What is the proper subject of street photography? Some people seem to equate street photography with stalking the homeless. Maybe they think photography isn’t authentic unless it’s gritty, and it isn’t gritty unless it portrays suffering.
Category: Head
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
Colour Street Photography
More than in any other genre of photography, street photography seems to demand purity codes, like a religious cult or a hockey team. You can’t be a real street photographer unless you shoot with a Rangefinder, or a Leica, or only shoot “unposed” subjects. There’s even a UK-based web site that sells “official” streettog T-shirts.
College/Spadina Streetcar Track Repair
The College/Spadina intersection was blocked this month for streetcar track repairs/upgrades so I went over a couple times to catch the mess.
People In Yellow Creek
Despite the luridity of Toronto’s literary imagination (I know there’s no such word as luridity but it seems to work), its ravines aren’t always the dark repositories of our unconscious desires.
Pointlessly Abstract
Is abstract photography pointless? If so, does that matter? Personally, I feel some ambivalence around the production of abstract photographs. Images that we describe as abstract can be pleasing to the eye.
First Peoples at the ROM
As a photographer, I’m naturally drawn to a display in the First Peoples Exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s a “Mohawk Family Life Group Diorama” composed of plaster figures by an American sculptor who completed them for the museum in 1917.
White Picket Fence
In his book, The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer writes at length about the white picket fence as a photographic subject. He begins with a well-known photograph which Paul Strand shot in or about 1917.
Hanging Outside the ROM
The entrance to the ROM – Royal Ontario Museum – is a great place to go people watching. People are drawn to the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, so there’s a lot of tourist gawking going on.
Slow Shooting
Have you heard of the slow reading movement? Among those who cultivate literary appreciation, there’s a growing push-back against the instant-on digital environment that treats readers as consumers and books as commodities to be gobbled up as quickly as possible so that consumers can move on to the next product.
The Ethics of Shooting Graffiti
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.
The Grammar of Photography
Do photographs have a grammar?
Shooting Street
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
Is Photography a Universal Language?
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.
Synaesthesia and The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment is a continuous cover-to-cover meditation upon the art of photography. I say “continuous cover-to-cover” because the book has no breaks, no arbitrary chapter divisions. Instead, it’s a series of riffs that follow one another in an associative way. He writes about Stieglitz and his relationship with his wife, Georgia O’Keefe…
Ugly Beauty
I know it’s an oxymoron to write about ugly beauty, but that’s sometimes how I respond when I encounter an object which I would ordinarily think of as ugly but which nevertheless draws to itself something strangely attractive.