Categories
Street Portrait

Curiosity

A woman with a heavily tattooed arm, and wearing strong makeup and a hairnet, sits in Toronto's High Park.

Curiosity is a mental posture worth cultivating in the pursuit of street photography. There is something to be said for revisiting the mind of a three year old and asking Why? Why? Why? wherever we turn our gaze.

I’m not a Roman Catholic, but curiosity has led me to delve into Roman Catholic theology. I am particularly taken by the writings of the Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, whose monumental work, Insight, rests on a simple observation: all human beings are born with an unrestricted desire to know. Curiosity.

For Lonergan, curiosity is the default condition of human consciousness. At one time or another, virtually all of us stray from that default condition, pulled by what he describes as distortions in our thinking. Many of these distortions happen because of the socializing process we call growing up. Adulthood has many things to commend it, but sometimes its demands can stifle curiosity.

Street photography (or any photography for that matter) can be a wonderful antidote to the dangers of growing up. It stimulates curiosity by encouraging us to look at our world in fresh ways. This is especially important when we encounter people as the subjects of our photographs. Curiosity pushes us to see beyond those habits that distort our seeing, habits like the impulse to judge and the entrenchment of personal bias. Curiosity demands that we see the more that rests inside each person we encounter.

Alongside curiosity, I find a delight in difference. This delight doesn’t find expression in a salacious voyeurism: look at this strangeness I’ve captured. Instead, it’s more an expression of relief. It’s such a relief that people don’t look or think like me. What a dull and narrow world that would be!

Categories
Street Portrait

Handling Dark Skin in Post-processing Software

Candid street portrait of a Black person wearing decorative earrings.

It’s well-established that film was optimized for light-skinned subjects. Manufacturers dodged allegations of racism by arguing that the principal market for film was light-skinned purchasers. They were simply meeting demand. If racism accounted for the fact that there was less demand from dark-skinned purchasers, that was a social problem. Not something that companies like Eastman Kodak could do anything about.

Except that they could. Part of the problem was that white photographers were complacent and simply assumed there was some immutable technical reason why film was the way it was. A notable exception came in 1977 when Jean-Luc Godard went on assignment in Mozambique and refused to use Kodak film.

It turns out manufacturers could address the issue if given the right incentive. For example, the vintage ID-2 Polaroid camera came with a boost that enhanced the flash by 42% which is exactly the additional level of light that black skin absorbs. The reason for the boost was to meet the requirements of the South African government. At that time, the apartheid regime required Blacks to carry a passbook and the photographs had to accurately reflect the skin colour of the subjects. It seems manufacturers were happy to meet the demands of apartheid but not the demands of a Black family trying to make a photo album.

Despite claims that the shift to digital photography has solved the problem, that isn’t universally true. Facial recognition algorithms have a persistent problem accurately detecting darker skinned faces. And since the principal function of these algorithms is to assist law enforcement and border controls, current shortcomings continue to promote the racial biases historically embedded in these roles.

For an individual photographer, or even someone wielding an iPhone, post-processing apps have made it easy to accurately correct for different skin tones. In my own work flow, I rely on programs like Lightroom and Nik Effects. There are still challenges, especially when people with radically different skin tone appear in the same frame. For the time being, I have adopted the practice of optimizing for the person with the darkest skin. It’s a bit like the practice news agencies have adopted of capitalizing the word Black. It’s one small step on a path to right relations.

Categories
City Life

Doors Open or Closed?

Gritty door with a sign on it that says: Stan's Pizza
Side door to pizzeria, Cumberland St N and Tupper St, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In my marriage, there are certain areas of domestic life that are subject to battles of the will.

For example, there is the question of cleaning the toilet. My wife insists that because I cause the greater mess, it’s my responsibility to clean it. I have suggested that we should take a more global approach to domestic cleaning. By way of illustration, I point out that I routinely wash the floor even though my wife does half the walking on it.

As an experiment, I’ve tried to measure my wife’s stubbornness as expressed in days without cleaning the toilet. Ordinarily, she is fastidious about these things (she absolutely refuses to use portable toilets and outhouses), but it turns out she’s not as fastidious as she is stubborn. We could go for decades without cleaning our toilet because she insists absolutely that it’s my job. It’s a matter of principle.

We have a similar battle of wills when it comes to our bedroom door. When I’m in the bedroom, the door must be shut. My wife doesn’t care.

My insistence on a shut door has nothing to do with fear or anxiety. I don’t worry that urban ninjas are going to break into our house and storm the keep. It’s more a symbolic matter. I need a sense of enclosure. Completeness. An open door is ambiguous. It allows for a leakage into the wider world.

Intellectually, I enjoy ambiguity. I love to read stories that leave me hanging in indeterminate positions. I love arguments that see-saw on a fulcrum. But as an emotional matter, I can’t abide an open door.

My wife is the opposite. If she watches a movie, she likes it when all the story lines come to clean resolutions. Art house films drive her bonkers. But as an emotional matter, she’s comfortable with open doors and the leakages they imply.

I’ve noticed lately that if I let the toilet go for a few weeks, I wake up in the morning and find that the bedroom door has been left wide open all night. And so the battle rages.

Categories
Street Photography

The Naked Truth

A man stands naked on a busy street corner.
Butt naked at the intersection of Church & Bloor, Toronto

I could stand butt naked (or is it buck naked? I’m never sure) on a busy street corner, and nobody would notice.

That seems to be the way it is for me. I write. I photograph. I create. But I attract very little attention to myself.

In the world at large, it seems as if people are scrabbling over one another for attention. Despite talk about cancel culture and deplatforming, never have so many of us had so much access to tools designed to amplify our voices. In fact, our apparent anxiety about cancel culture and deplatforming implies that we regard widespread attention as a right. We have the right to develop a personal brand. We have the right to carry media studios in our pockets to promote that brand. We have the right to be famous.

I regard myself as a bit contrarian and, certainly when it comes to digital culture, I feel like I’m forever walking into a serious headwind. Still, I feel that my time has come. No, I don’t think I’m on the cusp of becoming famous. Only that I’m better prepared for an inevitable and impending oblivion.

In her Norton Lectures: Spending The War Without You, Laurie Anderson has this to say about our creative impulses:

We’re also the first humans who face the possibility, some say the probability, of our own extinction. And we’re the first humans who are trying to find the words for this. But here’s the thing about stories. A story is usually something you tell to somebody else. And if you’re telling a story to nobody, is it still a story? And this is our awesome job. We are the first humans to try to do this: to tell a story to nobody.

I’ve pulled the quote from the second of the CBC Ideas broadcasts starting at 36:20.

Laurie Anderson gives me hope because she makes it clear that I’ve devoted my whole life to the bleeding edge of our latest (ultimate?) cultural trend: I’m seasoned in the art of telling stories to nobody. I have no expectation of fame or even of a modest reputation, and I have no confidence in a posterity to receive my creations.

That isn’t as depressing as it sounds. It’s simply to note that I act on interior motivations. I do what I do because I have to. Obsession. Compulsion. Call it what you will. I prefer to think that I am motivated by the immediate pleasure I feel at the very moment of creation. It is a quiet and private satisfaction and it is enough.

Categories
Street Photography

Feeling Down

A man stands naked on a street corner and stares down at his schlong.
Toronto Pride, Church & Bloor St E

While yesterday’s post concerned bodily autonomy in the face of state power, today’s post concerns the related matter of photographic autonomy in the face of media power. Ironically, most contemporary public conversations happen on media platforms that are privately own. These are the virtual equivalent of POPS or “Privately Owned Public Spaces.” The problem with POPS is that, although they feel public, the usual constitutional protections, like freedom of expression, don’t apply. Private ownership means that the owners of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Telegram and Tik Tok and YouTube get to regulate whatever happens on their respective platforms and nobody gets a say. All those arcane clauses in your TOS or EULA documents, those are the law of the land.

In Instagramistan, for example, nudity is pretty much verboten. Assuming you can reach a real person there, you can argue with them until you’re blue in the face about artistic merit or breast feeding or innocent incidental nudity. It doesn’t matter. Their decision is final and there is no further recourse.

This means that nudity as speech, nudity as a way to change hearts and minds, nudity as protest, can’t even get a foothold on these platforms much less convey a message. (Some platforms, like Twitter, don’t regulate nudity, but that could change if/when Elon Musk assumes ownership.) Never mind that nudity as speech has a long and venerable tradition, from King David dancing in his ephod and flipping his schlong (think Scotsmen dancing at a ceilidh) to Lady Godiva protesting oppressive taxation to the Doukhobors in Canada who protested, well, just about everything.

In the context of Pride, public nudity may be celebration, it may be foreplay, it may be strategy, it may be a lot of things. It may also be an assertion of the simple fact that embodiment is fundamental to human experience. Not just queer human experience. All human experience. And attempts to regulate how we talk about embodiment often infantilize important aspects of that experience, like the joyful gift of sexual pleasure, the mystery of its genderedness, and its many frailties that usher us to our deaths.

This is one of the reasons I maintain my own private domain. It’s a fallback. Here, at least, in my own space, I can do my modest part to push back against the ridiculous prudery of Instagram and Facebook.

Categories
Street Photography

Bodily Autonomy

Two naked women walk down the middle of a busy street.
Walking Down Church Street, Toronto

As often happens, noisy news from the US drowns out what’s happening in my own back yard. With the May 2nd leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, talk about abortion rights has formed a tsunami of toxic discourse that has washed over the border and threatens to sweep away Canada’s quieter conversational habits.

Then June arrives with Pride and I’m reminded that conversation in one sphere doesn’t happen in isolation, but leaks into other spheres. To the extent that abortion laws concern themselves with matters of bodily autonomy, their language and reasoning ends up contributing to conversations about sexuality, gender and identity, too. To what extent does the state have an interest in the bodies of its citizens? And how far can it go in asserting its interest? These are questions that we can ask in nearly every sphere of public engagement.

Taking a long view of history, we can be forgiven for thinking there is a general trend that favours bodily autonomy. We have shifted away from the view that treats the body as property. Feudalism and indentured servitude give way to natural rights theory. Humans have a transcendent quality that eludes bondage, or so goes the narrative. We abolish slavery. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in women which means that women are not subject to masculine authority. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in people who express their sexuality differently. And so it goes.

Until it doesn’t.

I find it odd that the pro-life crowd lean to the libertarian end of the political spectrum. A rational person who enjoys coherence in their public conversation might expect a libertarian to favour bodily autonomy. I guess we shouldn’t expect coherence from people who call themselves pro-life while renewing their NRA memberships. As a famous American poet once said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” It seems an incidental fact that the poet in question was also gay.

If we are to be consistent, we should also reinstate laws that criminalize suicide since those laws were premised on the view (from feudal times) that suicide is an offence against the state because the body exists by right of the state. We abolished such laws because they were cruel. That was the same motivation for the abolition of abortion laws. But these days people seem inured to cruelty. For the sake of consistency, maybe we should abolished compassion altogether and be done with it.

Categories
Street Photography

People Not Doing Things

A man offers a pamphlet to a passer-by who ignores him completely.
Pamphleting in Dundas Square, Toronto

There is a kind of street photograph that I try to avoid at all costs. It’s the “catch whatever’s walking down the sidewalk” photograph. People being people. People going to work. People going home from work. People waiting for the light to change. People walking at night. People walking in the morning. People walking in dull light. People walking in bright light.

Yawn.

I prefer to capture people engaged in interactions either with other people or with their environment. People kissing people. People yelling at people. People avoiding puddles. People protesting things that make them angry. People spray painting messages on walls.

In the first case, I could photograph a cardboard cutout on the sidewalk and you wouldn’t be able to say for certain whether it was a flesh-and-blood person or a poster from the print shop. In the second case, my photograph would capture a dramatic encounter impossible to replicate no matter how many times I revisited the scene.

However, every rule has its exceptions, as does the rule about photographing people only when they’re engaged in interactions. In today’s photograph, a man offers a pamphlet to a passing woman who emphatically ignores him. This documents a deliberate refusal to engage.

In a way, this encounter typifies all contemporary public discourse. Never have so many people had so much to say. And, thanks to universal literacy and social media, never have so many people had the means to disseminate their messages. At the same time, never have so many people found themselves the unwilling audience for so many messages. Never have so many people felt so overwhelmed by the sheer noise of others exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms.

Increasingly, this dynamic produces an exchange in which one person does their utmost to promote a message while another person, the intended recipient, does their utmost to ignore that message. As Janis Joplin never said: “Freedom’s just another word for making a nuisance of yourself.”

Categories
City Life

Black & White Photos Promote a Feeling of Nostalgia

A man talking on a cell phone walks on wet pavement past the graffiti-covered entrance to the Hotel Waverly.
Hotel Waverly, Spadina just north of College, Toronto

The Hotel Waverly doesn’t exist anymore. Even when it did exist, the word “Hotel” was a generous gesture. It was more like a flophouse. I had thought I’d write a short story someday about a family of tourists on holiday from another country, Germany for instance. Not knowing any better, their travel agent books a suite for the family at the Hotel Waverly. They arrive from the airport to some shock. Hilarity ensues as they share with the locals the German words for such phrases as “crack whore” and “meth-head.” They return to their home in Bonn with bedbugs and STD’s for souvenirs. Alas, I was too slow and a condo developer had demolished the building before I could get around to banging out my story.

Like so much real estate in Toronto, if I blink, it vanishes. While I’m out and about, I make a point of capturing older buildings so that I have personal documentation of what things looked like at that precise instant. It’s astonishing how quickly visual memory fades. Without the help of my photographs, I would soon forget the old buildings, the ones people like to say had character when what they really mean is that they were gross, dirty, and decrepit.

It feels somehow natural to offer these photos as black and white conversions. Black and white signals we are glimpsing a world that no longer exists. Black and white encourages a certain feeling of generosity toward the subject matter, too. However disdainful we snooty middle class types may have felt for the Hotel Waverly in its day, we can forgive its sins now that we look back from a safe distance. Such character!

After a few more years have passed, and we find ourselves growing weary of the endless rows of glass and concrete towers, we note a surge in feelings of nostalgia. The Hotel Waverly was not just a place with character. We realize now that it was somehow integral to the city’s life and personality. Its demolition is a lot like what happens when a senior loses brain mass. Memory grows unstable, and then follows the gradual slide into municipal senescence.

Categories
Street Photography

Pushing back against Susan Sontag: Cozy in Plato’s Cave

Man in tie and overcoat walks past the west entrance of Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel.
York St., West entrance of Fairmont Royal York Hotel

The first essay in Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, is titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I love Sontag’s writing. It does what all good writing should do: it provokes me. It doesn’t try to be my friend; it tries to make me think.

The trope of Plato’s cave—firelit shadows dancing on a wall—suggests the basic mechanisms of photography itself. Instead of firelight, photographers rely on sunlight or flashes; instead of shadows, they capture light reflected from their subjects; and instead of a wall, they cast that light on film or image sensors. Sontag invokes the trope the way clergy tell a parable: it has a didactic purpose. Like the dancing shadows, the reflected light we have captured on our image sensors is a dull likeness of a fuller reality that lies just beyond our apprehension.

But there’s something about Sontag’s tone that troubles me. She expresses her views in extreme terms:

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

I’m troubled by her use of the word all. She lays this down as an absolute law of universal application. She leaves no room for variations in personal experience.

At the end of the essay, she offers another grand pronouncement of universal application:

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

First published in the New York Review of Books nearly 50 years ago, her words have taken on new life in the post Instagram age when people will produce 1.72 trillion photographs in 2022. How prescient! say her admirers. Well. Yes and no.

While I do agree that we are a society of image-junkies, our addiction goes beyond image-making. We are addicted to stimulation: binge-watching Netflix shows, road rage in GTA, Twitter hate-fests, Tik-Tok porn, live-streaming Ukraine gun battles. An image avalanche may well be the least part of our addiction.

What Sontag’s observations may miss 50 years after the fact is that, among the countless motivations for making images, many contemporary image-makers may use the process as a defence against over-stimulation. Like so many others, I answer Sontag’s invitation to turn around in Plato’s cave and stare at the world as it really is, only to find a world so saturated with stimuli that I find myself inundated.

My reality is a media-saturated reality. The only way I can cope with its overwhelm is to turn its tools on itself. I don’t make photographs to colonize the world, or to commodify it, or to fetishize it. I make photographs as a way to throw up a buffer between myself and a fuller reality. I tighten the frame and get rid of the colour to make the buffer more effective. Without that buffer, I would go crazy. I need Plato’s cave. I need the protection it gives me from a version of the real that isn’t interested in my well-being.

Categories
Street Portrait

How does The Amazing Spiderman go to the Bathroom?

Spiderman struggles to line up the eye holes of his mask

Does Spiderman have a fly? (I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.)

But seriously, if Spiderman struggles to find his eye holes, don’t you think he’d struggle even more to find his pee hole? I guess it depends on how desperate he is.

And what happens when Spiderman hits middle age? In the entire 60 year lifespan of the franchise, I don’t think Peter Parker has ever been more than 19 years old, complete with acne and cracking voice. But realistically, I don’t think the spider bite changed the fact that Peter Parker has a prostate gland which, like all prostate glands, enlarges as he ages and correspondingly reduces his storage capacity. By now, he probably needs to whizz every hour or so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his initials are PP.

Assuming Mr. PP does have a pee hole and has no trouble finding it, there’s still the problem of how to handle his equipment without getting sticky webbing all over it. Or maybe that’s not webbing.

Now you know why I never got that second interview for a job at Marvel Comics.

Categories
Street Photography

Plywood Canyon

Woman passes plywood-covered shop windows on Bloor Street. A diagonal shadow terminates at her feet.
Woman Passes Plywood-Covered Shop Windows, Bloor Street, Toronto

I can’t speak to the way things played out in other cities during the pandemic. All I have for a reference is what I observed in Toronto. Based solely on appearances, Toronto looks like any number of large American cities. That’s why, in films, it often serves as a body double for cities like New York and Chicago. Of course Toronto isn’t an American city. While the features that distinguish it are often subtle, those features are real all the same.

Early in the pandemic, when everybody went into lockdown, most retail enterprises had to shut down. Unless they could hold themselves out as an essential service, they had to shutter their doors and send their workers home. As soon as this happened, most of those stores covered their doors and windows with sheets of plywood. By this gesture, these stores said, in effect, that they expected an end-of-civilization scenario complete with marauding gangs and looting and molotov cocktails.

I can’t say for certain, but I get the feeling the plywood order came from head offices in large American cities where end-of-civilization scenarios are more probable. Especially in those cities where (lack of) urban planning has encouraged (white) flight to the suburbs, downtown cores are less stable in times of crisis. But Toronto is not one of those cities. Say what you will about all the condominiums sprouting like mushrooms, these projects guarantee that the city’s core enjoys a vibrant street life which in turn promotes a greater sense of social cohesion.

In addition, there is a certain alchemy in Toronto that’s harder to nail down. Call it local culture if you like. The fact is: people in Toronto are extraordinarily compliant. Relative to other large cities, rates of violent crime here are extraordinarily low. (The 2021 Safe Cities Index ranks Toronto as the 2nd safest city in the world). Vaccination rates in the city have been high (almost 90% for 2 doses). And most people have accepted public health protocols like masking and social distancing.

Despite the evidence, as soon as Doug Ford issued his first state-of-emergency order in March of 2020, retailers with windows fronting on major thoroughfares covered those windows with plywood. As I discovered on my pandemic photo walks, the only people out on the streets at that time were the homeless and marauding gangs of photographers. I feel badly for all the trees they wasted.

Categories
Street Photography

Black & White Directs the Sight: a Post-processing Mnemonic

A street preacher with white hair and beard speaks to a gathering of youth on a street corner. Sunlight glints off a cross he wears and it looks as if his chest is on fire.
Light reflects from cross worn by street preacher at Yonge & Dundas intersection, Toronto

I’m standing on the southwest corner of Yonge & Dundas with my eye on a street preacher. He’s older, with a shock of white hair and a Santa Claus beard that makes him look like a prophet the way people look prophetic in Cecil B. DeMille movies. He’s gathered around himself a group of young people who look on as he shares the good news. He sways a little and I shoot a burst as he’s swinging through the full range of his sway. Well that was interesting, I think, and I go on my way.

It isn’t until I get home in front of my computer screen that I realize one of my images captured a glint of sunlight reflected from the cross dangling against the prophet’s chest. If I believed in any of the man’s hoo-ha, I might take the glint of sunlight as a sign. It’s an alignment of sorts, like the alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only in this case it’s the alignment of sun, flat surface of the cross, and my image sensor. Either way, it must mean something, no?

Then comes the all-important question: colour or black and white? In this instance, the answer is determined by the fact that the whole point of the image is the fiery cross. My choice will depend on which format shows up the glint to best advantage. Does colour or black and white do a better job of directing the eye to the centre of the preacher’s chest?

There are no absolute rules, of course. Every fresh photograph presents a fresh context for a decision. In this instance, colour is a distraction. It draws our attention away from the only thing that really matters in the context of this image. All of this highly subjective, of course. On another day, with my stomach rumbling after a dinner of spaghetti, I might have decided the image makes more sense as a riot of colour, signifying something else, like the vibrancy of urban living. But as it is, I had lasagna for dinner and I made my choice.

Categories
City Life

Kill All The Colours

View from above staring down onto King Street West and Toronto's Financial District. A translucent image of the photographer's foot appears reflected in the window.
Looking down on King Street West, Toronto, during the Pandemic

In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimated the inhabitants of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”. Subject to a quarantine for nearly a year, the characters grow anxious and fearful. Inevitably, the suspension of life’s ordinary activities coupled with the relentless threat of death wears on them. It corrodes the affective dimension of their lives, making everything appear dull.

I know from personal experience that severe depression can change a person’s capacity to see colour. All the colours seem muted. Where, in ordinary times, bright colours spark feelings of joy, in times of extreme stress, those same colours can look as if they’ve been greywashed.

In the first months of the pandemic, when most people weren’t sure what was going on and stayed in lockdown, the pandemic threatened to produce a secondary health crisis by ratcheting up anxiety disorders, promoting feelings of depression, and encouraging people to cope through self-medication.

Recognizing my own tendency to view the world through Camus-coloured glasses (life is absurd and pointless so let’s lounge all day in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking ourselves into a carefully modulated stupor), I chose instead to put the pandemic in a neatly wrapped package. I would manage the shit out of this thing. After all, what a shameful thing it would be to have an epitaph that reads: “Here lies someone who was such a loser he allowed a respiratory pathogen to destroy his liver.”

I did a lot of little things to promote a sense of mental well-being (e.g. making the bed each morning, dressing up even if I wasn’t going out). On the photographic front, I refused to desaturate my photographs. I ignored Camus’s observation and, even if it didn’t feel that way, I pretended the world was bright and shiny.

Only now am I allowing myself the luxury of black and white conversions. I’m far enough away from the early sense of uncertainty that I can now revisit my photographs from that time with a sense of detachment. Featured today is a photograph I made early in May, 2020 from the TD Tower overlooking Toronto’s Financial District. A solitary streetcar rumbles past. There are no pedestrians. No cars. The streets are pretty much empty. The scene really does deserve to have all its colours killed.

Categories
Street Photography

A Month of Nothing but Black and White Photographs

I went through a street photography phase where I made nothing but black and white photos. There is a massive bias on photo-sharing sites towards black and white photographs. If I post a black and white photograph on Instagram with a #bnw hashtag, I get far more traffic than when I post colour photos. Black and white is “real” street. Colour is for wannabes and Joel Meyerowitz.

I expect the bias goes back to the days before colour film existed. Early masters of street photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson had only black and white film to work with and look at what they produced! Clearly, colour film isn’t a necessary condition of great photos. The convention continued long after colour film became widely available, at first because it was more expensive and fussier to develop, and later because … Well, just because. That’s what it means to be a convention.

Here we are in the age of digital sensors where there’s no cost difference based on the colour values we assign to a given pixel. One would think that in such an environment the bias against colour photography would evaporate. But no. It’s as prevalent as ever. Now cameras come with black and white settings so you can pretend you’re shooting with black and white film. Or, you can convert your colour images to black and white in post, either through apps on your phone or through fancy software packages like Photoshop or Lightroom or through plugins like Nik Effects or Luminar.

The only thing we can say for certain about the decision to shoot black and white is that it is no longer a technical or financial decision. Photographers have shifted the decision into other spheres, like aesthetics and politics. And so, for the month of June, I will present black and white images with commentary about why, sometimes, it might be preferable to do things the old way. Not always. But sometimes.

Categories
City Life

Fading Street Art: The Times They Are A Changin

Old graffiti painted on paper that is peeling off a rotten sheet of plywood.
The Times They Are A Changin, Dupont/Christie, Toronto

This concludes a month of images curated on the theme of “things which were but are no more.” My final image captures a rotten sheet of plywood that covers the window of a decrepit building, former home of a hair salon near the southeast corner of Toronto’s Christie/Dupont intersection. Someone spray painted bubble letters on the plywood and then someone else (or maybe the same person) added words inside one of the letters: “The Times They Are A Changin.”

It’s the title of Bob Dylan’s song released in 1964 on his album of the same name, a call to hippies to resist the oppressive forces of the day, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, the police action in Vietnam. On this sheet of plywood, someone has invoked those times to resist the oppressive forces of today. But the times aren’t really a changin, are they? The fact that people say this over and over again demonstrates how little the times are a changin. To bastardize lyrics by Dylan’s son, Jakob, the only thing that’s changed is that things are exactly the way they used to be.

Things have taken a turn to the pernicious. In 1964, Bob Dylan didn’t have to name the forces of evil at work in his world. He sang his song and everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was singing about. But things have gotten confused since then. As someone who feels politically aligned with the hippies of Bob Dylan’s world, I look at my current world and name certain things: the oil and gas industries, consumption beyond the planet’s limits, accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. I want to sing “the times are a changin” but the world doesn’t agree with me.

Other’s challenge my perception of reality. They tell me the forces I name as forces of oppression aren’t even real. Climate change isn’t real. Collectively, we’ve never been better off than we are right now. Soon I begin to doubt myself. In another time, I might have called this gaslighting. But today’s forces of oppression take it one further and tell me their gaslighting is really gaslighting at all; it’s just a description of the way things are. In fact I’m gaslighting them.

For the sake of clarity: I’m not gaslighting these people even though they say I am. The purpose of gaslighting is to destabilize a person’s basic beliefs about the state of the world by injecting profound uncertainty into their thoughts. These people—the denialists, the conspiracists, the ideologues—haven’t enough uncertainty amongst them to fill a thimble.

Which takes me to my final observation: maybe Bob Dylan’s call for change is misdirected. The times are never a changin, or if they are, it has little to do with human agency. The only change we can ever effect is the change we inject into our personal thinking. And the only way that happens is if we cultivate mental habits like curiosity, and if we revel in the pleasure of uncertainty. The problem today with the people we disagree with is not that we disagree with them, but that we have all turned to stone.