Looking forward. Looking backward. A balanced view of life that takes stock both of our history and of our future. That’s a nice candy-coated way of interpreting a scene.
It’s just as plausible to say that when a body feels tugs from opposing directions, it remains static. Like Dr. Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu, all it feels is a sense of paralysis.
The interpretation you choose depends very much on context. Since I’m the photographer here and the first person to have a crack at interpreting my own image, I’ll look to my context first. I shot this on March 11th, 2022 at a busy intersection in downtown Toronto. Here is an excerpt from my journal for that day:
Today marks the 2nd anniversary of the WHO’s declaration that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. It also marks the 2nd anniversary of a relentless onslaught of denialism, disinformation, and cranksterism, and has given cover for the rise of populism the world over. To celebrate, the government of Ontario has stopped reporting Covid-19 deaths because knowing the truth of our situation is such a downer and we’re never going to resume our old lives if we keep worrying about hospitalization and death.
If you detected a note of snark in my journal entry, you were right. Despite the government’s efforts to scoot us along into a world where time resumes its normal pace, a mid-winter gloom has settled over the city. Time has stopped. Things seem to have progressed no further than they were two years ago. This is the context in which I made this photograph.
Based on this statement of context, you can see, then, why I would give my photograph a more problematic gloss. People don’t seem interested in a balanced view that draws on accumulated wisdom; they seem hellbent in occupying an ahistorical now. Without movement. Without dynamic engagement.
Batman T-shirt in the crowd, Kensington Market, Toronto
I grow increasingly skeptical of superheroes. Even ordinary heroes give me pause. Those I admired when I was young have disappointed me by proving to be flawed. As I get older, I find myself reconciled to my disappointment. For the most part, my personal heroes weren’t flawed so much as they were human. My feelings of disappointment are less a result of their failings than of my unreasonable expectations. I had no right to demand more of them than they could give me.
What I once experienced in the personal sphere I now witness playing out in the public sphere. Angry mobs pull down statues because the historical personalities they commemorate fail to meet ever-shifting standards of virtue. I hope one day for a reconciliation in the public sphere that mirrors the reconciliation I’ve crafted in my personal experience. If the aim is to celebrate a person’s virtue, then it was unreasonable to erect a statue in the first place. It’s a cruel thing to impose such a burden on a person’s legacy.
It’s easier to make our peace with fictional superheroes. Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is a billionaire, as is Iron Man’s Tony Stark, and if history has taught us anything it’s that there is only one way to accumulate egregious wealth: through the exploitation of the powerless. In the real world, we would label the trope of the billionaire superhero as cognitive dissonance, but in the fictional world we call it suspension of disbelief. When the video is done, so is the suspension, and we go on with our lives in a world without batmobiles and flying suits.
The modern fictional superhero is an iteration of an older and more durable fantasy: the saviour who will rescue us from evil. In Judaism, the evil, whether it arrived in the form of Ramses or Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar, was an embodiment of a more deeply rooted evil: the people of Israel had strayed from their God. Enter Moses or Ezekial or Nathan to challenge the powers that be and guide the Israelites back to the paths of righteousness. The followers of Jesus took the superhero saviour shtick to a new extreme by declaring Jesus their one-and-only, but the broad outlines are the same. We are worms who can’t do anything for ourselves and we need someone more powerful to broker our salvation.
As with all the other heroes in my life, I’ve had to work hard to reconcile myself to the disappointments engendered by the unreasonable expectations I impose on this last cloaked and sandaled superhero.
Woman sketches ancient pottery in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum
While visiting the museum, I stumble upon an intimate scene: a woman sits on a stool sketching bowls in a display cabinet, her reflection faintly visible in the glass. I’m not sure why I call this an intimate scene. We tend to think of intimacy as something that happens in the way that one person relates to another. How can we speak in relational terms of someone who is alone? Still, the scene feels intimate.
Can an image be quiet? I feel a quietude settle over this scene. In this quietude all I hear is the drawing of breath and the faint scratchings of a pencil on the sketch pad. If I’m quiet enough, maybe I can hear the noise the photons make as they bounce off the glass cabinet. I’m afraid to move in case I betray my presence by shattering the quiet. I’ve noticed that my running shoes tend to squeak on the museum’s polished wooden floors.
There is something about this woman’s close looking that deserves to be repaid in kind. Does she see the clay bowl the way a 3D scanning algorithm sees a clay bowl, mapping enough points onto the surface to replicate its shape, then wrapping it in a textured surface that reproduces the bowl’s colour, opacity, and reflectivity? Or does she see it organically, a living thing with a breath of its own? Or does she see it with her heart, using her pencil to capture the way the bowl makes her feel?
Capturing this image, I place it in a museum of my own making. I import it into Adobe Lightroom where I can easily read the meta-data, date and time (April 17, 2018), along with technical details (1/250 sec at f/1.4, 85mm, ISO 1600). In addition, I give it a label and description, just like an artifact in a museum (“Woman sketches ancient pottery in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum”). I finish by assigning it keyword tags to make it more readily searchable on any platform where I share the image.
Like a bowl dug from the earth and exhibited in a museum, I pull my image out of its natural context, put it on display, and do my best to protect it from the ravages of time. The timeless quality of museum exhibits is a fantasy, of course. One day, a catastrophic event will shatter the bowl. It might be something dramatic, like an earthquake. More likely, it will be something banal, like a careless curator who trips while moving the bowl. But long before the bowl meets its end, my image (made to support my personal fantasy of timeless creation) will succumb to digital rot, or hard drive failure, or format deprecation or whatever the digital equivalent of an untimely demise.
For the time being, I invite you to pause to relish the quietude, acknowledging that soon enough it will be gone.
In her seminal 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I wonder if there isn’t a similar set of stages at play in our mask use. My speculations have no scientific data to support them. All I can offer are my personal observations of others wearing masks in public spaces and, of course, reflections on my own responses.
The first time I encountered mask-wearing as a normalized practice was on a visit to Hong Kong in 2016. Since the outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1918, mask-wearing has been a common practice in large Asian cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul. These cultural hubs are probably more receptive to mask-wearing because of their long-held values of respect for elders and commitment to social responsibility. As a Westerner thoroughly indoctrinated in the values of individualism and aggressive self-interest, my first response to mask-wearers was: Well, isn’t that odd! If they want to do that, then good for them; but I’ll never do that. Denial.
On March 11, 2020, when the WHO declared a global pandemic, and when local public health officials recommended mask-wearing as a preventive measure, I grudgingly went along with the new protocol. I didn’t like it, but I went along with it. I manifested anger, but not at mask-wearing. Instead, I got angry at people who refused to comply with the protocol. In particular, I remember an incident when a maskless neighbour tried to step into the elevator with me and I stood in his way and wouldn’t let him on. He yelled at me and called me a covidiot, which I thought was an ironic thing to say. I shrugged my shoulders and told him he could wait for the next elevator. Anger.
It’s been a long time since this began, so we forget how we felt in the early days of our mask-wearing. I remember feeling anxiety and uncertainty. There were questions about what kinds of masks we should be wearing. How many layers? Did we need to wear them outdoors? When we weren’t wearing them, could we strap them to our wrists? Disposable vs. washable? What about the environmental impact of disposable masks? Some people started sewing masks, little social projects like knitting wool socks for soldiers during the war. Some people started treating masks as fashion statements. Others hot stamped logos onto the cloth, personal branding, or declarations of personal affiliation. Nike masks. Hells Angels masks. These questions about masks sounded a lot like bargaining.
With the arrival of the omicron variant, people realized that home-sewn masks weren’t good enough. I tossed all my triple-layered cloth masks and began wearing only N95 masks. I noted that most people did the same or, at the very least, resorted to those blue medical masks. The heavy duty masks offered some reassurance, but with winter approaching, it was such a drag. Depression.
To make my narrative fit the Kübler-Ross paradigm, I should round this out with an “acceptance” stage. However, I don’t see evidence of acceptance. I don’t think we can say there has been a long-term adoption of mask-wearing. It certainly hasn’t embedded itself in North American culture the way it has in many Asian cities. If anything, I think we’ve reverted to the bargaining stage. Where I live, in Ontario, the government has lifted masking mandates. The same is true in the U.S. and in Western Europe. Infectious disease experts tell us we’re in the midst of a 6th wave, but politicians want to bargain with the virus. Go easy on us. We want to get on with our lives. Let us throw away our masks.
Street photography is a protracted series of interrogations. One of those interrogations looks to the way people move through built environments. Although we might once have constructed our buildings in service of people, it’s not apparent to me how that is true anymore. Our urban spaces have assumed an internal logic that has flipped the standard assumptions and now places people in service of buildings. But I’m not certain of this. Me and my camera pose our questions and have begun our investigations.
The global pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the investigations. I was preparing to file a definitive report on the way our urban spaces have enslaved the people who use them, like the victims of an alien invasion movie, when the arrival of the Sars-Cov-2 virus undid my working assumption. For months, hectares of office space lay empty. Shops that served the office workers went bankrupt. Without foot traffic, custodians stopped mopping the floors. In certain sectors, new technologies have obviated the need for in-person work. In the blink of an eye, people abandoned their built environments, or at least those built environments tied to work.
I had thought my images of people passing through steamy cityscapes spoke to the fleeting nature of the human presence in built environments. But the global pandemic has changed the meaning of those images. The human presence is fleeting, not because the overbearing logic of built spaces renders humans insignificant, but because the overbearing logic of digital spaces has asserted primacy over our built spaces. Humans aren’t vanishing from built spaces so much as evaporating into the ether.
Woman leans over a stroller and a baby stares up at her wondering: what the fuck?
There was a meme circulating 15 or 20 years ago, back in the days when people thought memes were clever. Maybe you remember it. It was a series of infant photos and a series of famous adults and you had to try and match the infant face to the adult face. One of the adult faces belonged to Adolph Hitler and the point of the meme was that, based on appearance alone, we have no way to predict which innocent children will grow up to be genocidal megalomaniacs.
I look at this infant’s face and I see a generic plasticity to its expression. It has an undifferentiated innocence that makes it both delightful and dull. Delightful, because all infants return us to a time when the world was bright and simple. Dull, because innocence is an amoral state and therefore not particularly interesting.
Like the infant shown here, I’m inclined to direct my attention to the woman gazing down into the stroller. Life in the stroller is constrained; not much happening in there. But out in the world! Look at all those people walking past. And that woman looking down. What has she done to her lips? And her eye lashes? Why does she need to accentuate them like that? Will I have to do that someday? And that coat! Who dresses her in the morning? Who changes her diaper? Maybe, when you’re grown up, you get to drop your shit wherever you please. Wouldn’t that be amazing!
Couple walks up Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, Toronto
In fact, I’m more than a little behind.
As a general rule, I take my street photos head on so that I can see the subject and the subject can see me. A subject’s face is usually the most interesting thing about them. However, as happens again and again, I discover that the rules I set for myself have exceptions. Sometimes the face is the least interesting feature of a subject.
The same thing is true of buildings. My first impulse is to photograph a building by shooting its official entrance. We recognize the New York Public Library by its staircase flanked by stone lions. We don’t recognize it by the grand sweep of its service entrance. However, a careful eye will discover that the service entrance has its charms too.
Someday I may publish a book about photography. I’ll call it “Fundamentals of Photography” and this image will appear on its cover. An important lesson in my Fundamentals is that one should never ignore the backside. A subject’s visual interest can reach out and grab you in unexpected ways and you must always be prepared to capture that moment.
Woman smokes cigarette in crowd that's overflowed onto University Avenue waiting for the arrival of the Toronto Raptors
A keyword in the technical jargon of street photography is the French word flânerie which attempts to get at the state of mind of someone who idles in crowds. As it was first conceived in 19th century Paris, it described an aimless wandering coupled with the mentality of a connoisseur. In today’s world, a street photographer who engages in flânerie might be described as a sommelier of the streets.
Unfortunately, thanks to the global pandemic, flânerie has fallen out of fashion as it violates social distancing rules. Although, technically, many jurisdictions have chosen to relax protocols, the fact of the matter is, we are in the midst of a 6th wave and it would be foolish for us flâneurs to resume our old habits.
For now, we satisfy our compulsion by diving into our archives and dredging up images from happier times. Today’s images come from the 2019 Toronto Raptors NBA Championship celebration when more than 2 million people crowded into the downtown core. Things got so densely packed that it took me half an hour to walk across University Avenue. During my crossing, I held my camera at shoulder height or over my head and took shots of people as we jostled shoulders. Despite the discomfort, everyone was in a good mood and nobody minded that I (and thousands like me) were taking photos of them.
One of the appeals of flânerie is that it is accompanied by a feeling of invisibility. I suspect some people who practice the subtle art think of themselves as undercover agents who takes photos surreptitiously. But that isn’t my approach. I don’t take steps to hide the fact that I have a camera and am actively using it. For me, the feeling of invisibility has more to do with a dissolution of the ego. I lose my self in the crowd in the same way that someone might lose their self with psychoactive drugs or meditation or gazing at the stars. It gives me a short relief from the pressures of my own internal monologue, that yammering inside my head that rarely does me the favour of shutting up.
Homeless woman sleeps on sidewalk across from Dundas Square, Toronto
One of the insoluble debates that regularly tears through the street photography community relates to the ethics of photographing vulnerable people like those living on the streets. The challenge here is that both sides of the debate are right. On one side are those who say that these photographs are an affront to the dignity of the subjects. On the other side are those who say we need to photograph suffering in order to hold accountable those responsible for producing the social inequality that generates this suffering.
Without resolving anything, I offer a couple more considerations:
First, there is a danger that the entire conversation will assume a patronizing tone insofar as both sides of the debate sit over and above the situation and talk from a “we know what’s best for these people” point of view.
Second, it is tempting for photographers to aestheticize the scenes they encounter. Instinctively, they worry about things like composition, catching the scene in a sweet light, making sure the scene is properly exposed. There is a risk that this temptation will result in homeless kitsch or homeless porn or, god forbid, the Trisha Romance homeless print available for $14.95 on Etsy.
Personally, I don’t feel equipped to address let alone resolve this debate. The best I can do is consider matters on a case by case basis. I think it would be an especially craven thing to sell decorative homeless prints. At the same time, documentation is important. I think it’s incumbent upon me to challenge the self-congratulatory talk that local politicians spread like so much manure whenever some ridiculous survey-for-hire announces that we live in one of the world’s most livable cities. I point to the evidence I trip over every day and ask: but what about this person? and this person? How can we say this is livable if it isn’t livable for everyone?
I offer this post as a counterpoint to yesterday’s post in which I seemed to be saying that I prefer candid photos of people doing stuff. Today, I celebrate candid photos of people not doing stuff. In particular, I offer a photo of a man wearing a red T-shirt and waiting at a crosswalk. In the immortal words of Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I photograph multitudes.)
Well, maybe he didn’t say those exact words, but he said something close to those words, and I take them as permission to be human instead of consistent.
I want to share this photograph because I like the way the red T-shirt creates a single block of colour that dominates the image. And I like the way the left arm juts out at an angle that matches the angle of the crosswalk line. Finally, I like the way the late afternoon light washes the image in a yellow that shifts the blue just a little to green; it gives the image a faintly nostalgic feeling as if I had shot it with film. However, the image doesn’t show a person doing something. Nobody is doing anything. The man is just standing there, waiting.
What I love most about photography is the opportunities it gives me to embrace inconsistency, contradiction, and paradox. Introductory photo workshops will sometimes take a rule-based approach to making a good photograph: apply the rule of thirds, the golden-mean, remember foreground, middle-ground, background, visual tricks that more or less guarantee a decent result. Then there are the personal rules I impose on myself, like the rule of yesterday’s post: only shoot people when they are doing something.
The challenge of a rule-based approach is that, in a world where AI is reaching a critical mass, there’s little we can do in terms of image-making that an algorithm can’t do better. Our only advantage is our capacity for irrationality. Intuition, holy unreason, the embrace of irreconcilables. These are things we do with ease that would short-circuit a microchip. Increasingly, I think we will find that our most successful creative work ignores those rules that are reducible to algorithms.
Cleaning Windshields on Bay Street at Bloor, Toronto
“Hey, let’s go outside and take photos of people doing stuff.” When I’m shooting candid photos, I prefer to capture people doing stuff. “People doing stuff” seems like a simplistic description and it takes in a broad range of actions. People working. People shopping. People arguing. People enjoying themselves. People eating. People kissing.
What kind of stuff do I want people to be doing when I take their photos? The answer is: absolutely anything just as long as they’re not “not doing stuff.” Most photos of people not doing stuff are boring. A surprising number of photos that people try to pass off as street photography in my social media feeds is photos of people not doing stuff. The photographer stands on the street corner and shoots somebody walking across the street. Or they walk down the sidewalk and shoot from the hip as someone approaches them from the opposite direction. Yawn.
I don’t want to rule out the possibility that a few of these photographs might be interesting. Sometimes people cross streets in interesting ways. Or they wear brightly coloured clothes. Or the light strikes them in a special way. But most of the time, random shots of people standing or walking in public spaces are randomly dull.
I prefer to capture people as they are engaging their world. Their way of being in the world raises questions for me. I imagine myself crawling inside their skin and I wonder: what would life be like if I occupied their space? Saw through their eyes? Felt with their skin? Would I be tough enough? Would I have their courage? I want to create images that open the viewer to fresh stories of what it’s like to pass through this life.
Firemen climb down ladder on the northwest corner of the Sherbourne/Bloor intersection, Toronto
Sometimes getting there first is everything. I’d been sitting on the couch in front of my TV when the phone rang. A friend who lives in a building south of me was calling while he gazed out the window of his 33rd floor apartment. “Uh, Dave, is your building on fire?” I hadn’t heard any alarms. “There are these huge clouds of black smoke but I can’t tell from here if it’s your building.” I stepped to the window and, just as my friend had said, there were huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky, but to the east of us. I said, “I’ve gotta go.” And then I did what comes naturally. I threw on a coat, slipped on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my camera.
I live in an interesting neighbourhood. Interesting in the sense that there’s always something happening here. The Indian consulate across the road is subject to continual protests, as is the Israeli consulate down the road. Extinction Rebellion protests on my doorstep. Psychotic screams in the middle of the night. Smashed windows in the shops across the road. Last fall, we were in lockdown, not because of a virus, but because of a suspicious piece of luggage outside our front door. The bomb squad detonated it and the concussion rattled my ribcage. The downside of living here, especially during a global pandemic, is that a sense of unease wafts through the air at all hours. The upside is that, if you’re a photographer, the opportunities for interesting shots are limitless.
On this particular occasion, our illustrious mayor, John Tory, whose only distinction from his predecessor is that he doesn’t smoke crack, had ordered a sweep of the homeless from Rosedale Valley. A few days later, someone retaliated by dousing old tires in gasoline and setting the south end of the Sherbourne Street bridge on fire. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a gasoline fire. Arson. Firetrucks were still arriving and fire fighters were running hoses to hydrants. Police had just appeared on the scene and were sorting out how best to contain the situation. I took advantage of the chaos to get close to the scene for my best shots, and then the police pushed me back down the street. You can see me, camera in hand, in the second photo of this CBC article.
Chaos is my friend. Chaos stirs up the conditions of an essential creative foment. Without chaos, I’d stagnate.
For me, perhaps the greatest motivation for engaging in street photography is curiosity. Not a salacious voyeuristic curiosity (at least not always). I would like to think that my curiosity is driven more by empathy than by a desire for some weird sense of gratification. I want to know what other people are doing. I want to know what makes them tick. Inevitably, I find myself imagining what my life would be like if I gave my world a quarter degree turn. Or woke up occupying a different body.
A black car pulls to the curb. A man gets out and runs around the corner. Five minutes later, he returns with a wheeled rack of garment bags. He pops open the trunk and begins laying out the garment bags one by one. I wonder what he’s doing. It’s Friday. Maybe he’s picking up clothes for a Saturday wedding. Is he the best man?
But there’s steam and steam gives the scene a vaguely sinister aspect. Maybe these clothes aren’t for a wedding. Maybe this man is a funeral director and he’s picking up clothes to dress his “clients.” Maybe he’s the leader of a cult and needs to dress up his followers before he doles out the Kool-Aid.
Or maybe he’s a co-conspirator in a planned heist. He and his friends are going to do a high-end casino and they need tuxedos so they can look like high rollers. A fine idea except for the fact that Toronto doesn’t have any high-end casinos.
I should apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the true account of the situation. Obviously, each garment bag holds a dehydrated alien and the man has been summoned to dispose of the remains before conspiracy theories leak and run amok through the city. He’ll run the bodies to a nearby construction site and encase them in concrete before anyone notices.
Since the Oscars aired last weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with one thing and one thing only. Never mind that another wave of the Sars-Cov-2 virus may be sweeping the globe. Never mind that a lunatic with his hands on a stockpile of nuclear weapons continues his mission to “liberate” the people of Ukraine. All anyone can talk about is how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when Chris Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Some people defend Will Smith, saying Chris Rock crossed a line when he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, alopecia areata. Other people defend Chris Rock, saying he was the victim of an assault and Will Smith ought to be charged with the commission of a criminal offence. Some people analyse the incident from the perspective of race. Other people analyse the incident from the perspective of masculinity. Pretty soon, pundits throw so many opinions into the blender that nobody knows where to fall on the matter.
I choose to sidestep the matter altogether by using it to illustrate something about a marginally related concern. The infamous slap is an exchange between two men who are, by vocation, comedians and wildly successful comedians at that. What makes them so successful in their respective roles is that they are unafraid to explore that liminal space between the socially acceptable and the taboo. They do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
There is no absolute line that defines for all time the limits of acceptable behaviour. It is a matter of perpetual negotiation and most of us rely on others to do that work for us. Like the court jester, Chris Rock’s role is to say things others think but are afraid to utter. He may not always be right, but there is a rightness in the need to drag certain conversations kicking and screaming from their murky corners, like the the conversation about the way the red carpet supports our collective habit of fetishizing women’s bodies.
Candid photography sometimes functions in the same way. The limits of the acceptable shift over time. What stood in the past sometimes deserves to be re-examined today. Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Kiss in Times Square for example. Originally understood as capturing the jubilation of a particular historic moment, it has subsequently been reinterpreted as emblematic of rape culture. What we can say for certainty about Eisenstaedt’s photograph is that it thrusts us into a liminal space and nearly 80 years later continues to engage us in an important conversation.
New contexts demand new conversations. Sometimes it falls to street photographers to use the photographic equivalent of a slap in the face to get them started.
Asleep at the 2022 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Toronto
My theme for April is taking candid photographs. Candid shots are a mainstay of street photography. What makes a photograph candid is the absence of reciprocity in the interaction between photographer and subject. Where, in the case of a street portrait, there is almost a contractual exchange, in the case of a candid shot, the encounter is emphatically one-sided. The photographer takes the shot without the subject’s permission because, most of the time, the subject is unaware that anything has happened.
Obviously, I am a practitioner of candid photography. However, I acknowledge that, for many, it is an ethical quagmire. For many, especially for those who catch me in the act, the candid photograph is an invasion of privacy.
The answer to the privacy objection is that it depends on the circumstances. The legally protected right to take photographs varies from one jurisdiction to the next, so there is nothing I can say that is universally applicable. For example, I once had a woman tell me I was in violation of the Canada Privacy Act to which I responded that the Canada Privacy Act has almost nothing to say about photography in any circumstance. However, she didn’t believe me, just as she didn’t believe me when I told her I used to practice law in the Province of Ontario so I might actually know what I’m talking about.
In general, Canada’s Anglo-speaking provinces (Québec is a different matter) treat photography as a right if it occurs in public space because nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space. In fact, most Canadian jurisdictions go so far as to treat it as a constitutionally protected form of speech. Like all rights, it’s not absolute, but as long as you’re not a pervert or a terrorist, your photographic habit is probably protected. That means that, in law, if I am standing on a street corner, I don’t need your permission to take your photograph.
Law and ethics are two different beasts, and the fact that I may be legally entitled to take your photograph doesn’t mean it’s right for me to do so. This leads to the next objection: public photography is protected by Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence which means that, in effect, it is a creature of our colonial history. In keeping with our colonial history, a photograph can be construed as a form of exploitation. That exploitation can happen along any number of axes: age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, class. Some, like Susan Sontag, go further and suggest that taking a photograph is an act of violence.
A possible answer is that there are countervailing values at play, like the importance of representation and documentation, that offset concerns about exploitation. If we can’t provide our progenitors with a rich visual account of their past, then we impoverish the imaginative ground they tread as they move forward. The trick, from a photographer’s perspective, is to balance competing concerns in a way that preserves the subject’s dignity while keeping one eye on the context in which the photograph will appear.
Matters of photography and ethics are beyond the scope of a single tiny blog post. My inclination is to hold ethical concerns in abeyance, bringing them to bear on each fresh situation, but resisting the temptation to suppose that these matters will ever be resolved with finality. Even with the passage of a few short years, we see how our frame of reference, and the language we use to give it shape, reform themselves beneath the pressure of changing social expectations. If we supposed that we had finally resolved the matter now, we’d only look like fools 20 years from now.
So I proceed provisionally. The images I offer this month I offer as provocations with the hope that they prompt considered reflection on the purpose and value of photography.
Note: Nothing in the foregoing may be construed as legal advice. If you have concerns about photography-related privacy issues, retain the services of a legal professional.
