Tag: Winter

Categories
Architecture

Honest Eds

People cross Bloor Street during a snow storm in front of Honest Eds department store.
Honest Ed's Department Store, Bathurst/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

I’ve devoted the month of May to images that suggest ephemeral concerns, so it’s natural to suppose that when I present an image of an iconic Toronto landmark, now demolished, you might suppose I’m waxing nostalgic for a place I miss. It’s true. I miss the famous discount department store founded by Ed Mirvish. I miss the vibe it brought to the neighbourhood. I miss how it stood as an acknowledgement of the people who live here. The real people. The immigrants and students. It was absolutely analog. It resisted slick branding and social media campaigns. Sometimes that meant it was tacky as all shit. But, hey, if polished international brands are what you’re after, walk a kilometre east to the mink mile for your Gucci handbags and your Rolex watches.

But I’m not an overly nostalgic person. I’m more concerned with what’s in front of me than with what lies behind. In the case of Honest Eds, what lies in front is what towers overhead. Westbank and The Peterson Group purchased the site in 2014 and while they acknowledge the history of Mirvish Village and will include signs of that history in their new development, it is after all one more of countless residential/commercial developments popping up like mushrooms all over the city.

Toronto is a boom town. That boom started with the first Québec referendum when Montreal businesses, most notably financial institutions, fled the province for Toronto. It got a boost during the 2008 financial crisis when the world discovered that Canada’s more tightly regulated financial institutions, now all located in Toronto, had little exposure to dodgy credit instruments and so had weathered the storm relatively unscathed. More than ever, Toronto became an attractive place to park capital. Among other things, that influx of capital translated into new condo starts so that, by 2012, there were 148 cranes operating in the city. That pace has only accelerated. In 2021, there were 208 cranes operating in Toronto, almost as many as the combined total (276) of the other 14 North American cities in the survey.

Apart from the chaos of perpetual construction and infrastructure that can’t keep pace, the big downside of living in a skyscraper nursery is that all the buildings start to look the same. I find myself walking down a new condo canyon, all the familiar landmarks obliterated, and I can’t tell where I am anymore. I could be on one street. I could be on another street. Who knows? They all look the same to me.

I commend a short article by Aaron Betsky, “The Case for a New International Style.” He notes the trend to generic design in contemporary architecture influenced “by global flows of finance and culture, as well as by similarities in methods of production and standards”. While the influence of safety concerns arising from the pandemic has yet to play out in large projects, Betsky calls on the building industry to resist the temptation to what he calls “relentless value engineering”.

A word that comes to mind is “sterility.” While this word suggests a positive value in the context of health care and epidemiology with clean surfaces and filtered air, as an aesthetic value, it is soul deadening. I fear that much of Toronto’s built space is sterile in this latter sense. What I miss most about the demolition of Honest Eds is the way it disrupted urban space. It was the opposite of sterile.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Introverted Landscape

Sometimes a landscape presents to me as extraverted. At other times a landscape will approach me with a cautious reserve.

My encounters with landscape remind me a lot of my encounters with people. I think of all those times I’ve sat in a meeting and there’s that one person who goes on and on, and in the midst of it their bluster seems persuasive, but afterwards, when I’m reviewing the minutes, I realize that, despite the torrent of words, the person has said nothing of substance. Meanwhile, there is that one person who sits quietly in the corner, unable to get a word in edgewise, who later sends an email or phones me, and I discover that their head is brimming with helpful ideas and creative solutions.

Landscapes can be like that. Some landscapes smack me full in the face with an immediate impact and I say: Wow! A lot of sunset shots affect me in that way. Then I look more closely and realize there isn’t a whole lot going on in the image; it’s the photographic equivalent of a vapid blond Fox news anchor. Or, to borrow a phrase from MacBeth, it is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meanwhile, lurking in the corner of my lightbox is an understated image that doesn’t seize my immediate attention but nevertheless lingers in my memory.

Try an experiment sometime. Take an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white paper and mark it with a single black dot, then show it to friends and ask them what they see on the page. Almost invariably, they will point to the dot while ignoring the overwhelming whiteness of the page. When we look passively, we are keyed to see certain things, like bright colours and stark contrasts. Only when we look actively do we begin to notice subtlety and nuance.

Categories
Abstract

Meta-Photography

This could be a skirt. This could be a pony tail. In fact it’s a massive sheet of plastic pulled together and knotted around two stakes in the ground. To my way of seeing, this is a meta-photograph. We tend to think of meta-photography as photographs of people making photographs. But in this instance I’ve made a photograph of something doing what photographs do (metaphorically speaking).

This is a photograph of something drawing our attention to a focal point. The lines of the plastic remind us of the way light functions when it passes through a lens. All the lines settle on the stake in the same way that light passes through a camera lens and settles on the image sensor, or through the lens of an eye and settles on the retina.

When I was a kid, I was severely near-sighted. Apparently I have long eyeballs which means that light focuses in front of my retina and makes distant objects appear blurry. When I was in my early thirties, I had laser eye surgery to reshape my lenses. The result was stunning. However, the ophthalmologist cautioned that in time I would become far-sighted as part of the natural aging process. True enough, whenever I use an LCD screen to frame a photograph now, I have to stop everything and fish around in my pockets for my reading glasses.

Despite the analogy to eyesight, photography is nothing like natural eyesight. The focal point of a photograph is positioned front to back and the distance in front of and behind that point which remains in focus is called depth of field. But from side to side, and up and down, everything on the same plane as the focal point remains pretty much in focus.

Eyes don’t work that way. Our eyes focus light in a narrow range. The rest of our visual field, from side to side, and up and down (our peripheral vision), blurs and becomes increasingly blurred to the edges. Each eye also has a blind spot. But our brain compensates for this so that we are rarely aware either of the blind spot or of the fact that most of our visual field is blurred. Most of the time, we have no way to tell how much of our visual perception is presented to us courtesy of our eyes and how much courtesy of our brains. However, it’s fair to say that without brains to compensate for the limitations of our eyes, we would see far less than we do.

Because contemporary photographic technologies remove many of the limitations of seeing, it’s tempting to let our cameras do all the work. But when we do this, we forget that the real work of photography isn’t seeing, but looking. And the camera that can do our looking for us hasn’t been invented yet.

Categories
Country Life

Shoveling the Pond

Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

A 13 second exposure on the evening of a full moon while the clouds scud overhead. My brother-in-law is shoveling the pond so the kids can go skating. He wears an LED head lamp and, when I ask him to hold still, miraculously manages to keep the head lamp still for the full 13 seconds. When he’s done shoveling, he’ll augur a hole in the ice and pump water from underneath to create a smooth glassy surface. This is how you do it when you don’t have a zamboni.

It strikes me that this is an entirely northern scene. I have cousins who grew up in Florida. I remember one of them telling me how she had never seen snow until she was in grade 5 or 6 and there was a cold snap and freak snowfall. Her school let the kids out so they could play in the snow. I don’t imagine there was any accumulation, but at least the kids could run in it and catch flakes on their tongues.

I’m amazed at how easy it is to take for granted my own view of things. That’s one of the reasons I like to follow other photographers on social media. They shake me out of my complacency and remind me that mine is not the only way to see the world.

Shoveling the pond at night
Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON
Categories
Country Life

Frost on Old Maple Leaf

Frost on Maple Leaf Stem, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

During the past couple months, culminating with the “Freedom” Convoy and successive marches that use the pandemic as cover to promote extremist ideologies, I’ve witnessed regular displays of the Canadian flag co-opted in the service of hateful speech. The red and white, the maple leaf. People wrap themselves bodily in the flag and call themselves patriots, all the while turning the flag into yet another dog whistle for white supremacist tropes. I find it personally insulting that anyone should try to pass off this hate-mongering as patriotism.

To my way of thinking, patriotism grounds itself in gratitude. Like my dog whistling friends, I enjoy certain rights and freedoms, and for those I am grateful. But I’m more grateful for the fact that I am surrounded by people who, through their sense of duty, service, and social responsibility, safeguard my rights and freedoms. I express my gratitude by doing my part in turn to safeguard the rights and freedoms of those around me, including and perhaps most especially those who annoy me by wrapping themselves in the flag and saying things I contest.

The curious thing about the maple leaf that appears on the Canadian flag is that, of all the species of maple we could have chosen, we opted for the sugar maple. The leaf on the flag is a stylized representation of the sugar maple leaf. It calls to mind a practice—boiling sap to make syrup—that started on this land thousands of years ago. It reminds us of a gift—the gift of a specific knowledge—that Indigenous peoples freely shared with white settlers. And it points to something we have here in abundance, this sweetness that invariably brings us joy. Like our freedoms, it comes to us as a gift and needs to be acknowledged with gratitude.

One of the things that troubles me about these conversations is the way that patriotism gets passed off as a marker of personal identity. I am a white, cisgendered male who happens also to be … Canadian. However, history teaches us that what it means to be Canadian is tightly bound to the exercise of colonial power. It is contingent and rooted in stories of oppression. What’s more, as millions of refugees flee Ukraine, the rest of the world looks on and sees how nationality as a marker of personal identity can be snatched away in the blink of an eye.

The Ukraine people can console themselves with the certain knowledge that all powers fall and finally crumble to dust. Here in Canada, we deceive ourselves when we intimate that we are somehow exceptional. Like the maple leaf consumed by the morning frost, our cherished symbols lose their potency and their meanings fade. It may well be that of all possible markers of personal identity, national affiliation is the least stable.

There is an antidote to the feelings of instability that arise when we lose our grip on a shallow patriotism. The antidote is to acknowledge that, all along, we were asking the wrong question. We don’t invoke patriotism to answer the question: who am I? We invoke patriotism to answer the question: whose am I?

Frost forms on blades of grass.
Frost on Grass, Williams Farm, Wybridge, ON
Categories
Country Life

Tapping Out

Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

As with the maple trees each year, I find myself tapped out. I had thought I could sustain a series on maple syrup for the entire month of March. And while I have a lot of good syrup-related photographs I could share, I’ve run out of words to accompany them.

So, to borrow a word that’s become overused during the pandemic, I’m going to pivot. For the balance of the month, I will feature photographs of Williams Farm, the property that appears in all my earlier maple syrup photos. But these photos will treat non-syrup concerns. After all, the sap runs for only a few weeks each year. Things don’t suddenly stop the instant the last sap is boiled.

The first of my pivot images is a variation on an old theme. Visual artists love to play with the way trees cast shadows across the snow. I’ve seen paintings, woodcut prints, and of course photographs that explore the almost abstract variation of light and dark that bare trees produce in the winter time. However, I’ve always felt there is something missing from these images. There are no sap lines running from tree to tree. The sap lines produce a gossamer web through the forest that catches the early morning light.

Categories
Country Life

Maple Syrup Taffy

Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

I think it’s reasonable to suppose that maple taffy has been a staple of every maple syrup festival ever held since the dawn of time. You start by going outside with a shovel and you scoop up a big pile of snow. Look both ways first just to be sure local public health officials aren’t watching. Either that or use a really clean shovel. If you do get caught, you can always bribe the officials with a bottle of maple syrup. That’s how Doug Ford got Dr. Kieran Moore to say we don’t need masks indoors anymore.

After you’ve scooped up a gross of snow and laid it out on a flat surface like the hood of a car (Martha Stewart recommends a baking sheet), ladle lines of boiling maple syrup across the snow. As the cold snow causes the syrup to congeal, press a popsicle stick into one end of the syrup and roll the syrup into a ball around the end of the popsicle stick. Suck on the ball of cold maple syrup until the sugar makes you giddy.

Since we live in times that are simmering with conspiracy theories, let me throw one more into the pot. I think dentists have joined forces with maple syrup producers. If people bite down on maple taffy before it’s turned soft, it can cement top and bottom teeth together. As people open their mouths, it can yank out a tooth. That’s not so bad when you’re six and ready to lose a few teeth anyways. But it’s a matter of concern when you’re seventy-six and have no teeth to spare. If you’re worried for your teeth, best just to suck on the taffy and wait patiently for it to melt in your mouth. Keep the dentists poor.

I have a proposal: one day I’d like to set the world record for biggest ball of maple taffy. It would involve boiling an entire 140L drum of syrup, then rigging something on the back of a tractor so you could drizzle it as you drive back and forth in a snow-covered field. Meanwhile, someone would follow behind on a low flatbed trailer twirling a big pole through the congealing syrup. I wonder if there’s some way to automate this. Imagine the mouth you’d need to wrap your lips around that! We’d have to invite Mick Jagger as a guest of honour.

Eating maple taffy brings a smile to the face.
Categories
Country Life

When it comes to maple syrup you can’t just go with the flow

Installment #4 of my March series on Ontario maple syrup production:

In a previous post, I mentioned that, at Williams Farm, syrup collection relies on a combination of gravity and vacuum pumps. In other words, everything flows down to the lowest point on the property where it gets collected in a large tank. Unfortunately, the evaporator is in the barn and the barn is situated at the highest point on the property. That means whenever the tank is full, they have to pump the sap into a mobile tank and haul it uphill by tractor to the other end of the property where they empty it into another tank beside the barn.

This illustrates a couple important considerations. First, is the reliance on pumps which means that before each maple syrup season begins, it’s important to make sure all your pumps are in good working order. Second, it’s helpful if you know something about the movement of fluid through hoses and pipes, the kind of practical knowledge you’d need if you were a plumber. As you can see from the image below, we’re not talking about the sort of trickle you get through a garden hose; we’re talking about the sort of gusher you get when you’re filling a swimming pool.

Imagine swimming in a pool full of maple sap! It reminds me a bit of Homer Simpson swimming in a vat of Duff Beer. Well, not quite. Maple sap is diluted. Even so, some people tout the health benefits of drinking maple water and have packaged and branded it. Personally, I’d rather wait for the stuff that comes out the other end of the evaporator. I might not get enough to fill a swimming pool, but I should have enough to fill a hot tub. I’m sure soaking in maple syrup is good for the skin.

Maple sap pours from a hose into a tank before going to the evaporator.
Categories
Country Life

Liquid Gold: Ontario Maple Syrup

John Williams inspects sap lines in the sugar bush

This past month, we Canucks witnessed some dubious patriotism as people descended on the nation’s capital, honking horns and draping themselves in the flag. One morning, while eating my breakfast, it occurred to me that there must be less contentious ways to share with one another the Canadian experience. I gazed down at my plate of flapjacks slathered in pure maple syrup and said to myself: “I know just the thing!” I’ve never met a person who doesn’t love maple syrup. If we can’t set aside our differences to gather around an evaporator boiling 10,000 litres of sap while we draw the beautiful smell of wood smoke into our lungs, then there’s no hope for us.

And so, for the month of March, I share images that celebrate the joy of maple syrup. Given that Canada is responsible for more than 70% of the world’s maple syrup production, I think it’s fair to say that, even more so than hockey, this is a quintessentially Canadian experience.

I have an in at Williams Farm. My sister-in-law, Suzanne, and her husband, John, own a farm with a sugar bush in Wyebridge, Ontario. Every spring, they tap their sugar bush and neighbouring woodlots, and from that sap they produce somewhere north of 4,000 litres of maple syrup. Every spring, I show up with my camera to catch them working what to my eyes (and taste buds) seems a small miracle. It’s worth noting that, in addition to producing maple syrup, John is the executive director of the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers’ Association, helping advocate for the industry.

Join me, then, for the month of March as I share images that capture something of the process that turns tree sap into one of the most delicious foods ever invented. In the first two images of this series, we see John Williams inspecting sap lines to ensure their integrity and making repairs where needed.

Follow Williams Farm on Instagram.

Inspecting sap lines in the sugar bush.
Categories
Still Life

Snow-Covered Tulips

Snow-Covered Tulips, Bloor Street East, Toronto

This is the final image in my February series of winter scenes: tulips covered in snow. I shot this last spring. In our area, there had been an unseasonably warm snap early in March and it brought the spring flowers on early. When that happens, there’s always the risk of a late frost or snow. Fortunately, tulips are waxy and thick and that makes them resistant to the cold.

To my eyes, this photo straddle states, half in winter, half in spring. It looks backward and forward. It is renewed life after the dead of winter. And, perhaps most importantly, it is a dozen different clichés all rolled into one image for your convenience.

Speaking of clichés. Tomorrow I begin a fresh month-long series of photos devoted to that quintessential of Canadian clichés: maple syrup. Join me in the sugar bush at Williams Farm in Tay Township, Ontario where we will tap trees, boil sap, bottle syrup, and say “eh” a lot.

Categories
City Life

Toronto Waterfront

Shot from Canada Malting Silos

Here is the penultimate image from my February photo series: winter scenes. The water of Lake Ontario has frozen into large chunks that, with a little more cold weather, will coalesce into a single solid sheet of ice. A light appears on the horizon to the right side of the image. No, it is not a UFO; it’s an airplane coming in for a landing at Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island.

Like the island, the entire Toronto waterfront is built on landfill. The original shoreline was immediately south of the obviously named Front Street. Had I tried to take this photo more than 100 years ago, I would have found myself standing in 10 metres of water. And had I tried to take this photo 10,000 years ago, I would have found myself standing in 40 metres of water with the shoreline well out of the frame on the left side. Those were the days of the Iroquois shoreline when Lake Ontario was considerably larger than it is now.

It goes without saying that had I tried to take a photograph of this scene 10,000 years I ago, I wouldn’t actually be standing in 40 metres of water. That’s absurd. I would be standing in a boat that I had brought with me in my time machine. Whenever you’re going out to shoot, always be prepared. For me, that means bringing an extra time machine in my pack, just in case.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Abstract Forms In Snow – Evergreen Brick Works

Ice Forming on Pond, Don Valley Brick Works Park

A light dusting of snow settles over a pond as the surface water begins to congeal. This is the scene that greets me as I walk early in the season through Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works. Where the water has frozen, the snow remains intact; where the water is still more liquid than ice, the snow melts. The result is an abstract form that floats on the middle of the pond.

This image speaks to me of the liminal space that marks the transition between two different states. Liquid and solid. Autumn and winter. Warm and cold. When can we say the transition has happened? When can we say of a stretch of water that it is now definitively ice?

The space figured here speaks of the liminal space that marks larger transitions, too. Once, this was the site of a quarry (the Toronto Brick Works) that descended deep below grade. It was an industrial space with kilns that fired the bricks which still can be found in many of the city’s older buildings. More lately, it has become the site of a reclamation project aimed at returning the quarry to wetlands, creating a green space in the heart of the city. Is there a clear line we can draw between the industrial and the natural?

Extrapolating further, we can imagine this scene as emblematic of more global concerns. For example, what are we to make of that liminal space between whatever the world was before humans arrived on the scene and this state of affairs we have come to call the Anthropocene? Although experts tend to agree that the term, Anthropocene, is warranted, they disagree about when it “officially” began. Some say it began as soon as humans stopped living as nomads and settled into agrarian communities. Others say it began with the invention of nuclear weapons.

My personal take on the matter is that it makes no sense to draw a clear line. It is in our nature to occupy liminal spaces. We don’t want to live wholly in one state or another. We are neither the before nor the after. We are all about the transition.

Categories
City Life

An Ice Storm Transforms the Face of the World

Frozen Fruit

Unusual weather events can transform the familiar into the utterly alien. Winter stretches on and we grow accustomed to the same scene greeting us morning after morning from our window. The low light. The drab streets. Our world hardens into a frozen sameness. While this feeling is typical of Februaries, it is a feeling that has been compounded these last two years by the global pandemic, especially if we have been subject to lockdown or have felt anxious about going outdoors.

And then something happens that jolts us from our ossified view of the world. It grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us. That something can be a personal event: a near miss as we’re stepping off the curb, for example. Suddenly our heart races and it reminds us that we are alive after all. Or something that affects us all, like a major weather system that sweeps across the entire continent.

I remember how an ice storm struck the Toronto area in January of 2014. We haven’t had such a storm since then. Entire trees toppled under the sheer weight of the ice. Power lines came down. Nature inflicted on the city a terrible beauty.

On the morning after the storm had blown through, I stepped outside and was struck by how different the world looked. It occurred to me that I might live out the balance of my natural life and never again see the world in quite this way. And so I spent the whole day wandering, taking it all in, as if this might be the last day of my life.

Stop sign in ice storm with icicles dangling from the bottom.
Categories
City Life

Curved Roads in Winter

Yellow Creek Trail, Toronto

The ground is cold, but the asphalt path is still warm. The contrast in temperatures produces a corresponding contrast in the visual field. White remains at the edges of the path while the path reveals itself, snaking its dark line into the distance.

This is an apocalyptic scene. We tend to think of an apocalyptic scene as something dramatic, possibly associated with the end of the world, rivers of blood, lakes of fire, that sort of thing. But here I use the word in its original sense, the way ancient Greeks used it before early medieval religious nuts got their hands on the word and made a mess of it.

In classical Greek, the prefix ἀπό (apo) indicates a movement away from something, hence, its opposite. In this case, ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς (apocalypsis) denotes the opposite of being covered. In other words, uncovered or revealed. In classical Greek, there was nothing magical or catastrophic about apocalypsis. Presumably, it could refer to something as benign as playing peek-a-boo with a child. Or, in the case of my photograph, the appearance of a path when the snow melts.

For reasons I don’t understand, we’ve never been able to rescue the word from the fanatics who seized it. I wish there was a twelve step program for words that have grown dependent upon religious lunatics to give them a sense of cachet they don’t deserve. What’s wrong with being a modest word with no particular designs on the human imagination? There is a sense in which apocalypsis would reveal far more to us if it had less to do with revelation.

A path curves off to the distance. Nothing is revealed but the path itself. And we need nothing more than that simple curve to give us satisfaction.

Glen Manor Drive East and Pine Crescent, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Cycling in Winter

Cycling Through Flurries, Bloor Street, Toronto

I gave up cycling in the city after three run-ins with vehicles. The third time, I was passing a bus that had stopped to pick up some passengers. A tow truck tried to pass me while I was passing the bus and it clipped me with its wide rear view mirror, striking me between the shoulder blades. The glass in the mirror exploded all around my head and the impact shot me forward out in front of the bus as it was starting up. Two things worked in my favour: first, I was able to stay upright until I reached the curb; second, the bus driver saw me and stopped the bus, otherwise he might have run me down. But that was enough for me.

My previous run-in had been more serious, resulting in an overnight stay in an emergency ward and a major concussion. I wanted to get back to riding my bike. After all, cycling is one of the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It has the further benefit of taking up little space, an important consideration in urban settings. However, a third hit coupled with an increasingly confrontational attitude from many drivers sent my levels of anxiety through the stratosphere. I hung up my wheels and started walking everywhere.

I haven’t given up on cycling entirely. Not long ago, my wife and I went on an extended cycling tour of County Cork in the Republic of Ireland. In preparation, I had purchased a sexy pair of skin-tight shorts with padding in all the right places, and not wishing my purchase to go unused after our tour, I started wearing the shorts to the gym where I regularly sit on a stationary bicycle (which is technically a unicycle) and pretend I’m fleeing a horde of rabid zombies. I pedal like the wind, not that there’s any wind in a gym, but it gives me a good cardio workout. Most importantly, I haven’t crashed the stationary bicycle, not even once.