People in Toronto are fortunate because the city has grown up over a network of ravines that provide easy escape from the usual urban traumas of concrete and vertigo.
Tag: Black & White
Miasma
Before there were germs, there was miasma. Bad air. Billows rolling off the bogs and fens. The stench of swamp gas. The rot of ferns and trees fallen to decay in stagnant pools. Fetid. Rancid. Odoriferous.
Canada Geese In Fog
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.
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.
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.
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.
Covid-19 Self-Isolation Self-Portraits
I think it was Jean Mohr who recommended that all serious photographers produce a self-portrait at least once a month. I can’t locate the source of the quote, so I don’t know the reasons for his recommendation. However, I can come up with some reasons on my own.
Covid-19 in Toronto – Early Days
In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimates the inhabits of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”.
A Backward Glance
Far from the dispassionate observing eye, I am part of the scene I photograph and equally the subject of other people’s observations. Sometimes, my presence provokes their curiosity, at other times, their hostility.
Film vs Digital
I am as happy with the images I make with film as with my DSLR cameras. To me, these formats represent different strategies. The more strategies I use, the more opportunities I give myself to make varied and interesting photographs.
Five Days Gone, by Laura Cumming
Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child, by Laura Cumming When Elizabeth Cumming was 60 years old, she discovered that, as a young child, she had been kidnapped. In 1929, when she was only three years old, someone had lured her from the beach at Chapel St. Leonards, the Lincolnshire…
Filmores Hotel
As I continued to shoot, I heard a woman’s voice immediately to my right: Stop shooting! I ignored the voice and kept shooting. Stop taking photographs this instant.
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge
Every now and then, Kylo Ren made an appearance accompanied by two stormtroopers. Notwithstanding the park’s ban on guns—even toy guns—the stormtroopers carried blasters and swaggered, stiff-torsoed, like they were US Marines.