Ross stopped me on College Street, asking for directions. Although I had a camera slung around my neck, clearly I was not giving off a tourist vibe. He’d just arrived from Saskatchewan and was walking up from the bus depot. He was in town for a medical appointment at Women’s College Hospital. Ross was munching on a muffin and trying hard not to spew it on me as he spoke. The clenched jaw in the photograph is not some tough guy pose; he’s picking poppy seeds out from between his teeth.
I love the cow skull string tie. I love the leather jacket. But, of course, the prize is the eye patch. People writing about photography (see, for example, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment) make a lot of noise about photographs of blind people. They speculate that there’s an affinity between those who devote their lives to looking closely and those who can’t look at all. Forgive me for what I’m about to say but … I don’t see it.
I would think there’s a stronger affinity between photographers and those who are blind in one eye. After all, isn’t our patron saint Polyphemus? The thing about a one-eyed view of the world is that it appears in two dimensions, like a photograph. One-eyed people see the world the same way a photographer sees it through the viewfinder. It is depthless. Like all good multivalent words, that means the world presents either as flat or as so deep it is unfathomable. Whenever I make an image, I aim to produce something that is both.
