Tag: Snow

Categories
City Life

French Word For Toilet

Cold Toilet, Parkdale, Toronto

My dad tells the story of how, when he was little, he thought his mother spoke French. Admittedly, she had a distinctive accent, but it was the sort of accent that came from Boston, not from Rimouski. My grandmother had that classic New England accent that does strange things to the letter “R”. It removes “R’s” from words where they belong (Hahvahd instead of Harvard), and adds “R’s” to words where they don’t belong (especially at the end of words that end in a vowel). To my grandmother, everything was a good idear. If you’ve ever listened to Major Charles Emerson Winchester, III from M*A*S*H (David Ogden Stiers) then you have a good idear how my grandmother spoke.

However, my grandmother developed some linguistic idiosyncrasies, maybe because she married a Canuck and moved north of the border. My grandfather was a minister and one of his early charges came with a manse that had no indoor plumbing. My dad doesn’t appear to have been traumatized by the experience. Nevertheless, he does recall one odd feature of his early toilet adventures. Whenever it looked like he might have to go to the bathroom, my grandmother would ask him if he had to go to the pouchaud and point to the outhouse.

This explains why my dad thought his mother spoke French. He had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded French, and he naturally assumed it had something to do with the outhouse. It wasn’t until later that he realized what she was saying: Do you have to go to the push hard? With her tendency to run words together coupled with her inability to say the letter “R,” she had effectively invented a new word, pouchaud. I don’t suppose it will ever find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it has an honoured place in our private family dictionary.

Categories
Street Photography

Snow Selfies

Person takes a selfie on Bloor Street East, Toronto

I’ve noted in a preview post that when people encounter one another during a snow storm, they tend to be happier, friendlier. Snow storms elicit another (possibly related) response. People love to take selfies against a snowy backdrop and then share them with friends and on social media accounts. Almost invariably, they don’t post the photos to complain about how miserable the snow makes them feel; they post to share their excitement.

Snow does that to people. For me, snow draws up feelings of nostalgia. It reminds me of my childhood, especially my winter visits to my grandparents. One set lived in Montreal and the other in London and both locales got far more snow than my hometown (Toronto). We built forts, and went tobogganing, and poured rinks in the back yard. One year, my parents even took us to Quebec City Carnival and we got to watch people drunk on Caribou fall unconscious into snow banks. Ah, memories!

Years later, whenever it snows, I find myself drifting back in time to childhood moments of sheer joy and, like everyone else around me, I want to capture that feeling. Spread it around. The world can always use more joy.

Selfie at Toronto's Icefest
Selfie at Toronto’s Icefest
Categories
Country Life

A walk in the woods

Looking up at the trees, winter in Wye Marsh

We went for a walk along a trail near the Wye marsh. I had to answer nature’s call and when I was done and had turned around, everyone else was looking, though not at me. They were looking up into the trees. I don’t know what they were looking at. For all I know, they might have been suffering from a shared delusion and thought the tree people were calling them. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

In a sense, this forest is haunted. Since the glaciers receded after the last ice age, this land has been continuously inhabited by the people we’ve come to know as the Wendat. They’ve been passing through these forests for nearly 10,000 years. If you pause and listen, especially in the stillness that a layer of snow settles upon the place, you can feel their presence.

I believe in ghosts. Maybe not the ghosts of campfire stories but ghosts all the same. Our landscapes are haunted by people and animals that have gone before. We need only look and listen.

Categories
Country Life Still Life

Minimal Winter Photos

One of the things I love about photographing in the wintertime is that if you angle your camera downward against a rising slope, you can isolate the subject and produce an absolutely simple shot. Call it what you like—minimal, clean, uncluttered, Zen—the effect is the same: an image that calms the spirit and settles the senses.

I wonder if Marie Kondo gives photography workshops. Declutter your images. Leave in only those parts that give you joy. It’s not surprising that a contemporary “influencer” of the uncluttered space should happen to be Japanese. Traditional Japanese aesthetics lists seven principles necessary to achieve Wabi-Sabi which is a state of mind that emerges in the presence of beauty. One of those principles is Kanso which means simplicity or clarity. Kanso might also be understood as a process to the extent that it engages us in the practice of removing things from the frame until only the necessary remains.

Snow helps in this process by removing clutter in the background. In the case of the photograph above, that clutter includes dirt, grass, and shriveled wildflowers. In the case of the photograph below, that clutter includes a pond and the line of the far shore, all of which has turned to ice and been covered by a deep layer of snow.

Cattails
Categories
Street Photography

Don’t stick your hand in a snow blower while it’s running

When I was little, I was fascinated by the fact that my uncle Bill had lost his ring finger. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories about how he lost his finger. That side of my family is full of storytellers, gossips, and bullshitters, so I have no idea which of the stories is true. Instead, I’ve opted to believe the best (i.e. most gruesome) of the stories and truth be damned. In the spirit of bullshit, Bill is not his real name.

The story goes that my uncle Bill served in Korea as part of the US medical corp. Yes, he was in a M*A*S*H unit or something like that. One day, they had to bug out because they were under fire from the commies. My uncle Bill leapt onto the back of a moving truck and caught his wedding ring on something. So there he was, dangling by his ring finger with his feet dragging along the ground and the commies in hot pursuit. One of his fellow medicos grabbed his free arm while another pulled out a pocket knife and cut off his finger. They hauled him into the truck and escaped to safety. I reiterate that I have no idea if this story is even remotely factual. All I know for certain is that my uncle served in Korea and came home minus one finger.

Not to be outdone, his older brother Jeff lost three fingers. Incidentally, Jeff told everyone he was in the Navy; it’s even there in print in my aunt’s obituary. Despite that, I remember Bill rolling his eyes and saying it was just the Coast Guard. Jeff never saw any real action, not like Bill who also did a tour in Vietnam. Ahh, what fond childhood memories I have of my uncles engaged in military service pissing contests!

Again, the story comes to me like a game of broken telephone played by pathological liars, so I have no idea what really happened. Not even his name is real. Still, there are certain things I know to be true. For one thing, Jeff lived in New Hamphire where there is lots of snow in the wintertime. For another thing, he really did lose some fingers. The story goes that he fired up the snowblower during a storm and it jammed. Just to look at it, he couldn’t say why the snowblower had jammed. You might say it was a problem that stumped him. Without turning it off, he reached in to clear whatever was jamming it and that, as they say, was the end of his career as a concert pianist.

I can’t help but speculate here. Given that my uncle Jeff ultimately succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wonder if his tussle with the snowblower wasn’t one of its early symptoms. It’s the sort of thing I think about on a cold winter’s night as I wrap all eight of my fingers and my two intact thumbs around a mug of hot chocolate.

Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Categories
City Life

Dead Animals in Winter

Dead Raccoon - foot of the Chorley Switchback on the Beltline Trail, Toronto

Winter can be challenging for local fauna, and, for some, it isn’t survivable. As a matter of evolutionary biology, most animals have met the challenge of winter by developing migratory patterns. However, wherever humans have settled, they have disrupted those patterns, either by deliberately feeding animals or by generating enough garbage to sustain scavengers. Now, Covid-19 has disrupted the disruption. Where widespread lockdowns have been imposed, animals dependent upon humans may have to adjust to a sudden scarcity of expected food.

Or maybe nothing. Changes in human behaviour are temporary and short-term. Although difficult to measure, it is unlikely that Covid-related changes in human behaviour will have any lasting effect upon animal behaviour.

As for the photograph above, who’s to say why this raccoon died? Maybe it couldn’t find its usual heap of human generated garbage, or maybe it was diseased, or it was old, or it committed raccoon seppuku.

I think it’s worth noting that, in terms of the information they convey, virtually all photographs are anecdotal. This is a feature intrinsic to the medium. At the same time, perhaps for the first time in human history, we have been forced to engage in what might be described as an epistemological reckoning. While conflicts emerging in the context of Covid-19 present as political or ideological conflicts, if we step back from the fray, we find that they are really conflicts about how we know what we claim to know. We’ve never had to do this before, not as a global collective.

If you peel away the labels, the anti-vaxxers aren’t anti-science; they’re pro-science, but theirs is a science of the Newtonian variety. Cause and effect. Discrete interactions. All behaviours, whether on a cosmological or a subatomic scale, function like billiard balls in the rec’ room. Meanwhile, the WHO, epidemiologists, and public health advocates subscribe to a post-Newtonian science of probability where interactions are evaluated in the aggregate and discrete events are meaningless.

Photography is always a discrete interaction and, at least when deployed as a means to communicate information, has nothing to say about matters in the aggregate. A photograph of a dead raccoon doesn’t tell us anything about raccoons, or winter, or death, or disease.

In point of fact, I didn’t make a photograph of a dead raccoon to convey information in any of the ways we customarily think about information. I made the photograph for its affective force. How does it make you feel? Affect is another way we know what we claim to know, but it tends to get ignored in most of our public conversations.

Dead cat in snow, Lower Don Trail, Toronto
Categories
Street Photography

Should there be a moratorium on umbrella photos?

Umbrella in Snowstorm, Bloor/Yonge intersection, Toronto

I recently read, although I can’t remember where, an established street photographer’s rant about all the visual tropes he felt had grown tired and tiresome. He made a list of all the things he would no longer shoot and he urged fellow street photographers to join him in his little boycott. One of the items on his list was photographs of people carrying umbrellas. In general, I agree that, as with good writing, so with good photography: avoid clichés. That said, I offer a couple exceptions.

First, aspiring photographers learn by shooting clichés. If you turn your rule against photographing clichés into an absolute prohibition, then nobody plays, nobody has any fun, and nobody discovers anything new. So hop to it. Make hay while the sun shines. Take no prisoners. Be your best self. Be a photography thought leader.

Second, there is no such thing as a photograph of an umbrella. I’m not flogging Magritte’s dead pipe (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) which I take to mean that a representation of a thing should not be equated with the thing itself. I’m getting at something more straightforward. The fact is: most photographs of umbrellas are not photographs of umbrellas; they’re photographs in which umbrellas happen to appear. They’re photographs of scenes in which the umbrella may have an important place, but most likely the umbrella is only one of a constellation of features that coalesce to produce the photograph.

In the case of the photograph featured here: is this a photograph of a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman holding a red umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella? or is it a photograph of a woman crossing a slushy road holding an umbrella while a red car approaches from the opposite direction? And so on.

Categories
City Life

Winter Scenes: The Precariously Housed in Toronto

Winter tent on Bloor Street, Toronto

Winter is always a difficult time for people whose housing arrangements are insecure at best. Whenever the temperature goes below -10ºC, the city of Toronto issues a cold weather alert for the benefit of those who ordinarily live rough. This triggers the opening up of additional temporary shelter space. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, there are always some recalcitrant souls who won’t place themselves in the shelter system. For some, there are mental health issues. For others, there is the fear of violence. And Covid-19 has added another dimension to the sense of bodily threat.

During a snow storm, I shot this tent on the stretch of Bloor Street West known as the Mink Mile, one of the most expensive shopping districts in the world. You can see the Cartier sign in the background. Nearby are flagship stores for Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Burberry, and Hermès. With talk of rentals at $300 a square foot generating sales of $2000 a square foot, the disparity of wealth this suggests is stunning, and yet those of us who live here grow inured to it.

The other day, I made the mistake of tumbling down the rabbit hole of a Twitter thread where somebody suggested this was nothing we should be concerned about; it’s for the homeless to take responsibility for themselves; let them get proper jobs. Maybe I was being trolled. Maybe the person posting this wanted own the libs. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Even so, I suspect the people who post these things are far less ironic in their views than they’d have us believe. They don’t want only to provoke a reaction; they really mean what they say.

In the past, I might have responded with some variation of a chat about the fact that the proportion of those living on our city streets while struggling with a major mental health issue is north of 70 percent. I’d go on from there to describe some of the more concrete ways in which mental illness hamstrings a person and makes talk of getting a job utterly beside the point.

But I don’t engage in those kinds of chats anymore. Life’s too short to waste talking to people who have already foreclosed the possibility of compassionate regard for those around them. I don’t care if people want to troll me or own me or stomp on me and thump their chests like silver backed mountain gorillas. This conversation isn’t about me, so owning me accomplishes nothing.

Homelessness and its attendant demons, mental illness and an outrageous housing market, are matters of social responsibility. You either commit to that view or you don’t. But if you don’t, your world view takes you ineluctably to the assertion that people who suffer aren’t human. This is the view shared by the person who refuses to participate in the well-established protocols that keep people safe during a pandemic because they lack the imagination to see how their rights are safeguarded by everyone else’s commitment to social responsibility.

The intractability of such a view, the refusal of give and take, the impossibility of reason, is not simply immature, it veers into cultism which, ironically, is a mental health condition.

Thus endeth my rant.

Categories
Country Life

Snow-covered railway tracks in Thunder Bay

Rail marshalling yard, Hardisty Street, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In Thunder Bay, the railway tracks come up alongside Hardisty Street North which is where I was standing when I made this shot. I was struck by the high contrast of white ground, dark rails running to the horizon, and dark utility pole set off against a gloomy sky. When I was done making the shot, I collapsed my tripod, strapped it to my pack, and walked over to Simpson Street. I was heading down to the Fort William side of town.

Because of the light, I made a lot of good photos that morning. Perhaps the most memorable photo was nothing special, at least not from a photographic point of view. I saw what I took to be a small derelict theatre and, without looking too closely, assumed that somebody had bought the building and converted it into a retail space. It wasn’t until after I made my shot that I noticed it was the local Hells Angels club house. I quickened my pace and hoped nobody had been watching me. I worried that if they saw my camera, they might think I was from a law enforcement agency. I’d vanish and people would later find my body in a boxcar off Hardisty Street.

As happens to so many buildings in Thunder Bay, somebody torched the Hells Angels club house almost exactly two years after I made this shot. The CBC article says the cause of the fire was unknown, but come on. This is the Hells Angels we’re talking about.

When I heard about the fire, my lawyer brain immediately wondered if the Hells Angels had insured the place. Given their efforts in recent years to carry on legitimate business enterprises, I don’t see why not. Even so, I tried to imagine the first time an insurance broker met with a Hells Angels rep to discuss insuring their place of business. How would an actuary even begin to go about evaluating potential risk?

Finally, I note that the street address is a fractional number, like the platform where aspiring wizards catch the train to Hogwarts. It seems that fractional numbers lead us into magical realms where we can alter our reality by eating gillyweed or shooting heroin.

Hells Angels Club House, Thunder Bay, ON
636 1/2 Simpson Street, Thunder Bay, ON
Categories
Country Life

Winter Scenes: Snowmobiling in Rural Ontario

Elliiott Side Road, Wybridge, ON

This is a recent photograph, shot while walking on a Sunday morning along Elliott Side Road near Midland, ON. It’s in Tay Township which got its name exactly 200 years ago when Lady Sarah Maitland, wife of then Governor General of Upper Canada, General Sir Peregrine Maitland, thought it would be cute to name some towns after her pet dogs. Now, besides Tay, people race their snowmobiles through Tiny and Flos. Before the English, it was the French who laid claim to the region. Like most colonizing enterprises, it was the Bible that led the way. In 1639, Jesuits established a mission that lasted all of 10 years when Iroquois decided they’d had enough and killed them all. Before the Jesuits, the land had been occupied for nearly 10,000 years by the Wendat-Huron people.

The first time I rode on a snowmobile, I was all of four or five. My grandfather had sold his farm south of London, retaining just enough land that he could make a good run from the road to the woods and back on what I presume was an expression of his midlife crisis. Why else would a man in his mid-fifties buy a snowmobile? When I visited in the wintertime, he’d take me for a little spin. My parents raised me as a city boy, so I’ve had little contact with snowmobiles since then. Whatever crisis my grandfather had suffered quickly subsided and his snowmobile gathered dust under a tarp for a few years until he sold it to a neighbour.

Except for indigenous people who live in remote communities, I don’t understand why anyone would need a snowmobile. Every year, we hear fresh stories of people decapitated running under fence wires or sinking through the ice as they make their last run of the season out to the fishing hut. People answer that they’re perfectly safe if you drive them sensibly. But the whole point of a snowmobile is to drive fast; nobody in a midlife crisis wants to drive sensibly. The fact that my grandfather survived his midlife crisis is more a case of god playing dice with the universe than sound planning on my grandfather’s part.

So there I am, a city boy out for a walk with my camera, when several groupings of snowmobiles come roaring down the road in quick succession. My brother-in-law, who lives there, explains that they pay a $300 fee for a permit. Among other things, that permit gets them nicely groomed trails and, implicitly, the assurance that there are no low wires hanging across those trails.

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.

Categories
City Life

How do you pronounce Toronto?

Construction Crew, Toronto

One of the things I love about Toronto is that a majority of the people living here weren’t born in Canada. What’s more, a majority of the people living here identify as belonging to a visible minority. That means there are huge opportunities for personal and cultural enrichment. If I let people in, they can shake me from my complacency and show me fresh ways to engage the world around me. This is a gift.

As a middle-aged white male who was born here, I acknowledge that bias inevitably creeps into my impressions of Toronto’s multicultural life. For example, I tend to regard Toronto as a place which, relative to other places, puts far less pressure on newcomers to conform to some hegemonic view of local culture. Then again, as I’ve never been a newcomer, I could be mistaken.

However, there is one matter which demands absolute conformity. If you want to claim you’re from here, you have to pronounce the name of this place without the second “T”. Nobody is from Toronto. We are from Trawna. I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. You can find a good example of this in the hit song by The Kings, The Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide. There, they rhyme Trawna with wanna and Donna.

Another way to pronounce Toronto is “construction.”

Categories
Public Art

Larry Sefton Memorial

Larry Sefton Memorial, by Jerome Markson

Typically, I avoid shooting a work of public art if all I’m doing is documenting its existence. That feels parasitic. I should leave the work alone to do whatever it’s supposed to do, whether that means interact with its environment or with the people who encounter it. But there are times when I feel drawn into conversation with a work, as I did when I approached this arrangement of girders by the architect Jerome Markson. There was something about the falling snow and the red wall behind it that lent it a something more. I met it in a fleeting moment that would vanish when the snow melted and the sun came out to cast shadows across the scene. There was a surplus in this moment.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Christmas Tree

Snow-Covered Tree, Yellow Creek (Vale of Avoca), Toronto

Merry Christmas!

This is a photograph of a Christmas tree.

How, you may ask, is this a Christmas tree? Isn’t a Christmas tree supposed to be an evergreen tree covered in tinsel and lights?

I’m glad you asked. This is a Christmas tree because, taken with its reflection in the river, it forms an X. In Koine Greek, X is the letter Chi which is the first letter of the word, Christ, and is often used as shorthand for it.

If we wait long enough, it may also end up being the name of a coronavirus variant. We’re at omicron right now. We have only seven more letters to go. Yippee!