They are obnoxious. They remind me of city neighbours who go at one another across balconies. They honk louder than city cars. They’re filthy. They carpet the shoreline in green knots of shit.
Category: Heart
The category, Heart, is for posts that make us feel.
Photographing What Is Not There
A photograph is an instance, not an aggregate. A photograph is an anecdote, not a trend. A photograph is a rumour, not a fact.
Story: An Elementary Solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem
Barnabas Moynahan woke from his coma. Nurse Lydia was the only person to witness the moment. She was standing at the foot of his bed and was staring at his eyes when they flickered open. Everyone important had gone home for the day, so Nurse Lydia had no one to tell.
Wear A Face Covering
I used to think masks were for badasses, protesters during the G20 summit who didn’t want to get ID’d by police, or graffiti artists trying to hide from surveillance cameras. Now, masks are what sensible people wear, like Birkenstocks or sunscreen.
Exercise in the Age of Self-Isolation
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
Toronto Pride 2020
Thanks to Covid-19, all major Pride events in Toronto (at least those requiring a city permit) have been cancelled. Like the rest of the world, Pride Toronto has gone virtual.
Paint the City Black
In an initiative called Paint The City Black, 40 graffiti artists from the GTA and Montreal have gathered in Graffiti Alley to support the Black Lives Matter movement with murals
Retail’s Sudden Demand for Plywood
The history of Toronto retail in 2020 will be framed in terms of carpentry (forgive the pun). A threat appears and the immediate response is to cover all the windows with plywood to keep marauding hoards from smashing things.
Story: Dermatitis Herpetiformis
Tom and George sat on the low stone wall and watched how the tear gas, looking for all the world like tufts of cotton, scudded along the street and vanished through the trees in the park.
Matthew Hayley #MentalHealthIsVisible
It was strange going out with my camera this morning. I feel like a bear crawling out from hibernation. The light seems too bright. And, god, I’m hungry.
Sleeping Rough in the Time of Covid-19
It’s easy to overlook the possibility that medical guidance is entrenched within or is an expression of middle-class values. But those things we expect of people—self-isolation, social distancing, masks, hand-washing—are not possible for many people.
Covid-19, God, and Aliens
The longer I listened to him, the more I felt like Woody Allen talking to Annie Hall’s younger brother (Christopher Walken) at the family dinner when he cut him off and said: “I’m due back on the planet Earth.”
Suffering Photography
I grew up in the chilly arms of the Protestant work ethic which is stunningly devoid of grace. You can only deserve what you merit. In the photographic world, that means an image can’t be truly good unless the photographer suffered in its making.
Pale Fire
If the scene suggests a story, it isn’t for me to advance it; that task falls to the viewer. My work was done the instant I released the shutter.
Bathed In Luxury
Bathed In Luxury. This is the tagline of a new condominium residence and hotel under construction on Bloor Street East. I struggle with the word luxury. I struggle with the way it’s used.