Tag: Reflection

Categories
Nature

Photo Accessibility

A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.
Mckay’s Harbour, Lion’s Head Provincial Park

Several years ago, in another context, I lamented the rise of what I described as photographic literalism. It’s a problem produced by search engines which rely on tagging to index photographs. In order to for photographs to rank well in Google searches, the associated tags have to accurately describe what appears in the photograph. We see the same thing on photo sites like Instagram and Flickr where often the photos that get the most attention are those with the best configuration of hashtags.

People have become fixated on the thingness of an image. This is a picture of X. This thing called X is a Platonic X that has about it an ideal quality of Xness. We can name it and classify it and slot it into its proper cubbyhole. Taxonomy is king! Long live the well-named!

While hashtags have their place, it’s important to recognize their shortcomings, too. Hashtags have no way to note ambivalence or vagueness, meanings that teeter on a fulcrum, feelings, the numinous experience, intimations of a spiritual life, visual poetry. And they have no way to register fleeting sensations: I looked here and suddenly I was taken back to my childhood. Instead, hashtags presume that a thing is a thing is a thing for all time.

Accessibility has given new life to the issue of photographic literalism. I’m quite happy to describe my photographs in alt tags for the benefit of those who are visually impaired. It’s a helpful measure for people who chance upon my web pages and want to understand how I have integrated visual media with my words. But, as with hashtags, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of these tools.

A photograph is more than a representation of a thing. It may also be a provocation or an evocation. If it’s any good at all, it makes the viewer feel something. It is not so much the thing as it is the feeling that is the point of a photograph.

I think, in addition to the alt tag, there should be a poetry tag: a short ekphrastic statement about the feelings a photograph evokes. In the image above, for example, the alt tag reads: “A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.” Yes, but I might also write: “I was filled with a sense of calm as a gentle breeze rippled the shallow waters and, for a brief moment, I felt a sense of surrender.” Nothing overly flowery, something simple to suggest a state of mind.

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photography: The Pushmi-Pullyu

Bay/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

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.

Categories
Street Photography

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: the case of the flying man

Man Runs to Union Station, Toronto

On a wet snowy afternoon, I went to the southwest corner of the Front/Bay intersection to catch people rushing down to Union Station to catch the train. I positioned myself a couple steps down where the stairs on the corner follow the slope of the street. That way, I could shoot lower to the ground which had turned wet with a light snowfall. I was after reflections of people walking across the reflective surface. That’s when I caught a man running so fast that he had enough lift to fly across the pavement. I have the proof. I captured a photo of it. A pox on your house if you try to refute the evidence of my unaltered photograph.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting photos of Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s. Speaking of UFO’s (or UAP’s as the US “Intelligence” community calls them), I note that 2021 was a banner year for unexplained sightings. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (US) released a report on 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (sic) which it has assessed. Of the 144 sightings, the intelligence community has explained only one. It remains open to the possibility that these were sightings of airborne aliens. You can read more on CNN’s web site.

In November, defense officials announced that they would be establishing a new task force to investigate these and other related phenomena (wood faeries? bridge trolls?). Although this appears to have happened under the aegis of the Biden administration, in fact, it was the Trump administration that imposed the requirement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit a report to Congress. Is anyone surprised?

Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a period, after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, of interminable Trump sightings (think Elvis) supplemented with seances licensed of course by Ivanka & Co., the hereditary grifters.

In the meantime, I offer this image to the new task force as its 145th UAP. A man hovers above the ground. How is this even possible? Unless … maybe this is an alien disguised as a man.

Categories
Street Photography

Shop Window on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street

Man adjusts a mannequin in a shop window on Buchanan Street, Glasgow

A man stands in a window display and adjusts the clothing on a mannequin. Reflected in the window, we see Buchanan Street, a pedestrian thoroughfare and one of the main shopping districts of Glasgow. Apart from a couple shops that sell tartan scarves and Scottish kitsch to the tourists, most of the shops here are what you find anywhere: Apple, Starbucks, Nespresso, Prada, Hermès, Omega, The North Face, Urban Outfitters, Victoria’s Secret, GapKids. Living as we do in a global marketplace, the idea of shopping on holidays seems silly. The supply chains that bring us these products have probably circled the globe several times already, then we purchase them and fly them another 5,000 km to bring them home with us. They hang in our closets. We wear them twice. Then, when we decide they make us look fat, we run them out to Value Village.

Categories
Bugs

Fly and its Reflection

Fly and its mirror image reflected on a glass door.

I’m not an entomologist so I have no idea what kind of bug I’ve captured here. If I had to understand everything about a scene before I photographed it, I’d never photograph anything. I was mesmerized by this insect and its doppelganger and that was good enough for me.

I’m not sure what it is about reflections that is so universally compelling, like the twins in Kubrick’s The Shining, or virtually anybody taking a selfie these days. Maybe it has something to do with ancient myths like Narcissus. Or maybe it’s something lodged in our Jungian collective unconscious. Or maybe it has to do with the bicameral structure of the human brain. Or maybe I’m overanalysing things.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

Forest scene overlooking Barnum Creek in the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

This is an appropriately autumnal photo I shot at the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve just weeks after it opened to the public in 2020. Presumably, the water in this image is Barnum Creek. It is located in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario in the prosaically named township of Dysart et al. Yes, Dysart et al. The et al appears on all the official signs.

If I were a philosopher (I’m not, but if I were) I might wonder about what it is that makes a creek a creek. When I talk about Barnum Creek, what defining feature gives it its distinctive creekiness? It can’t be the water. In a variation on a theme by Heraclitus (you can’t step in the same river twice), the water in a creek is never the same from one instant to the next. This photo captures an instant in time, but if I released the shutter again a few minutes later, most of the water in the photo would have been replaced by fresh water flowing from upstream. Some of the water in this photo might go on to Kashagawigamog Lake then into Lake Ontario, St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Ocean. Some of it might evaporate and quickly recirculate through the hydrologic cycle. And some of it might sink down to the water table and lurk in deep aquifers for hundreds of years. I can’t say for certain what would happen to any given water molecule, but I can say for certain that none of it would stick around to pose for another photograph.

What is true of the water is true, too, for the leaves, the soil, the trees, even the rocks. Like the water, it all flows, but on a different time scale. Whatever we call Barnum Creek and fix with pins to our map is only a provisional naming. I’m certain indigenous people living here named it something else. And people yet to come will name it something else again. And then it will vanish.