Author: David Barker

Categories
Street Photography

Saying goodbye to a month of candid photography

Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto. The woman wears a bright red dress, the man wears a baby blue suit. Both are blessed with ample buttocks.
Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto

This is the final post in a series of candid photos that ushered us through the month of April. This is by no means the last word on the matter given that the possibilities for candid photography are as varied and as interesting as the people on this planet.

As I see it, there are only two circumstances in which I run out of candid photos. The unlikely circumstance is that the government passes legislation prohibiting this kind of photography. At least in Canada, this is improbable because the ability to photograph in public is intimately tied to constitutionally protected conduct. One day, we might become the creatures of an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel constrained by constitutional principles. Trump could get re-elected and decide, like his buddy Putin, to invade a neighbouring country. But until such a day arrives, I view the opportunities for candid photography as limitless.

The more likely circumstance that could put an end to my candid shooting is that deep fakes become so widespread they render photography meaningless. I see that a year old video of Bill Gates sporting breast implants has retrended on Twitter. Snopes declares that the video is digitally altered, but debunking it isn’t enough to make it go away. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more unreliable our digital ecosystem becomes in its documentation of the real world, the less likely we are to believe anything is true.

As people assume digital manipulation as their default approach to online images, those like me who make such images will move on to other kinds of image making. Maybe we’ll manufacture backdrops for dystopian sci-fi virtual reality games. Or we’ll produce animal porn. But it’s a losing game. In time, even these specialized areas will be taken over by AI image-making engines.

Eventually, we old-school documentary photographers will grow old and tell tall tales of the amazing and improbable things we’ve seen. No one will believe us, of course. Anything we’ve seen, AI can do better. So we’ll drink ourselves into oblivion instead.

Categories
Street Photography

Health Care Worker on the way to his next shift

Health care worker in hospital greens crosses the street
Health Care Worker heads to Saint Michael's Hospital, Toronto

Throughout the pandemic, my wife has been able to work from home. But every so often she has to go into the office to handle something that can’t be handled virtually. She’s required to carry a laptop with her wherever she goes, but it’s heavy, so I serve as her personal pack mule. I walk down with her early in the morning, carrying her laptop and my camera gear, then I go on from there with a morning photo walk.

Back in the spring of 2020, when we first started doing this, the downtown streets were all but empty. There was no traffic coming into the downtown core and the only pedestrians were either essential workers or, oddly enough, street photographers like me documenting the emptiness. I caught this health care worker arriving for a morning shift at St. Michael’s Hospital as we were standing at the Queen/Victoria intersection. I note the Blue Jays baseball hat, a reminder of a life outside the job even as the job was beginning to overwhelm our health care workers.

Do you remember how, every evening at 7:30 pm, people leaned out their windows and banged on pots and pans to celebrate the dedication of front line workers? When did that stop? It seems our energy petered out, maybe falling victim to Covid fatigue. Two years on, it strikes me that our front line workers need the celebration and encouragement more than ever. Instead, they have to deal with a government that dickers over trivial wage increases. They have to confront incessant denialism and disinformation from a subculture of ignoramuses. And, because so many end up exposed to Covid-19, they find themselves understaffed and unable to deliver the level of care to which they are committed.

I suspect the best way we can support health care workers is to do our best to ensure that we don’t need their services. That way, they are free to offer their services to those who truly need them. That’s my subtle way of saying: wear a damned mask when you’re indoors, self-isolate when you’re sick, and take all other prophylactic measures you possibly can.

Categories
Street Photography

Is that a bullhorn? Or are you just happy to see me?

A man with a bullhorn walks down the sidewalk with a man carrying a flag.
Man with Bullhorn, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Early in the pandemic, before I had figured out that anti-vaxx anti-mask anti-government anti-everything protesters were meeting every Saturday to stage their little marches, I would see people scurrying along the sidewalk who seemed out of place. For one thing, they were walking with purpose. Nobody walks with purpose on a Saturday in downtown Toronto except if it involves shopping. But these were no shoppers. I didn’t understand then that they were rushing to their rallying point where they would get themselves whipped into a frenzy before they took their message to the streets. For another thing, they came in their dozens with flags and signs and bullhorns. What good is a message if you can’t shout it loud to a shopping public?

Ah, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the basic freedoms that buttress a healthy democracy. Even though I vehemently disagree with these people, and even though I think their notions of civic engagement have all the subtlety of a collision with a planet-sized asteroid, I celebrate these moments. They remind me that I share these basic freedoms and, if I so choose, I can stand on a street corner and speak my mind without reprisal. They also remind me that, as part of the social contract, it is my responsibility to ensure that these people feel free enough to continue without reprisal as well.

My daughter went through a stage where she would ask me what things I grew up with that we don’t have anymore. Typically, I would answer with things like rotary phones and vinyl. If I had thought more closely on it, I might have flipped her question on its head and told her about things that didn’t exist then that exist now. Social media would top the list and, with it, certain ideas about civic engagement that have changed since we all became so attached to our iPhones. In particular, I am mindful of cancel culture, an idea that didn’t exist when I was my daughter’s age.

Forget for a minute that cancel culture is something people on the left do to people on the right or vice versa. Instead, abstract yourself from specific political leanings and view cancel culture as a structural problem. When people complain that they have been cancelled, they are telling us that they have been deplatformed. They still enjoy their freedoms; they just have no way to enjoy them. A classic example from 2021 was Twitter’s decision to cancel Donald Trump’s account. We’ve encountered similar events on a smaller scale closer to home. When anti-vaxx protesters tried to enter Toronto’s CF Eaton Centre, private security personnel enforced a mask requirement and prevented them from entering. It seems almost an incidental fact that Toronto police arrested two protesters for assaulting the personnel.

Both incidents illustrate that the constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms that safeguard a democracy apply only to the relationship between citizens and the state. They aren’t binding upon private enterprise. Twitter owes nothing to Donald Trump. Cadillac Fairview owes nothing to the shoppers (or protesters) who enter its premises.

The problem with a world where civic engagement happens increasingly in privatized spaces (especially privatized virtual spaces) is that it is increasingly vulnerable to cancellation. Democracies, and the political thought that underpins them, hasn’t been able to keep up with this strange shift.

But I assure you, me and my camera will be there, tracking the moat that protects our ever-dwindling freedoms.

Categories
City Life

Photographing People Photographing Paintings in Museums

A man raises a camera over his head and photographs a painting in the Louvre museum.
Photographing Paintings, Musée du Louvre, Paris

I suppose you’re going to call me a philistine or a dilettante because I go to museums not to look at the works of art but to look at the people looking at the works of art. And maybe you’re right. But to my mind, people are infinitely more interesting than works of art, especially if those works of art are hundreds of years old and commissioned by powerful people or institutions as a way to celebrate the fact that their social station granted them such power. In polite moments, I’d call this tautological; in blunter moments, I’d call this masturbatory.

Now, we hang these works in galleries that are accessible to humbler sorts like you and me, but in a way the message remains the same. We allow these paintings to persuade us that there is an official Art with a capital “A” that is worthy and valuable, and then there is the pedestrian stuff that humbler sorts like you and me produce that, however, compelling, is not so valuable.

We come into the presence of these works like travellers on a religious pilgrimage, and we abase ourselves before them mostly by photographing them as a sign of our absolute belief that nothing could be a worthier subject matter for our cameras. Outside these walls there may be people and traffic and gardens and birds winging through the sky, but who are we to decide that such things deserve our attention? We are mere worms, unable to decide for ourselves what is beautiful or stirring.

To be honest, I have no idea what people are thinking when they whip out their cameras in the Louvre. All I know is what I am thinking when I catch them in the act. I laugh and cringe in equal measures.

People with iPhones crowd around the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre museum trying to take selfies with the famous portrait.
You’d be smiling too, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Categories
Street Photography

What’s more important? Staying fit? Or performing fitness?

A young couple go for a morning run and their image is reflected in a store window as they round the corner.
Out for a Morning Run on Balmuto Street at Bloor, Toronto

I hate exercise. I’m not particularly fit, but I live in a building with a gym and so, in order to get my money’s worth from my common expense fees, I visit it at least 3 times a week. The sound of my bones creaking confirms to me that I’m still alive.

I’m glad my building has a gym. A regular gym wouldn’t let someone like me be a member. I think it was Nietzsche who first articulated the gym paradox. He adapted it from Schopenhauer’s haute couture paradox: they won’t let you into a fancy clothing store unless you are wearing fancy clothes, but how can you be wearing fancy clothes in the first instance if they won’t let you in to buy them? In Nietzsche’s version, they only let you into the gym if you look fit enough to belong to a gym, but how can you look fit enough in the first instance if they won’t let you join to become fit? Is it any wonder most of us sit on the couch in sweat pants and hoover potato chips?

When it comes to exercise, I think I have mixed motives. Like everyone else, I claim that I exercise for the sake of my personal health. But in rare moments of self-reflection, I discover that it’s more complicated than that. The real reason I exercise is to “earn” the right to eat a bag of chips or drink a bottle of wine by burning an equivalent number of calories. Or, since exercise comes after the fact, it’s more like doing penance. In fact, there are deeply religious overtones to my exercise: “Forgive me, rowing machine, for I have sinned. It’s been a full week since my last session.”

I’m self-conscious and grateful every time I visit the gym and find I’m the only one there. Sometimes I choose odd hours on purpose so I can avoid what I imagine are the judgmental stares of all the buff and beautiful people. But I’m convinced that an extraverted subset of the exercising public is motivated by a need to perform exercise. It’s not good enough just to be fit; it’s important to be seen to be fit. That means working out in high-visibility settings. That means wearing the “correct” clothing with expensive brands that declare a financial commitment to the enterprise. Most important of all, that means wearing headbands.

Categories
Street Photography

Casually Strolling Down the Street in a Gorilla Suit

Man in gorilla suit walks down Kensington Avenue, Toronto

Sometimes when I’m out and about (yes, I’m Canadian and I don’t say oot and aboot), I play a game of photography scavenger hunt. I keep a mental list of things I’d like to photograph should the opportunity arise. Examples include: 1) middle-aged men wearing argyle socks and sandals; 2) looters smashing a store window; 3) a woman landing a slap; 4) a dog pooping on a religious tract; 5) a car at the moment of impact as it careens into a utility pole.

But if I included: 6) a random guy walking down the street in a gorilla suit, I guarantee you I would never in a million years get that shot. The only way I could get the gorilla suit shot would be to hire someone. But I never included the gorilla suit shot on my photography scavenger hunt list, so the gorilla appeared quite naturally and I seized the moment.

Lists are fine, I guess, but they don’t do me any good if they distract me from the strangeness of the world I encounter with every step. With a tip of the hat to Yogi Berra, I see a lot just by looking. And if a guy in a gorilla suit happens to appear, strolling casually down the road, then who am I to deny my camera the opportunity to make the shot?

Categories
Street Photography

What’s The Point?

City News at Bloor Street east of Yonge in Toronto

If I’m out on a photo walk and I see reporters, my first instinct is to suppose that something interesting is happening; I should keep my eyes open for opportunities. But when the news reporter is wearing pastels, I know he’s never going to report anything of substance. The most I can expect is school children showcasing new dance moves. Or the release of a new line of cosmetics. Or tips on how to avoid pigeon shit. That’s not to say there’s nothing of visual interest for me to shoot; only that I’ll have to look somewhere else to find it.

In this case, the visual interest lies in the news people themselves. They look as if they’ve just teleported to this corner and are trying to get their bearings. The cameraman is pointing to the west as if to say: Look! That’s west. The reporter (or the personality, or whatever he is) says: Well if that’s west, then which way’s east?

To be honest, I feel sorry for media personalities. They face horrible discrimination, especially the white blonde ones on Fox News. Much of that discrimination has arisen thanks to comedic Fascists like Will Farrell whose Ron Burgundy suggests that news personalities are vapid ciphers. If I had more money, I’d create a charitable foundation that provides support for the victims of such discrimination. Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity no matter where they score on the Human Vapidity Index (HVI), which is a real measure, at least in my own mind.

Whatever’s happening in this photograph, we can see clearly that it’s happening somewhere else. That’s the point of the pointing. There’s something to the west. What is it? Godzilla? Lady Boadecia riding naked on a horse? People wearing last year’s fashions? We’ll never know, but at least we have the consolation of our overactive imaginations.

Categories
Street Photography

Split Perspective

Front & Bay, Toronto

During the pandemic I have noticed a rise in conversations about the benefits of mindfulness meditation practice. I’m skeptical of those people who claim they use it to be more focused, more awake, more aware, more attentive, more directed. As the proud owner of a monkey mind, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to focus attention. My monkey mind isn’t unique; I think everyone has a monkey mind and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

People talk about staring at a candle flame and achieving a state of perfect concentration. They then take that state with them from their meditation to think great thoughts, imagine cutting edge technology, implement never before heard of investment strategies, write Man Booker winning novels, and calculate in their heads the trajectory of the next mission to Mars.

I try. Honestly, I do. But my monkey mind keeps hopping around. There are bills to pay. Stupid conversations to replay in my mind. Infuriating comments on social media that won’t go away. Ear worms from the latest music. An itch on the back between my shoulder blades.

I’m inclined to think the mindfulness meditation narrative, or at least the one that’s pitched to us by the oversimplifying media, is grossly unfair. It presents us with an impossible ideal: a perfect focus that is supposed to unlock astonishing creative potential. Although I’m no expert when it comes to human cognition (if you discount the fact that I engage it every second of my life), I suspect that we can’t help but entertain a split perspective. Part of us lives in the moment while, simultaneously, another part of us detaches from our present self and looks down on us, observing and commenting on that part of us that lives in the moment. This is our monkey mind and we can’t help but give it free play.

I’m an advocate of a far less utilitarian mindfulness, one that puts no stock in achieving a perfect focus, and concerns itself instead with loving kindness, starting with the self. It forgives us for failing to meet impossible standards. We are a monkey mind people. Consciousness is a necessarily fragmented state. We are present both within and without it. We do, and at the same time we narrate our doing.

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photos: Public Displays of Affection

Bloor/Yonge Intersection, Toronto

I’ve gone two years now without capturing a single shot of physical closeness. With masks and social distancing and self-isolation, people have grown suspicious of personal contact. So when I stood at a busy intersection just as two friends (who obviously hadn’t seen one another since the pandemic began) screamed hello and hugged one another, it seemed almost shocking. They rushed into one another’s arms and clung to one another.

I happened to be standing two steps to the left. At first, it felt awkward, like I was privy to the most intimate moment that had ever passed between two people since hugging was invented. Then I shook my head, like I might shake off a bad dream, and reminded myself that this is the sort of thing people used to do all the time. I reminded myself, too, that unabashed affection in a public space is fair game for street photography. By the time this last thought occurred to me, the moment had almost passed. I raised my camera and captured the tail end of a long embrace that had been two years in the making.

We are forgetful creatures and treat Covid-19 like it’s the first time we’ve ever experienced such a crisis. But it wasn’t long ago that we faced SARS, another novel coronavirus. And before that, there was HIV/AIDS, a global pandemic that remains with us to this day. A generation ago, I lost friends and family to AIDS-related complications. In the intervening years, we’ve forgotten how HIV/AIDS changed physical intimacy.

Before people understood how HIV was transmitted, people refused to touch others especially if they thought those others were gay. (Some were even afraid to sit on toilet seats for fear of contracting the “gay disease.”) When it comes to physical intimacy, the enduring (science-based) legacy of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the use of condoms during sexual intimacy between non-exclusive partners. When infectious disease experts were able to dispel the misinformation and provide better information about transmission, people resumed their public displays of affection. Kissing on street corners, bear hugs, these things started up again, just as they will as Covid-19 plays out.

Categories
Street Photography

Itching for a Pint

PJ O'Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto

Nearly 25 years ago, I woke with a start in the middle of the night with an excruciating itchiness on my back and shoulders, calves, forearms, even my earlobes. In particular, my palms drove me out of my gourd and I starting doing this thing where the fingers of each hand scratched the opposing palm. This worked fine until I started to draw blood. I stood in the shower to ease the itching. I slathered myself in different lotions. I lay on my back and shimmied around the bedroom floor. Nothing worked to ease the itchiness.

A couple days later I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a dermatologist. It was a high-rent location and all the other “patients” in the waiting room looked as if they were there for their latest botox injection. When the dermatologist saw my back, he made his colleagues drop everything and come in for a look. Then he asked me if I’d be willing to put myself on display for grand rounds at Women’s College Hospital. This was the most exciting thing he’d seen all week. My back was a grade A teaching opportunity.

A biopsy confirmed that I had DH or dermatitis herpetiformis. Celiac disease typically manifests as a gastro-intestinal problem but for a subset of celiacs it produces skin lesions. For some, it’s both. Essentially, it’s an autoimmune disorder and, despite the fact that itchiness doesn’t sound like much of a problem, prolonged itchiness is bloody excruciating. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect the CIA to use in Guantanamo. The solution is to avoid foods containing gluten. This isn’t some kind of lifestyle new-age fad diet; this is necessary to keep people from going absolutely bonkers.

And so I changed my diet. I shifted from a wheat-based Western diet to a rice-based Asian diet, not so difficult since my wife is Tamiko. However, it also meant I had to stop drinking beer. Guinness was out of the question.

That explains a moment of wistfulness as I was walking down Leader Lane past the PJ O’Brien Pub and watched a woman retouching the pint of Guinness on the side of their building. Recently, I went to Ireland with friends and, while everyone else drank Guinness, I ordered pints of Bulmers (Magners) cider. I remember the smell of the drinks to either side of me. The frothy heads. The thick opacity. If drinking beer were a carnivorous act, drinking Guinness would be the equivalent of eating a buffalo steak charred black on a grill.

Then I remembered the itching and the moment of wistfulness vanished.

A woman retouches a painting of a pint of Guinness on the wall of the P.J. O'Brian Pub in Toronto.
PJ O’Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto
Categories
City Life

A Day at the Museum

People gaze at an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum while the skull of a triceratops looks on.

In the dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, two visitors gaze into a glass display cabinet. I notice how the skeleton of a triceratops, suspended from the ceiling, is reflected in the glass of the cabinet. Two heads from the late Cretaceous period gaze at two heads from the early Anthropocene period, spanning a gap of 65 million years. Through the window, blurred in the background, is a new condominium residence on the north side of Bloor Street West, a typical sight as the urban population here intensifies. The triceratops skulls give the impression they are whispering secrets to the human visitors, maybe imparting a little of what they know about extinction.

Roughly 65 million years ago, in an event known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, a series of meteorites slammed into the planet, triggering an impact winter that killed 75% of all life on Earth including all dinosaurs. The upside is that this catastrophe created the conditions for mammals to thrive and ultimately evolve into homo sapiens. This is an upside from the point of view of homo sapiens; if we could interview cows domesticated for milk production, we might get a different opinion on the matter.

The idea of the Anthropocene is that humans have made an indelible mark on the geological record. As it has done in the past, the Earth could undergo a radical transformation, whether by asteroids or earthquakes or continental drift, yet none of that would be sufficient to erase the changes we have wrought upon the face of the planet. The lingering question is whether the idea of the Anthropocene is necessarily tied to a human-triggered 6th mass extinction. It is conceivable that we could leave an indelible mark without destroying ourselves and most other species in the process.

As a realist (depressingly so, at times), I’m inclined to think that Earth’s 6th mass extinction is already well underway. As with the K-T Mass Extinction, the event we have triggered will create fresh opportunities for new species to evolve. Maybe some of these new species will enjoy sentient self-awareness or, better yet, sentient self-aware wisdom. Imagine the rise of a hyper-intelligent dung beetle, or gnats that coalesce to form a collective consciousness. After another 65 million years, they might come to dominate the planet. They will build museums with a “Human” exhibit as an object lesson in how not to live. Giant dung beetles will gaze into cabinets at samples of teeth and fossilized fingernails while overhead, suspended from the ceiling and gazing down on them, are ancient human skeletons: the fossil record of a spectacularly unsuccessful species.

Categories
City Life

Where Does Grease Go?

Pumping Grease, Yonge & Wellesley, Toronto

There are many things about the modern world I don’t understand. The restaurant business is one of those things. When the guy comes to pump all the grease out of the fryer, where does it go? Yes, it goes through a hose and into a tank on the back of a truck. But what happens after that? How does he dispose of it? This is one of life’s mysteries.

I don’t have an answer to my question, but I do have an imagination, which means that the lack of an answer is no great impediment. I wonder, for example, if maybe the cooking grease gets sold to manufacturers who turn it into capsules that get resold to health food stores as the latest omega epsilon z.27 rejuvenation regimen. Why not? We already do worse. Slaughterhouses sell cow hooves to make gummy bears. (Why do they never make gummy cows?)

It reminds me of a pair of decorative elephants that sit on a shelf in my living room. I inherited them from a great uncle. They revolt me, but I feel compelled to keep them close at hand as reminder of what a monumentally stupid species we are. The elephants are carved from ebony but the tusks are ivory. Real ivory. In other words, somebody killed an elephant to provide some of the materials to produce a decorative figure of an elephant. Somebody cut down a utter miracle to support the creation of mediocre disposable crap.

But that doesn’t help me answer the question at hand.

Do we dump the grease into Lake Ontario? Do we pour it into mine shafts along with the spent fuel rods from our nuclear power stations? Do we store it in rusty barrels and bury them somewhere beneath the tundra? Do we mix the grease into tailing ponds with all the heavy metal by-products from the manufacture of our lithium ion batteries? What? Please tell me. I want to know.

Categories
Street Photography

Unintended Consequences

Negotiating Concrete Barriers, SW corner of Front and Bay

After the Toronto van attack on April 23rd, 2018, when Alek Minassian drove a van down a Yonge Street sidewalk, killing 11 and injuring 15, the city took measures to ensure that such a thing could never happen again. While the city’s motives are laudable—after all, who wouldn’t support measures than ensure public safety?—nevertheless, implementation came with unintended consequences. The most obvious safety measure the city took was to drop concrete barriers at key intersections where there is high pedestrian traffic. Pedestrians could walk through gaps in the barriers, but the barriers were impassable to vehicles.

One key intersection the city identified was Front and Bay Streets where workers in the financial district move to and from Union Station for their daily commute. The intersection is 14 km away from the site of the attack, but I suppose it is best to err on the side of caution. I visited the intersection a week after the attack and observed how people passed through gaps in the concrete barriers. For most people, it was a minor inconvenience. But for others it was a challenge.

I don’t think this unintended consequence is an aberration. I suspect unintended consequences proliferate every time authorities implement prophylactic measures in the name of public safety. Perhaps this is because safety is not an absolute value, but is one of many variables in risk assessment. If we treat it as an absolute value, then all the other variables get thrown out the window.

After 9/11, the United States Government invoked public safety to secure its borders especially where passage across its borders happened by air travel. The measures it implemented soon became the global standard which means that virtually anyone who has traveled by air since September 11th, 2001 has found themselves subjected to these safety measures. Collectively, we have decided that other values, like privacy, sanctity of the person, and personal dignity, do not matter. However, increased surveillance at airports is a contributing factor in the rise of nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiments, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and general feelings of xenophobia. It is a deep irony that security measures have made the world less secure. Unintended consequences.

The global pandemic has produced a strange mirror image of this behaviour. I call it a mirror image because, while the behaviour is similar, it is reversed. One would think that concerns for public safety would motivate political leaders to err on the side of caution, especially given that today’s global political climate is emphatically conservative and conservatism tends to treat public safety as a plank in its law and order platform. But here we are, beginning our 3rd year of a global health crisis, and politicians both locally and around the globe tell us that we need to set aside our concerns for public safety. Other values, like economic prosperity, are more important.

The only thing I am certain of in all this is that unintended consequences will appear. It’s still too soon to say what these consequences will be, but as surely as the world turns, they will rear their pernicious little heads. I guarantee it.

Categories
City Life

A Different Kind of Homeless

Walking south on Bay Street in December, Toronto

A lot of street photography that documents people living on the street is little more than homeless porn, a salacious leering that doesn’t even pass as curiosity. I’m sometimes guilty of this myself as I try to find my way through the ethical quagmires of street photography. A question that often passes through my mind as I’m framing a shot: exploitation? or social commentary? Typically, the answer that returns to me is: a little of both. It’s nigh impossible to do the latter without the former.

Since none of us can ever achieve ethical purity—at least not without allowing our work to devolve into a Disneyfied kitsch—the next question we have to ask ourselves is whether people might nevertheless need to see the images we make. We acknowledge that our hands are dirty. We steel ourselves against the slathering absolutists that run in packs on social media. And we share our images.

It’s early evening in December of 2019. People carry on with their holiday office parties. There are vague reports of a mysterious new virus. But the outbreaks are on the other side of the globe. It has nothing to do with us. I’m walking up Bay Street toward King, the heart of Toronto’s financial district. A young suit is walking my way, probably on his way to Union Station after an office party. Despite the snow piled around the utility pole, he’s feeling warm. Maybe he’s had a couple of cocktails. He’s ditched the tie, an open neck in freezing weather. The young can get away with that sort of thing.

The suit passes a homeless person in a sleeping bag laid across a warm steam vent. The suit doesn’t appear to notice the sleeping bag. He sidesteps it the same way he’d sidestep a lump of dog shit, all while keeping his gaze straight ahead. He’s pulling a smart phone from his pocket, maybe to text his buddies, meet up for another drink.

This is what I call a high contrast photo. It’s not high contrast in the technical sense, the juxtaposition of strong shadows and bright lights. It’s high contrast in the social sense, and that contrast will only grow more pronounced as the distant virus settles in closer to home. The suit will be fine. He’ll work from home for a few months, recoup his losses one way or another. As for the person sleeping on the vent, all our talk of resilience in the face of adversity won’t much help, will it?

Categories
Street Photography

There’s what I shoot, and then there’s what I really shoot

Marvelous by Fred Pastries, Queen Street West, Toronto

It often happens, especially when I’m doing street photography, that I shoot something that happens in the blink of an eye. Somebody does something. A fleeting movement. Or a brief interaction. If I don’t respond quickly, the moment will vanish. Later, when I’m processing the image, I have time to examine it and realize that while I was making the shot, there was a lot happening in the frame that I missed.

I’m walking along Queen Street West when I pass the window of Marvelous by Fred Pastries. A woman in white uniform and white mask is making a confection. Before she has a chance to notice me watching her, before she has a chance to ruin the moment by posing, I raise my camera and take a burst of images. I’m wholly fixed on the way she holds her knife poised above whatever it is she’s preparing.

Only later do I notice everything else in the frame. The reflection of the man passing behind me on the sidewalk. The customers in the background. The colleague talking to someone outside the frame. And the chandelier! Really, I think this photograph is all about the chandelier. In this context, its extravagance strikes me as absurd. Why had I not noticed it when I was framing the shot?

In this age of corporate mindfulness and new-age Buddha-speak, people make a lot of noise about the importance of being awake. The idea of being fully awake is lifted straight from Gautama, the Buddha, as reported by his contemporary followers. I review an image like this and say to myself: “If only I had been fully awake, I would have noticed the reflection, the customers, the colleague, the chandelier.” I scold myself for not being observant enough. After all, I’m the guy with the camera; I’m supposed to be observant.

But there is an upside to being unobservant. Especially in the city, there is a feeling that everything is coming at me all at once. The sights and sounds of the street, the roar of the traffic, the screams of the sirens, all of it ratcheted up another degree by the tiny metal computer in my pocket, with its social media feeds pushing the latest horrors from around the world. If I’m too awake, I risk feeling overwhelmed. It feels to me as if it might be a healthy defense against overwhelm to pass at least some of my time in a state of somnolence. This may be in line with another Buddhist practice: loving kindness. As an act of loving kindness to myself, I allow myself, at least from time to time, to be oblivious to what is going on around me.