Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
A strange literalism has infected our world. We have blinded ourselves to the distinction between a thing and the representation, between a person and the image. This has produced perhaps the most egregious erasure of all—the erasure of a numinous surplus that inheres in all beings. Thus the seemingly innocuous act of tearing a poster from a board becomes an act of violence.
I hear only the sloop of my paddle through the water; the fog has silenced everything else. I’m headed to an island. I don’t know if the island has an official name, but I’ve taken to calling it Bird Island because, when I went there one afternoon earlier in the week, I found it occupied by a flock of Canada geese. Or is that a gaggle?
Turn away from famous sculptures and buildings. Turn away from brides in all their consumer-driven finery. Turn away from the terror and delight that draws us to scenes cordoned off by police tape. Instead, seek out the ordinary. Celebrate the mundane. Reveal beauty in the quotidian.
While in Rome, we did as the Romans do, and lined up to file past the body as it lay in state. Although not Roman Catholic, it seemed necessary. After all, how often do you get to see a dead Pope? If I had closed my eyes and focused solely on the mood of the crowd, I would have sworn that I was standing in line for Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean.
The first question that entered my head was: What happened to the roof? As a Canadian boy, I had no experience of medieval anything. My experience of sacred architecture was pretty much confined to churches built in the postwar suburban boom.
It is arguable that in the summer of 1978 the whole world felt an innocent pause, a shining moment in time when people of the West could pretend there was nothing pressing at the doorstep. Saigon had fallen which meant American and Vietnamese kids weren’t getting killed anymore. A peanut farmer was President of the US of A. Canada’s leader was a playboy/media darling who seemed to swing the world by its tail.
Along with thousands of my colleagues, I pound the pavement, responding only to those scenes which hold precisely the features that confirm my view of what makes a good photograph, repeating the process until I have ground my bias into a cheap cliché.
A poem to mark July 4th, 2018, and the celebration of American Independence, or whatever. As a Canadian, I find it hard to give a flying fabrication.
Le Grand Continental is a 30 minute line dance inspired production choreographed by Montreal’s Sylvain Émard.
This year’s theme was Until We’re Safe, acknowledging, among other things, the murders committed by Bruce McArthur. It was disheartening to see a group of “Christian” freaks near the end of the parade standing on the north side of Dundas at Victoria Street.
There are two kinds of people: those who share their umbrella, and those who do not.
Postmodernity is a sensibility that refuses to inhere in an object. Instead, its vague presence floats through the interstices of the scene. It reminds me of the rotten-egg smell that wafted through my elementary school when classmates set off stink bombs.
For legal reasons, I don’t want to come right out and say “Doug Ford was a drug dealer”, but there are so many stories circulating in the GTA smog that people generally take it as a given: Doug Ford’s claims of business acumen and entrepreneurship stem largely from his experience dealing drugs.
For me, as a street photographer, shooting a homeless person is an ambivalent act. It plays along a line of tension between the need to document lived conditions and the need to protect our most vulnerable citizens from exploitation. As our missionary forebears demonstrated, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between compassion and colonization.
Following my personal theory that “scary-looking” dudes are sometimes lonelier than the rest of us precisely because they are “scary-looking” and are therefore dying to talk to people, I asked if he’d mind me taking some shots. Once again, my theory seems to have been validated. He smiled. His face opened up. We started to talk. His name is Ben.