Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
A couple years ago, my wife and I sold our house in the suburbs and rented a condo downtown. It was an experiment. We wanted to test a different lifestyle. More evenings out. More amenities. More walking. Less cars. Less big box stores. Less cocooning.
I’m a relatively new member of the Toronto Camera Club which has been operating continuously since 1889 and is one of the larger camera clubs around. There are advantages to being big. One is that it draws decent speakers for its lecture series. Another is that there is a large pool for its internal competitions.
I wonder if it’s okay to shoot graffiti. The reason for my concern is that if I shoot graffiti I’ll be appropriating the creative expression of someone else. All the originality and work is theirs. I simply point my camera and click a button.
These shots come from the abandoned rail tracks that run northwest by the Evergreen Brickworks in Toronto
Yesterday, I got up before dawn and walked up Yellow Creek in David A. Balfour Park to a place where a small dam has crumbled.
Autoshare — the car-sharing service — has made its 400 signs available to five street artists to liven things up.
Koala Beavers have taken over from the Love Bots as the latest invasion in Toronto. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that there are lots of them scurrying around underfoot.
Last year, concrete robots invaded Toronto. You can read about the invasion here. The one shown below can be found on Church Street in the Village: The concrete invasion was followed by a sticker invasion. They’re everywhere. They’re even springing up on the pavement, although these ones don’t have hearts. Maybe, with all the tires…
It’s good to see that Dadaism is thriving at construction sites in downtown Toronto. I call it Canadada
Do photographs have a grammar?
One of the brilliant things about street photography is that the backgrounds (streets, buildings, sidewalks) provide long perspectives. Here are a few shots that try to take advantage of that:
Blurring can imply motion, action, chaos; it can produce a mood; it can evoke feelings of nostalgia.
Another debate, when shooting street photography, is whether to be obvious or discreet. Sometimes, the answer is determined by legal considerations. For example, where a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy, the general rule of thumb is that no permission is required.
There are all sorts of debates around street photography. One of them is the colour/black and white debate. There’s a convention that street photos should be in black and white. My own feeling is: it depends
Although I have no empirical data to support the assertion, I sense that most people regard photography as a universally accessible medium. We believe it’s possible to understand the power of an image across cultures and across languages.