interest.

I find the same situation arises with buildings. The front of a building has an obvious interest. But sometimes, the back of a building tells a story all its own and I would miss that story if I didn’t duck around the side and explore what lies behind.

Categories
Architecture

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – S1.E3 Ghosts of Illyria

Black and white photograph of Ontario Place buildings rising from the ice covered waters of a thawing Lake Ontario.
Ontario Place

Strange New Worlds, the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, explores pre-Kirk life in the Federation. In particular, we learn the back story of Captain Christopher Pike whom we first met in “The Menagerie” which aired in 1966. Anson Mount plays the current iteration of Pike, a character written according to a longstanding template that makes him indistinguishable from James T Kirk. When he’s not in the chair on the bridge, he’s riding a horse in Montana while sporting a rugged beard. Starfleet rules are really suggestions, but he only breaches them when higher values are at stake. And he carries himself with a good-humoured sex appeal that, sooner or later, will have some large-breasted alien swooning.

Why, you may ask, does a guy with a photo blog post a piece about Star Trek? Glad you asked. It turns out they’re filming Strange New Worlds in that strangest of strange new worlds, the city of Toronto. This became cringingly obvious in the first shots of episode 3, “Ghosts of Illyria.” The opening shots establish that the Enterprise is in orbit around an alien world, home to species called the Illyrians. The next shot takes us to the planet’s surface where an away team has landed only to find that the planet’s inhabitants are missing. We swoop across the surface of a large body of water and the camera rises to the horizon. A strange alien structure comes into view.

It’s Ontario Place. But in the future. And on another planet.

For more than 10 years now, Ontario Place has been a sad shell of its former self, serving no particular purpose other than to slowly rust away into the lapping waters of Lake Ontario. Doug Ford’s decision to make it a terminus for his new subway line strikes me as utterly pointless. Once built, the Ford line will be the subway ride to useless. But don’t worry. He’ll license a casino there to one of his mob cronies and all will be well.

The irony is that when it first opened in 1971, it reflected an optimistic vision of the future, or at least the future as its architect, Eb Zeidler, imagined it. At the same time as Zeidler was preparing his plans, Stanley Kubrick was giving us far out furniture on his 2001 space station and selling space travel as a glorified acid trip. The only thing missing from the original Ontario Place designs was a humongous lava lamp. It’s the kind of place you could go for a giant city-wide key party. The future was so much better back then.

In the Star Trek version of the future, Ontario Place is ground zero for a plague transmitted by photons. Once infected, victims crave light which of course produces photons and increases the likelihood of transmission. This futuristic plague’s version of masking is to turn out the lights. The only thing missing from this episode are the anti-darkness truckers who demand in the name of freedom the right to turn on the lights and infect their Enterprise crewmates. But I guess that would make it more like Toronto today than the Federation in stardate 2548.3.

Black and white photograph of Ontario Place buildings rising from the ice covered waters of a thawing Lake Ontario.
Ontario Place
Categories
Nature

Photo Accessibility

A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.
Mckay’s Harbour, Lion’s Head Provincial Park

Several years ago, in another context, I lamented the rise of what I described as photographic literalism. It’s a problem produced by search engines which rely on tagging to index photographs. In order to for photographs to rank well in Google searches, the associated tags have to accurately describe what appears in the photograph. We see the same thing on photo sites like Instagram and Flickr where often the photos that get the most attention are those with the best configuration of hashtags.

People have become fixated on the thingness of an image. This is a picture of X. This thing called X is a Platonic X that has about it an ideal quality of Xness. We can name it and classify it and slot it into its proper cubbyhole. Taxonomy is king! Long live the well-named!

While hashtags have their place, it’s important to recognize their shortcomings, too. Hashtags have no way to note ambivalence or vagueness, meanings that teeter on a fulcrum, feelings, the numinous experience, intimations of a spiritual life, visual poetry. And they have no way to register fleeting sensations: I looked here and suddenly I was taken back to my childhood. Instead, hashtags presume that a thing is a thing is a thing for all time.

Accessibility has given new life to the issue of photographic literalism. I’m quite happy to describe my photographs in alt tags for the benefit of those who are visually impaired. It’s a helpful measure for people who chance upon my web pages and want to understand how I have integrated visual media with my words. But, as with hashtags, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of these tools.

A photograph is more than a representation of a thing. It may also be a provocation or an evocation. If it’s any good at all, it makes the viewer feel something. It is not so much the thing as it is the feeling that is the point of a photograph.

I think, in addition to the alt tag, there should be a poetry tag: a short ekphrastic statement about the feelings a photograph evokes. In the image above, for example, the alt tag reads: “A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.” Yes, but I might also write: “I was filled with a sense of calm as a gentle breeze rippled the shallow waters and, for a brief moment, I felt a sense of surrender.” Nothing overly flowery, something simple to suggest a state of mind.

Categories
Street Photography

Statistical Photography

Black and white photo of a woman wearing ear buds and smoking while texting on her cellphone.
Shot on SE corner of Queen St W and Bay St, Toronto

I’ve noticed that in the curation of my own photos, there’s a statistical process at play. I go out and I shoot and I shoot and I shoot. When I’m done, I dump my images into a folder and do a preliminary cull. Typically, half my photos go into the trash right at the start. I load the rest into Lightroom and begin a closer examination of my shots, flagging those I like best for post-processing adjustments like colour correction and cropping.

So far this year, 1 in 14 of these images have made the cut. That’s 1 in 28 of my total. In any given year, that leaves me with a thousand or so images of a certain quality which I then cull to a hundred or thereabouts, those I regard as suitable for print. In other words, I end up with 1 in 10 of the 1 in 28. If my math is accurate, that means that, on average, I make 280 images for every one that really satisfies me. That ratio is pretty consistent year over year.

No doubt other photographers function differently. Some take greater care at the moment they capture the image, making sure they release the shutter only if they know the image is good. For them, the ratio of satisfying images is higher. But that isn’t me. I can’t afford to be so precious. I subscribe to the Wayne Gretzky school of photography: the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t make 100% of the shots I don’t take. So I shoot and I shoot and I shoot.

As odd as it may sound, the global pandemic has provided affirmation of my approach to photography. The pandemic has made me daily mindful of statistical thinking and its importance to public health policy. No one action will guarantee that I avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but if I wear a mask and get vaccinated, and if others do the same, then collectively we improve the odds that everyone will avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus. It’s all a matter of statistics.

Applying the same kind of thinking to my photographic practice … no one photo may be a great photo, but if I keep shooting, and if I do my best with each shot, then, statistically speaking, at least a few of those shots are going to be good. The real trick is recognizing them when they happen.

Categories
City Life

History of Violence

Tow-Away Zone sign on a bent metal pole with tall buildings in the background.

One of the things the Black Lives Matter #BLM movement has tried to do is expand the meaning of racism. In the past, white people like me tried to exempt ourselves from responsibility by saying: “What, me racist? I haven’t got a racist bone in my body.” And, in a way, we were right if, by racist, you mean we don’t run around engaging in overt acts of racism.

The #BLM movement struggles to communicate the idea that racism is more than overt acts. It invites people who look like me to see beyond the obvious: to acknowledge that many institutions were designed from their outset to discriminate (and to commit racist acts on our behalf); to identify passive aggressive behaviours and microaggressions that neatly evade allegations of racism but commit such acts all the same; to own our failures to intervene when others do engage in overt acts of racism. People find it difficult to accept that simple omissions can be acts of racism too.

We can understand racism as a category of violence. If we look to violence generally, we find the same dynamic at play. It’s easy for most of us to avoid allegations of violent behaviour because we aren’t prone to engage in overt acts. I don’t physically abuse my wife. I don’t lose my temper and hit people when I don’t get my way. I don’t cut people off on the highway then get out of my car and threaten them with a baseball bat. So, no, I am not a violent person.

As with the #BLM movement, I get to avoid charges of violent behaviour only if I hold to a narrow definition of violence. But violence is more than overt acts. I can abuse my wife without laying a finger on her; it’s possible to engage in all sorts of manipulations that subtly wear her down. And I can do injury without ever striking a person; I can engage in implied threats or utter indirections that are nevertheless demeaning.

Further expanding my definition of violence, I see violence embedded in urban planning. For example, when infrastructure fails to accommodate increases in pedestrian and vehicular traffic, everyone grows frustrated and that frustration leaks out as anger. The people on the receiving end of that anger didn’t cause the frustration. They just happen to be convenient targets.

And when public services fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, not only does that do violence to those vulnerable people—the mentally ill, the homeless, the different—, it heightens the anxiety of everyone else and produces conditions ripe for moral panic: let’s round them up and warehouse them out of sight. This, too, is a form of violence and it implicates us all.

Then there is the violence implicit in our built environment. When we build in ways that fail to account for the human scale, we say in effect that people—all people—are incidental to the late modernist project. Concepts trump people. Ideologies transcend humans. Putin is not extraordinary. This kind of violence has been at work on us for decades.

Categories
Wildlife

Dreaming Black & White

A black and white photograph of a black bird perched on a branch with its beak open as if singing.

When colour film became commercially feasible, it didn’t exactly sweep the photography world off its feet. Part of the reason may have been the cost. Colour film might be commercially feasible, but black and white film was still cheaper. However, when digital photography put an end to the price differential, black and white still retained its appeal.

While there are probably many reasons why people continue to shoot in black and white or to convert their colour images, one possible explanation is that some people dream in black and white. A monochrome palette feels natural to them.

A cursory search with Google suggests there is no definitive answer as to why some people dream in black and white and others dream in colour. For example, this Penn State course blog cites two principal reasons for black and white dreaming: 1) some people just don’t dream that vividly and so recall their dreams as black and white, or 2) people lose the ability to dream in colour as they age. However, a post on Psychreg suggests that most black and white dreamers were exposed to black and white media (and therefore tend to be older because they grew up in the days of black and white TV).

Personally, I recall my dreams in colour, although I do confess that the colours tend to be muted if visual concerns are incidental to the dream. For example, if the dream concerns a conversation or an argument, colour doesn’t really matter and so I don’t remember it. To that end, I share my two most recent dreams, both of which involved conversations.

Dream 1: Maya Ang;1ou

I dreamt of Maya Angelou. Instead of being dead, she was running for governor. I had volunteered to help her out. She needed technical advice on how to keep the haters from inundating her email account and flooding her social media with hate-bots. My big contribution, apart from telling her to use proton mail, was to suggest she use a special spelling of her name and distribute it only to her closest most trusted friends. So we came up with Maya Ang;1ou. I can think of no reason on earth why, at this particular moment, it should occur to me to dream about Maya Ang;1ou.

Dream 2: Bloomsday

Honest to god, on June 16th I dreamt it was Bloomsday. I was riding my bicycle through the streets of Dublin when I came upon a dingy row house with an old tin plaque beside the front door. The plaque commemorated the deeds of the fictional Leopold Bloom: “On this day in 1904, a fictional character in a James Joyce novel did take a shit on this site.” Or words to that effect. I had arrived with a paring knife in hand and meant to pry the plaque from the wall so I could take it home as a souvenir. However, before I could start, a woman opened the door and gave me proper hell in tones only the Irish know how to produce. I looked at her, sheepish, and when she saw that I was harmless, only drunk on Bulmer’s Cider, she softened her tone and, looking from side to side, said she didn’t think it would do any harm for me to steal the sign, and what did she care since it wasn’t her as put it there in the first place.

A black and white photograph of a graffiti-covered double door in Dublin.
A Door In Dublin
Categories
City Life

Arrow

A woman pushes a bundle buggy along the sidewalk while, overhead, an arrow points off at an inclined angle.
Walking west on Scollard Street, Toronto

Speaking of clichés … arrows are a great favourite in street photography. I’m not sure why that is. A Freudian thing, maybe? Or maybe arrows imply a sense of direction which viewers find reassuring. At least it’s reassuring until the arrow points in a direction that isn’t terribly helpful.

What do we make of an arrow that points at an inclined angle? I’m inclined to think the people who installed this arrow had Elon Musk in mind. It points the way to Mars. Or maybe city planners put it there to remind us which way the skyline is headed.

Personally, this arrow makes me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t fill me with existential dread or make me doubt my fundamental beliefs. It causes a feeling of discomfort more on the same order as when I’m at a church wedding and the officiant goes on too long and the hard pew presses against my tailbone and I have to shift in my seat every two minutes to relieve the twinge. It’s that kind of discomfort.

I can tolerate an arrow pointing off into space, but I don’t want to take that as a prescription for my life’s philosophy. If I had my druthers, I’d turn the arrow the other way around. Instead of staring off at the heights or beyond into space, I’d encourage people to stare down at themselves and their rootedness in the ground they walk.

Dreaming and star-gazing are fine. But balance these impulses with self-examination and a regard for our own place. We can ill-afford to neglect the ground we walk.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographic Clichés

A woman cleans the interior face of a store window, holding a bottle of window cleaner in one hand and a white cloth in the other.
Window Cleaning on Spadina Avenue

I remember hearing a story about a university student taking an English Lit course. The class had been assigned Shakespeare’s Hamlet and on the first day of lectures the professor asked: “So what did you think?” The student put up his hand and said: “It was great, but there were too many clichés.”

I have no idea if the story is true. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, it’s becoming a bit clichéd in its own right. But the story points to the fact that every cliché was once an original thought. Before there were new age self-help gurus, there was Polonius saying to his son: “To thine own self be true.” And before we had hedge fund managers standing on ledges, we had Hamlet saying: “To be, or not to be. That is the question.”

Although photography hasn’t been around quite as long as classic literature, it has explored huge swaths of what it is possible to say with images. It has developed a canon of “great” images and these images have produced a kind of stylistic grammar. Want patient suffering? Look to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Want the 1000 yard stare of collective trauma? Look to Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. Want puddle jumping? Look to Henre Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazare.

Tourism has added to the range of our stylistic grammar. For example, if you Google “holding up the leaning tower of pisa” you end up with enough visual cheese to make a thousand pizzas. And, of course, there’s the selfie. Here I am in Times Square. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. And here I am at the Taj Mahal.

As evidenced by today’s featured photo, I am a great practitioner of the visual cliché. In fact, I am absolutely shameless in my taste for visual cheese. I have a couple thoughts on this. First, trying to put my own spin on what the masters have done before is a great way to hone my craft. Second, let’s be realistic. With eight billion people on this planet, the majority of whom now walk around with cameras in their pockets, the chances of me coming up with anything original are minuscule. Even if I do come up with an original idea, it’s likely that other people are coming up with the same idea simultaneously.

In such an environment, it makes more sense simply to revel in cliché. Own it. Roll around in it like a pig in mud.

Categories
Street Photography

The Migraine Dress

A woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress.
Woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress

I get migraine headaches. They are textbook classic migraine headaches. Most of the time, they follow the same pattern. First, I see a hole. A spot goes missing from my visual field. Maybe I’m reading, and as I move my eyes from left to right, the words on the right disappear as I shift my gaze. It’s as if all the words tumble into a black hole. Or maybe I reach for something and I notice that my hand has disappeared. It’s an odd feeling to lose track of your body parts.

Next up are the fortification hallucinations, jagged lines shaped like the parapets of a medieval fort, but unlike fortifications, these lines shimmer, and they’re lit up like electric arc lights. When the fortification hallucinations start, the whole world lights up and quivers. The woman’s dress shown above, looks a lot like the start of a migraine headache. Clearly, this woman does NOT suffer from migraine headaches; if she did, she would avoid this dress like the plague.

These preliminary stages are called the aura. There is speculation that they are the source of stories about poltergeists. Many people, myself included, report an extraordinary sensitivity to sounds and strange auditory sensations. While this is probably caused by a sudden rush of blood through the ear drums, I can understand how premodern migraine sufferers might have thought they were hearing ghosts. At the same time, I experience a taste/smell of icy mintiness. And let’s not forget about the numbness that typically affects my left hand and the left side of my face (because the migraine headache affects the right side of my brain).

Of all the preliminary stages, my favourite is transient aphasia which typically lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. I use the word favourite loosely. It’s such a weird experience to hear words inside my head but find myself unable to communicate them. The experience makes me feel horribly for those (like Bruce Willis) who have permanent aphasia because of a brain trauma or progressive dementia.

On a couple of occasions, I have had a journal close at hand when I happen to be entering the aphasic stage of migraine and so, as an experiment, I have recorded whatever happens to enter my head as I pass into and out of my aphasic state. The results are odd and I have shared them on my other site, nouspique.com.

Then comes the headache proper. Most of the time, medication keeps the worst of it at bay. But there are times when nothing helps. It feels like somebody has taken knitting needles and a hammer and has pounded the needles up my nostrils through my brain and out the top of my head. The next day, it feels like I have a hangover from the bender of the century.

Why would anyone wear a dress that looks like that?