On Monday (Jan 17th), the skies opened up and dumped 33cm of snow on Toronto. Because the city tends to be a heat island, it doesn’t usually get much snow. Not since 1999 when mayor Mel Lastman called in the army have we had such a heap of the white stuff. Although a storm can be disruptive, if it isn’t too destructive, it can be a positive event. As I found on Monday, people were cheerful. It gave us something in common to talk about that wasn’t pandemic related. People smiled and—always a plus from a street portrait point of view—they were happy to pose for photos.
I was crossing Dundas when I noticed a camera raised and pointed in my direction. When I got to the other side of the street, I said: “Surely, you could find a more interesting subject than me.” He said: “Don’t call me Shirley.” No he didn’t. That’s silly. What he really said was that he didn’t actually take my photo because, as he was framing the shot, he noticed the camera slung around my neck. He doesn’t need photos of other photographers.
It’s a minor matter and nothing really hangs on it, but I disagree with his concern about shooting photographers. Given today’s prevalence of cameras, especially now that smartphones are delivering images of a reasonably high quality, I think it’s important to document what strikes me as a significant cultural shift. In about 1930, my grandmother paid $3 to buy a Kodak Eastman Box Brownie. She was a teenager then, and like teenagers of any age, she wanted to be in on this new thing. I’m sure if she could, she would have used it to take selfies. She might have shot a couple hundred photos when she bought it and virtually all of them are lost, but she contributed to the several millions of photos that people made that year. She proved to be an early participant in an exponential rise that will see people in 2022 collectively shoot an estimated 1.7 trillion photos. The sheer volume in play today suggests that this is something worth investigating.
In any event, I have no scruples about shooting people who carry cameras around their neck. Besides, I’m in close enough here that you can’t see the camera in any event.
