Tag: Street Photography

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Street Photography

Nice N Sleazy on Sauchiehall Street

A man watches 3 women walk past Nice N Sleazy, a bar on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow

Nice N Sleazy is a bar on Sauchiehall Street. It’s like Brigadoon. Caught in its own special time when ideas like feminism didn’t exist.

I wonder what’s going through this guy’s head as he watches the three women pass the bar’s entrance. This is emblematic of who gets to watch whom.

It’s worth noting, however, that the women are watching something too. They’re not returning the man’s gaze. Instead, they’re watching something that lies beyond the frame.

In a way, the women are more interesting because they look to something that is unknowable. Unknowable, at least, to those of us who join the man in gazing at the women.

Categories
Street Photography

Child Running in the Rain

Child runs in the rain at the Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, Scotland

I’m standing in the Royal Exchange Square at the back end of GOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art, experimenting with the wet pavement and the broad curving line of the steps when a child runs up the steps and races towards me. Sometimes the photography gods are kind to me. What is particularly kind in this instance is that the girl’s parents look on, smiling, apparently unconcerned that a middle-aged man is standing there with a camera.

I offer this photograph as a reminder of whose interests we serve at Cop26. Let us never forget: our children have no voice here. We will be long gone by the time the consequences of our decisions play themselves out in full. It will be our children who suffer or benefit from those consequences.

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City Life

Public Toilets in Glasgow

Youth walking past public lavatories at Buchanan Street & St. Vincent Place in Glasgow

Whenever I visit another city, I find myself inevitably drawing comparisons to my hometown. Sometimes I observe things that make me glad I live where I do. In Glasgow, for example, I’m struck by the relative cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the local population. I come from a city where more than half the population identifies as a visible minority and where more than half the population was born in another country. As odd as it may seem, I find it disturbing to enter a space where most everybody looks like me. Difference is a comfort.

At the same time, Glasgow has many features to commend it, including the availability of public lavatories. This strikes me as a sensible response to a homogeneity of a different sort: we are all alike in our need to pee. Stuck right in the middle of town, near the intersection of Buchanan Street and St. Vincent Place, is a great black behemoth where people can find sweet relief. Toronto has no such public facilities. As I have documented elsewhere, Toronto is hostile to the idea of the public lavatory. City politicians fret that homeless people might sully their fine facilities so they prefer to deny them to everyone than to share them with people of all stations.

I haven’t visited Glasgow since the global pandemic gripped us, so I can’t say if that may have changed the Glaswegian approach to public facilities. I hope not. There is something heartening about a town that frankly acknowledges (and answers) a universal human need.

Public Lavatory in Glasgow
Categories
Street Photography

Beer Kegs on the Sidewalk

Man walks past beer kegs at Sauchiehall & Scott Street, Glasgow

Beer kegs on the sidewalk is pretty much the norm for Glasgow. Perhaps the most famous of the local breweries is Tennent’s located at the foot of the Glasgow Necropolis. I’ve often wondered where they source their water. Do they take it locally, filtered through the hills of the Necropolis? Does that give their beverages a special flavour?

Peering through the gates of the Wellpark Brewery
Categories
City Life

Piper in Nelson Mandela Square

Piper marches through Nelson Mandela Square in Glasgow during an All Under One Banner (AUOB) protest.

When we see the bagpipes, our minds immediately think of Scotland. When we hear the bagpipes, our minds immediately think of cats tied to the back of cars and dragged through city streets. No one would listen to the bagpipes for the mere pleasure of it. Would they? Then again, this is a people who thinks sheep’s offal stuffed with oatmeal into its stomach is a delicacy and washes it down with liquefied dirt (Laphraoig). Why then would it surprise us that they have such taste in music?

I caught this piper at a Scottish independence march: All Under One Banner (AUOB), passing through Nelson Mandela Square in the centre of Glasgow. It seems the vaguely racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric wafting up from the Tory government south of the border has galvanized many Scots. That and the economic fallout from Brexit. As a Canuck, I sympathize. We’ve had to put up with the stink of vaguely racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric wafting from south of our border too.

Categories
Street Photography

Policing at Cop26

Police monitor protests at a Scottish Independence (AUOB) march.

A Guardian article indicates that activists are concerned about the way police will be deployed during Cop26. My personal experience during Toronto’s G20 summit in 2010 suggests their concerns may be justified. The policing effort, which will see 10,000 personnel drawn from all over the UK descend upon Glasgow, is called Operation Urrem. Urrem is the Scots word for respect.

As I understand it, the concern has to do with differing attitudes towards policing. The Scottish approach tends to be more hands off and conciliatory whereas English policing tends to be more heavy-handed.

Shown above is a photo I shot in George Square where police placed themselves between Scottish Independence marchers and those waving Union Jacks who came to protest the protesters. As you might gather from the photo, the police didn’t really do anything except create a space for both sides to have their say.

I hope the same approach holds for Cop26.

Categories
Street Photography

Child on Buchanan Street

Child climbs a step on Buchanan Street, Glasgow, Scotland

I was standing beside the entrance to the Buchanan Street underground, shooting south down to the Clyde River, mesmerized by the reflective surface of the polished rock, when a young girl (and her reflection) stepped into my frame. How could I not make the shot? I’m not sure what she was thinking but I suspect it was simple curiosity: what is that man doing with that funny-looking box in his hands? There is something satisfying about this shot—the reflection, the way the perspective lines all lead us to the girl, the red bow in her hair, the simple expression of innocence—so that I’ve ended up including it in my portfolio.

A child on a Glasgow street, she reminds us why we’ve tasked our world leaders to gather nearby and hammer out an agreement to limit climate change. She is emblematic of our future. We do this for her.

Categories
Street Photography

Scary Hallowe’en Photo

Hauling a clothes rack up Augusta Avenue in Toronto's Kensington Market.

I shot this photo in beforetimes. You can tell. No one is wearing a mask.

It was just before Hallowe’en in 2019. Ah, we were so young, so naive. We didn’t have a care in the world. We had no idea what scary things lurked just beyond the horizon.

This year, I’m dressing up as an anti-vaxxer. I’m leaving the mask at home. That’s the scariest costume I can think of.

Categories
Street Photography

Seeing Red

Person stands on sidewalk wearing a maple leaf suit to promote a tax preparation service

By its association with blood, red is the colour of life. Paradoxically, red is also the colour of death because we rarely see blood except when it has been spilled.

In a roundabout way, red is also the colour of equality. We learn this from one of Shakespeare’s most marginalized characters. Shylock cries out: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Pierce the skin and what you find underneath is remarkably democratic.

Red has the longest wavelength of any colour on the visible spectrum (620-750 nm) which means, ironically, that it has the lowest level of energy. I say “ironically” because, when we set aside our scientific bias and examine matters from the more useful perspective of human emotions, we find that red is associated with high-energy feelings, like anger and passion. If we want to provoke a bull, we wave a red cape. If we want to evoke sexual passion, we put a woman in a red dress and call her Carmen. Bizet’s opera would have been considerably different if he had called it Violet; it would have been the story of a depressed banker.

Red is also the colour which appears on the flag of the country I call home. This is not so surprising given that Canada is one of the most sanguine countries in the world (as least by reputation). My use of the word “sanguine” is deliberate. According to medieval medicine, a person whose humour is dominated by blood (sanguinity) is cheerful and happy (like a good Canadian). And that happiness extends to happiness in bed too. Sexual passion.

I’m not sure how passionate a person has to be to stand around in a maple leaf suit trying to persuade people to use a tax preparation service. I’m guessing not much. Unless the pay is really good.

Categories
Street Photography

Orange is the new um Orange

Graffiti on concrete wall near the Bloor Street East overpass at Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto

When I was a kid in art class, I learned that you make orange by mixing red and yellow paints. As my art teacher told me, red and yellow are primary colours, and when you mix them, you get a secondary colour. With words like primary and secondary, what I took from his lesson was that orange is a lesser colour, maybe parasitic on the more legitimate colours. It has taken me a lifetime to undo that bias and give orange the recognition it deserves.

Part of the reason we don’t acknowledge orange as a colour in its own right is that, for centuries, at least in the English language, we didn’t have a word for it. In a book called On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, we learn that people used to describe the colour associated with wavelengths of 590 – 620 nm as red-yellow or yellow-red. It wasn’t until the people of England were introduced to a certain citrus fruit that the word “orange” began to describe things that share the fruit’s colour. And it wasn’t until the beginning of the 18th century that the word “orange” was used to denote the colour itself. So, yes, orange the fruit came before orange the colour and not the other way around. Just imagine what would have happened if people in England were introduced to the pumpkin first.

Categories
City Life

Beating the Drum for Yellow

Yellow Drummers march through Toronto's Bloor/Avenue Road intersection

Yellow shares the middle of the visible spectrum with green. Hovering somewhere between 570 and 590 nm, its wavelength is just a little longer and its energy just a little less than green’s.

Yellow is bright, sunny, uplifting. It is the colour of brilliant morning sunlight, the colour of a cracked egg sizzling on the frying pan, the colour of bumble bees spreading pollen through fields of goldenrod.

Despite the feelings of optimism that yellow can engender, it simultaneously holds negative meanings. A coward is yellow, refusing to face duty and preferring instead to flee.

Yellow has long been associated with a racist trope. The Chinese in particular, and Asians generally, have been called yellow. Since the end of the 19th century, Western political forces have toyed with the trope of the Yellow Peril as a way to manipulate anxiety and to galvanize public opinion. Donald Trump is only the latest in a long line of demagogues to leverage Western racism in this way.

Whenever I use my photography to celebrate the colour yellow, I hope, in some small way, to push back against these tiresome tropes.

Categories
Street Photography

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Walking up Yonge Street towards College Street while dressed all in green

The title for today’s post comes, of course, from Kermit the Frog, who faced discrimination for the colour of his skin. Amphibians have faced such discrimination since the first tiny tadpole sprouted legs and crawled from the primordial slime onto dry land.

Martians face similar discrimination as, historically, they’ve been known as “little green men.” Oddly, feminists have tended to ignore the sexism embedded in the “little green men” stereotype. When you think about it, though, there’s no reason little green women couldn’t be the ones who invade planet Earth. Maybe they need space for themselves because they’re sick of living with all those little green sexist bastards.

Vulcans have green blood. Ask a phlebotomist. It’s one of the first things they learn in Phlebotomy 101.

Ever since Othello killed poor Desdemona, we’ve called jealousy the “green-eyed monster.”

And people can be “green with envy” as Anne Shirley discovers when she dyes her hair.

Green is the colour of money, at least in America.

The colour green falls in the range of wavelengths from 495 to 570 nm on the visible spectrum of light. There is some debate about where blue ends and green begins but given the passion some people feel for such distinctions, I prefer to avoid this controversy altogether.

Personally, I am partial to green. In fact, we named my daughter “Green” but in Japanese because it sounds much more delightful as a Japanese word–Midori.

Categories
Street Photography

Feeling Blue

Walking outside the Royal Alexandra Theatre, 260 King Street West, Toronto

Picasso had a blue period.

The blues is a genre of music that takes its name from an emotional state.

Mild depression is a case of the blues. The cure is to sit on your stoop and play a guitar.

Beginning sometime around World War I, blue started to be associated with being a boy.

Shades of blue have wavelengths between 380nm and 500nm.

Pyroflatulence or flatus ignition (setting light to your farts) is commonly known as a blue angel.

Becoming a blue man can take from 10 weeks to 2 years. However, if you’re in a hurry, you can become a blue man by falling through ice in the middle of winter.

Categories
Street Photography

What’s The Story

One man accosts another man in Toronto's Dundas Square

I have no idea what’s going on in this photograph. I had parked myself in the southwest corner of Toronto’s Dundas Square, framing a shot and watching as people moved through the frame. It’s a bit like setting a trap and waiting to see what wildlife I can capture. Eventually, these two men walked through my frame and I shot a burst of about 10 stills.

Even though I was within spitting distance of the pair, I have no idea what was passing between the two of them. The guy to the left is wearing a shirt decorated in cannabis leaves. He holds a lighter in his left hand and a cigarette in his right hand. He’s saying something to the guy on the right, waving his left arm as if he’s trying to get the other man’s attention. It’s impossible to hear what he’s saying because there is loud music blaring nearby and because the fountains are splashing water.

The guy on the right is eating a hot dog and continues to walk, either not hearing or deliberately ignoring the man on the left. Is the man on the left trying to sell him something? Drugs, maybe? Is he uttering a racial slur? There’s no way to know simply by staring at the photograph.

I like it when my photographs defy my expectations for them as documentation or evidence. I like them best when they prove to be documentation of nothing. Or documentation of ambiguity. At most, they are evidence of an unknowability at the heart of human experience. We really don’t know what’s going on in any of it.

Categories
Street Photography

Text and Photographs

Poster on utility pole: rental ad titled Husband Abandoned

Certain photography purists insist that text should never mix with photographs, not inside the frame of a photograph, and most certainly not as commentary alongside the photograph. Text is text. Images are images. As I understand it, their reasoning is that if an image can’t speak for itself then it doesn’t deserve our attention. Text is a crutch for second-rate work.

I’m not sure how these purists answer Marshall McLuhan who, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, reminds us that text is a visual medium. Font designers understand this, as do layout and advertising designers. But, in the world of photography, text is somehow parasitic to the truly visual.

Obviously, I’m not a purist. I devote an entire website called nouspique to my textual infidelities. Maybe I have loose morals.

As an aside, today’s featured image is an anomaly because it’s black and white. It had no choice because I shot it with black and white Kodak T400 film on my little Yashica rangefinder.