Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
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.
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’ve recently had the pleasure of working with the Canadian Men’s Chorus as they update their promotional material. The CMC is in its sixth season, with Greg Rainville as artistic director and Arlene Jillard as manager.
I walk through Crother’s Woods and out to the level crossing (at the 4.93 mile marker) in the Don Valley where the Go Trains pass during rush hour. They’ve put up a new sign for the Mental Health Helpline. It makes me wonder about the Luminous Veil. Does it really prevent suicide? Or does it offload suicide to other sites?
I don’t take photos of people out of some lurid voyeuristic obsession, but because I’m drawn to fundamental questions. Taking photos of people is a way to address those questions. I’m drawn to questions of identity. What does it mean to be a person?
As I see it, literalism is an application of power grounded in anxiety. It loads the aesthetic experience on the creative end at the expense of the interpretive end. It seeks to certify creative intentions—this is what I really meant—by stipulating in advance how viewers/listeners/readers ought to respond. As a result, it infantilizes the relationship between creator and audience. It leaves nothing to chance.
Once I’d adjusted to the light, I noticed, for the first time, a print of a painting that hung on the wall above my feet. It was the only adornment in an otherwise bare room. It was a “realistic” painting of a maritime scene: ocean, rocky shore, green grass above the rocks, lighthouse, rainbow, and bald eagles. The colours were gaudy. The horizon line cut straight through the middle of the scene. It was sentimental. It was kitschy.
In an age when it’s increasingly easy to make technically “perfect” images, it’s correspondingly easy to be complacent about whether or not those images do what images are supposed to do. Do our images merely allay anxieties around formal requirements? Or do they satisfy deeper needs? While the two are not mutually exclusive, there are many photographs that move us deeply even though they are deeply “flawed”.
Sometimes what I see offends my sensibilities. I don’t want to believe that some of my neighbours equate Islam with Nazism, or call black people niggers and monkeys and say they belong in prison. I want to tell a story of Toronto the Good.
Here are sample photos of people riding bicycles. Each is shot by a different method, each with a different result. I shot the first image with a fast shutter speed. Both cyclist and background are crisp. I shot the second with a slower shutter speed (1/160) and moved the camera in sync with the cyclist…
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.
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.
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”.
Three times a year, the Toronto Camera Club accepts submissions for its internal “Nature” competition. Members can submit under one of three categories: botany, zoology, and general. The general category is for nature-themed images where the main subject is neither plant nor animal e.g. a landscape, or seascape. There is one proviso: the submitted images cannot include any evidence of the “hand of man.”
Photographing buildings in Manhattan is a challenge, or at least it was for me last week, and for two reasons. First, I didn’t have the right gear, only my little mirrorless Fujifilm camera and a pancake lens. Second, even if I had the right gear, buildings in Manhattan have been shot to death. What could I possibly say that’s original or interesting?