Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I’m not much of a street photographer. Purists say street photography requires a kind of invisibility. You have to capture people unposed. The object is to produce an authentic documentation of life on the street. You’re like a birder in a blind. Or an anthropologist in camouflage. Personally, I find that hard to do. Inevitably, I end up connecting with the people I photograph.
Mixed media artist, David Hynes, has a conundrum. Maybe you’ve seen it. I saw it in the Distillery District as part of Panamania. It’s a canoe with raw hide wrapped taut across the gunwales to form a giant drum.
I read an article (I can’t remember where) that suggested the selfie stick is no longer simply a fad; it’s gone to the next level and has become a cultural phenomenon, whatever that means. I think what the author was getting at is that its presence in our daily activities is symptomatic of deeper cultural rumblings. It captures something of the zeitgeist.
Last night saw the close of the PanAm Games in Toronto. Photographically speaking, they’ve been kind of hard to miss; they’ve formed part of the city’s backdrop for months now.
I was shooting in Callaghan Lane, near Dundas & Parliament, when a guy spotted me and came over to chat. Before he went on his way, I asked if he would pose for me.
Today marks the first anniversary of my first post on this blog. More than 200 posts later, I find myself in a reflective mood. Here are a few random (and eerily interrelated) observations which may be of use to fellow photographers, but more generally to anyone engaged in an artsy pursuit.
In Toronto, on the corner of Avenue Road and Davenport, there is a billboard advertising the Galerie de Bellefeuille in Montreal. It’s positioned so that people driving their Maseratis north from Yorkville will stop at the lights and stare at work by the gallery’s latest darling. Currently, it’s photographer David Drebin whose work you cannot find by following the URL on the billboard because somebody fucked it up.
Here’s a collection: 20 of my best shots from this year’s Toronto Pride week. Most are from the parade on Sunday afternoon. You can view more in a flickr album here.
I observe Toronto’s Pride Week the same way I observe Remembrance Day: with a great deal of skepticism. I want to remember. I want to remember how people struggled to carve out a space for themselves where they can live with a measure of dignity. I want to remember friends and family who succumbed to HIV/AIDS.
My initial assessment of the 5DS was that it would be best for measured, reflective, slow photography, the kind of photography that requires you to set the camera on a tripod, carefully compose the shot, turn on mirror lock-up, pull out your remote, take a deep breath, then release the shutter. That initial assessment may have been premature.
It seems everyone who has their hands on a 5DS has been posting samples so people can download giant image files (50 megapixels) to see how giant an image file can get. I’ll offer a couple images here (just to get it out of my system), then side step the whole giant image thing which, after all, is nothing more than a photographic pissing contest.
A selection of signs in downtown Toronto: I don’t see that a psychic has much to complain about in this situation; she should have foreseen the problem before she set up business. Also, I would have thought psychics are better spellers than this. Couldn’t she “travel” to the library & consult the OED before she…
I recently bought a used copy of a photo book, Nowhere In Particular, by a medical doctor/TV and theatre director/photographer named Jonathan Miller. It features photos of rooftops, corrugated sheet metal, bits of canvas, and (mostly) palimpsests of weathered posters and torn advertising.
This is a selection of photos I shot while walking along Bloor Street & chatting with whomever I bumped into. There are times when the camera becomes a tool not so much for making images as for setting aside the customary barriers between strangers and enabling connection.
The production of ever-higher resolution cameras may be understood as a commercial answer to late modernism’s disaffection with the limitations of reality and its desire for the “really real”.