Tag: Mask

Categories
Street Photography

Things Are Opening Up

A man wearing a mask passes a store window that has been papered over but has the word "open" in red letters still stuck to the glass.
Man Passes Store Window, Yonge Street, Toronto

Things are opening up now.

That’s what Jeremy’s father had said when his parents came upstairs to his bedroom to tell him he’d be going back to school.

But I’m already at school, and Jeremy pointed to the tablet sitting upright on his makeshift desk.

Honey, we’re talking about real school. You’ll get to see your friends.

Jeremy didn’t think much of his first day back at real school. The problem with friends at real school is that when they shove you at recess you fall down in the pea gravel and tear a real hole in the knees of the new jeans your mother bought you special and when you get home you’ll have to tell your mother how you tore your jeans on the first day and she’ll give you a lecture about not appreciating all that you have. Jeremy didn’t see how appreciating your new jeans would keep your so-called friends from shoving you at recess. Maybe he’d figure that one out when he got older. If his friends didn’t kill him first.

On the way home after his first day of opened up school, Jeremy noticed something he’d never noticed before. Standing at one end of the longest street between school and home, Jeremy looked to the far end of that street and saw how it was littered with discarded masks. Most were blue or white. Some were cloth with logos or patterns stamped onto them. A couple were funny, with cartoon characters or teeth or giant lips. Some lay in the dirt by the curb. The wind had blown a few under shrubs in front of the building where he went to get his teeth cleaned. There was even a mask hanging from the lowest branch in a tree. When Jeremy got close, he saw that it was an Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask, nothing any normal child would wear.

Jeremy had an idea. His mother would give him proper hell for this one but, seeing as she was already going to give him proper hell for the knees of his new jeans, he didn’t see how things could get worse. He pulled off his own mask, a white N95, and tucked it into his back pack. Then he pulled down the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask and put it on. It didn’t smell as bad as he thought it might. He could hear his mother scolding him, telling him he was being gross, yelling at him about germs and the need to be hygienic. Jeremy didn’t know what the word hygienic means but he figured it had something to do with not putting on masks that other people have worn.

As soon as Jeremy put on the mask, it felt as if he was somewhere else, like someone had flipped a switch and there he was, instantly transported. He could hear three older kids, like the bullies he knew from school, teasing him. Only they didn’t call him Jeremy. They called him Arthur, or shitface, and they kicked him, and when he wet himself, they howled like animals. Jeremy tore off the mask and when he looked down at his crotch, he saw that his jeans were dry. What he’d felt seemed real enough but it must have been virtual, like going to school on his tablet before the world opened up.

Jeremy threw the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask into the bushes and tried another mask, a blue medical mask that was clean except for a patch of lipstick on the inside. Right away, the mask dunked him in a world of chatty Cantonese and, for reasons couldn’t grasp, she understood every word. She was complaining to a friend that she never had enough money, always behind on the rent and the car payments, and although the books she kept told her there should be enough, there wasn’t; the money seemed to evaporate. She worried that her husband was gambling again. If one of them got infected and they couldn’t work, she didn’t know what they’d do. When Jeremy pulled off the blue medical mask, he found that he was gripping his stomach like there was an acid hole burning through the middle of it.

Finally, Jeremy put on a mask the colour of night. It was dirtier and smelled of something he couldn’t name, though it reminded him of the smell on his father’s breath whenever he went out with the men his mother didn’t like. There was a sweet yeastiness mixed in with the mud. He became a man of few words, with no friends to speak of, who drifted through the streets cadging coins from strangers and taking shelter underneath the bridge behind the school. He didn’t like to wear a mask, but he needed it to get into certain places, like the shelter where he sometimes slept, and the clinic where they treated the scabs on his feet. He’d only had the one mask for months but now he knew where he could score a clean one.

Jeremy tossed the black mask onto the street and ran home. He didn’t understand why everybody was so excited about the world opening up. As far as he could tell, it was open enough. Any more open, and it would make him bananas.

Categories
Street Portrait

Masked Street Portrait

Man poses with mask at Toronto's Evergreen Brick Works

One of my personal laments about the pandemic is that it has hampered my ability to do street photography. There are a few reasons for this. When numbers spike, people tend to stay indoors; with reduced pedestrian traffic, the streets are less vibrant. When people wear masks, there is less opportunity for personal interaction; people need to read one another’s facial expressions. And our heightened state of anxiety means that we tend to be warier of one another; it’s harder to make the initial approach when everyone is so fearful.

Nevertheless, opportunities do arise, as with this gentleman who was standing in line behind me as we were waiting one Saturday morning for the Evergreen Brick Works market to open. There we stood, two white middle-aged men with our Asian wives, him with a “Stop Asian Hate” mask and me with a camera. It seemed an obvious moment and he was happy to pose.

As an aside, I note that an Asian wife doesn’t give a white man a pass in conversations about race and racism. After all, Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, was married to Kellie May Xiong Chauvin. (She filed for divorce 3 days after the murder.) There is a narrative applied to a subset of mixed-race marriages that has the white man deliberately seek out a submissive Asian wife because, in true incel fashion, he can’t stand the Stacys of the world, steeped as they are in the teachings of feminism and sexual assertiveness. He needs someone who will say yes to his every whim.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s marriage. I can barely speak for my own. If you want the inside scoop on our relationship, you’d better talk to my wife. I doubt she’d complain that I married her so I’d have someone to do all the cooking and cleaning. She’s more likely to complain that whenever we go out, I bring a camera with me.

Categories
Street Portrait

Street Portrait of a Street Portraitist

Woman in beforetimes wears mask, not to prevent disease, but to conceal identity

There’s an unwritten code of street photography, and article one of that code is this: you can’t shoot photos of people if you aren’t willing to be shot yourself. In keeping with that code, I saw this woman out in a snowstorm lugging a pack full of gear; although we exchanged no words, I raised my camera and motioned towards her; in answer, she nodded, so I pointed and shot.

I made this photo in before times when a mask seemed an exotic thing, and I congratulated myself for such a rare capture. Now, it’s a rare capture to photograph a bare face. It’s odd how circumstances have flipped. Then, a mask seemed somehow subversive; it signaled an outlier wary of surveillance. Now, a mask signals a conformist wary of contracting and transmitting pathogens.

What is common to mask-wearers in both situations is the fact that obscuring the face closes us off from certain connections that facial expressions would otherwise facilitate. Now, as a diligent mask-wearer, I find it more difficult to make eye contact with the mask-wearing people I pass in the street. Even if I do make eye contact, I rarely present the kind of openness that makes strangers feel comfortable posing for photographs. They can’t see my smile. They can’t tell whether I’m a creep or someone they can trust.

This isn’t really a street photography problem. It is part of a broader social problem, a heightened sense of alienation and atomization that the pandemic experience has inflicted on us. Paradoxically, the fact that we all share in this experience may offer us a fresh point of connection.