Tag: Umbrella

Categories
Street Photography

A Month of Nothing but Black and White Photographs

I went through a street photography phase where I made nothing but black and white photos. There is a massive bias on photo-sharing sites towards black and white photographs. If I post a black and white photograph on Instagram with a #bnw hashtag, I get far more traffic than when I post colour photos. Black and white is “real” street. Colour is for wannabes and Joel Meyerowitz.

I expect the bias goes back to the days before colour film existed. Early masters of street photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson had only black and white film to work with and look at what they produced! Clearly, colour film isn’t a necessary condition of great photos. The convention continued long after colour film became widely available, at first because it was more expensive and fussier to develop, and later because … Well, just because. That’s what it means to be a convention.

Here we are in the age of digital sensors where there’s no cost difference based on the colour values we assign to a given pixel. One would think that in such an environment the bias against colour photography would evaporate. But no. It’s as prevalent as ever. Now cameras come with black and white settings so you can pretend you’re shooting with black and white film. Or, you can convert your colour images to black and white in post, either through apps on your phone or through fancy software packages like Photoshop or Lightroom or through plugins like Nik Effects or Luminar.

The only thing we can say for certain about the decision to shoot black and white is that it is no longer a technical or financial decision. Photographers have shifted the decision into other spheres, like aesthetics and politics. And so, for the month of June, I will present black and white images with commentary about why, sometimes, it might be preferable to do things the old way. Not always. But sometimes.

Categories
City Life

Green Umbrella

An upended green umbrella lies on the damp path beside Rosedale Valley Road while in the distance, obscured by fog, a bridge spans the valley.
Foggy morning in Rosedale Valley, Toronto

When I was a child, I was afraid of umbrellas because, viewed in a certain way, with their eight ribbed supports, they reminded me of spiders. Why would I want to hold a spider over my head? What if the umbrella collapsed and all the spider legs folded over my face? I imagined myself in the clutches of a malicious umbrella, waving my hands over my head, unable to see, running into the street and mowed down by a passing garbage truck. Long before the movie, Alien, there was my imagination breathing life into all the terrors of the modern world.

I once believed that my passage into adulthood would relieve me of my childhood terrors. My imagination would settle itself: a thing is just a thing, and not invested with terrors beyond itself. In a sense, that’s true. I’ve never once been attacked by a malicious umbrella and so my childhood fears have subsided.

However, my adult life is not without fears all its own. And like my childhood fears, my adult fears arise from an overactive imagination. I see a broken and discarded umbrella splayed on the ground while a garbage truck trundles past, and I imagine all the umbrellas that have ever lived since the invention of the umbrella. Billions upon billions of them heaped in a pile of dead umbrellas. Umbrella mountain.

I imagine the flimsy frames of unreclaimed metal, the plastic latches, the nylon fabric fading in the sunlight. In time, the elements work away at the monstrous pile of waste, dissolving bits of the metal, breaking the nylon fabric into microplastics, all of it washing toxic into the water table and borne from there into the hydrologic cycle. In a way, this is a horror far worse than anything springing from my childhood imagination. This is more like FrankenUmbrella: a billion billion arachnid creatures flip over onto their spindly legs and scuttle down from their high mountain on a long march against their creators.

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

Pikachu Lamborghini

Bloor Street West in front of Holt Renfrew

This is a followup to my previous post which featured a photograph of a tent on the Mink Mile, with its juxtaposition of conspicuous wealth and extreme poverty. I was walking along the same stretch of road during an ice storm when I saw twenty-something shoppers exit Holt Renfrew while a valet pulled to the curb in their bright yellow Pikachu Lamborghini. In light of the fact that a two minute walk to the south will take you to multiple shelters and community hubs while a five minute walk to the west will take you to a soup kitchen, I find moments like this obscene. And on this particular day, when an ice storm produced hazardous driving conditions, the moment descended from obscenity to idiocy.

It came as a surprise to me to discover that not everyone shares my worldview. At the time I made the photo, I posted it on Twitter, and unlike my usual practice, I poked the hornet’s nest (which, it turns out, is the only way you get any traffic on that or any platform). I wrote: “Trust brats take their Pikachu Lamborghini out for a spin in an ice storm.” A sample of the comments that came back:

“brats” just because of their choice of car in this weather? smh. #CheckYourselfBeforeYouWreckYourself

Wow, the comments on here. Some people obviously are VERY wealthy. It happens, and good for them. I LOVE Pikachu #Pokemon

Haters gonna hate

Some comments were more neutral, observing that a Lamborghini has all wheel drive and a low centre of gravity so handles well in adverse weather. Not really on point but, hey, this is social media.

There is something missing from the thread, perhaps because it’s difficult for people to identify what isn’t represented in a photograph but nevertheless present. In this case, what isn’t represented but nevertheless present, is the great horde of the exploited which necessarily hovers in the shadows just beyond the light that shines on conspicuous wealth. If you squint your eyes and look a little more closely, you will see it.

Categories
Street Photography

Cycling on Queen Street with Umbrella

Person cycles down Queen Street West while holding an umbrella

I’m grateful I live in a city where it is possible for people to be unafraid to live as they are. It isn’t perfect, of course. Wherever they are, people will always struggle to negotiate with grace the challenges of difference. But here, at least, I witness more moments of grace than not. That leaves me free to notice little details I might otherwise miss: a yellow pepper in the basket, a plastic Dumbo the Elephant fixed to the handlebar.