Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Carrying a camera to a museum, I feel a kinship to the curators who develop the exhibits. How do we classify a vase or a bust or a coin? By geography? Historical period? Influences? Provenance? Materials? How does it speak to us? What do we discover about ourselves when we examine it? And how do we think ourselves into the future? Something similar happens with my photographs.
This is Atta. I met him in Dundas Square near the Yonge/Dundas intersection. Approaching through the crowds, this is what I saw: a slender man in a hoodie, sometimes still, sometimes moving with an exaggerated animation. He was laying pieces of paper on the pavement and fixing them in place with objects. Gusts blew the pieces of paper away and Atta chased after them through the square.
Walking up Bay Street from King, I saw two guys sitting on the sidewalk. It was rush hour and people were pouring from the buildings to make their dash down to Union Station. At first, I didn’t think anything of it: two more kids begging on the streets. But as I passed, I did a double-take. A rat had climbed onto the one kid’s shoulder. I stopped and knelt beside him: “Is that what I think it is?”
One day, my photography habit is going to turn me into a bona fide sociologist. I’d love to conduct an investigation of religiosity on the streets. While mainstream media keep harping at the secular/humanist/agnostic shift of the mainstream-cultures/middle-classes/people-who-pull-twenty-dollar-bills-from-their-pockets, that shift doesn’t appear to have touched those who live in the margins.
Scott’s been sick these past few months and has dropped 70 lbs. He says he could afford to lose the weight, but not like this. Not so fast. He shows me his teeth. They’re falling out. There are three left on the bottom and their roots are exposed. He says he’s given up crack. He threw out his pipes and shit last week and he’s never going back.
Facebook makes it impossible to privilege one discursive mode over another. (The only thing that’s privileged is Facebook itself.) In the same way, Rob Ford never woke one morning and said to himself: Hey, I’m gonna be a postmodern mayor. It just happened that way.
I met Ross on College Street in front of Fran’s. He asked me directions to Women’s College Hospital. He said he had an x-ray booked there. He’d just come into town from Saskatchewan.
I met this woman in the space south of Trinity Lutheran Church in the St. James Town area. She doesn’t feed the birds and squirrels every day, but when it’s cold she makes a point of giving them something to eat. She comes with bird seed, peanuts and, in case the squirrels don’t like the peanuts, she brings walnuts.
I wanted to send him a copy of this shot but he couldn’t think of how that would work. In the last month, he’s had two cell phones stolen, plus he can’t use his email account anymore. His ex-girlfriend is a computer programmer and, like, psycho. She’s hacked all his passwords. He’s got to figure out something else for email.
Was out Sunday afternoon with my camera and, dull weather notwithstanding, people were chattier than usual. Maybe it has to do with the approach of Christmas. Or with the fact that Christmas is still far enough away that people aren’t feeling stressed by it.
Mike invited me to a party. He said there’d be a girl there. The whole thing would be recorded on video. Streamed on the internet. I could wear a mask if I liked. I don’t know why, but while he told me this, I was wondering who he voted for in the last federal election. I didn’t ask, of course. I didn’t want to make him feel awkward.
I met Amry outside a dental office in Cabbagetown. He was leaning against a poster of a big perfect smile, smoking a cigarette.
Freddy was sitting on a bench in Allen Gardens tuning his guitar. I went up to him and asked if I could take some photos of him doing his thing. A couple hours later, after (among other things) a trip to a Timmies where I bought him a coffee, we parted company on Carlton Street.
There’s a karmic quality to street photography: what the gods take away with one hand, they grant with the other. I walked west along Queen, squinting into the late afternoon sun, and saw a man in silhouette leaning against a wall and bumming a light from a passerby.
Congratulations to Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals for their stunning election victory last night. To celebrate the ouster of King Stephen, I offer a bit of nostalgia: some photos I took of Justin’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. I think it was during the 1979 election campaign.