Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Heart, is for posts that make us feel.
Freddy was sitting on a bench in Allen Gardens tuning his guitar. I went up to him and asked if I could take some photos of him doing his thing. A couple hours later, after (among other things) a trip to a Timmies where I bought him a coffee, we parted company on Carlton Street.
At a time when the weather should be cold and dull, a streak of bright warm weather comes as a boon to street photographers. People are out being people, doing all the varied things that people do, maybe with more gusto (desperation?) because they know it can’t last.
There’s a karmic quality to street photography: what the gods take away with one hand, they grant with the other. I walked west along Queen, squinting into the late afternoon sun, and saw a man in silhouette leaning against a wall and bumming a light from a passerby.
Most years, we think of November as cold and dreary. We don’t need meteorological records to confirm our assumptions about November; we can read what poets and novelists have written.
On Sunday morning, we went to the Falls Reserve Conservation Area in the village of Benmiller. We assumed we would see some lovely waterfalls or rapids on the Maitland River as it flows to Goderich and out into Lake Huron.
An earlier post on graffiti under the St. Clair St. bridge is now officially an archival document. The original subject matter no longer exists, so the only record of it is in photographs like mine. The city’s anti-graffiti people have grey-washed the concrete footings on the east side of the St. Clair St. Bridge.
Although scaffolding sites are temporary, and shift dynamically across the face of the city, the fact of scaffolding itself is a permanent feature of modern city life. Forgive the oxymoron, but scaffolding is an ephemeral permanency.
Sometimes I like to photograph people from a distance, using a white or light-coloured wall as a backdrop. One challenge in a city is finding a wall that isn’t obscured by building shadows during the sweet light times of day.
On Monday morning, I sat in the dark on the north side of the Brickworks quarry, sipping from a thermos of hot coffee, and watched the light from the rising sun spread across the city. (Note to self for future project: this sight deserves a time-lapse video.) As the light changed from complete darkness to deep blue, I saw that all the golden rods and grasses at the bottom of the quarry were covered in a silvery frost.
Congratulations to Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals for their stunning election victory last night. To celebrate the ouster of King Stephen, I offer a bit of nostalgia: some photos I took of Justin’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. I think it was during the 1979 election campaign.
If I were a nature photographer, I’d be out driving through the countryside to view the fall colours. Maybe I’d stay at a hotel in Haliburton so I could be up early to catch the sweet light. But I live in the city and I’m too lazy to plan a big weekend in the countryside.
Before there were graffiti artists, there were civil engineers. At least that’s a theory of mine. For years now, Toronto has been in the grips of a construction boom and, before anybody breaks ground, teams of surveyors and engineers spray paint lines all over the pavement. The streets become canvasses for a kind of urban development graffiti.
Shooting skateboarders is like shooting wildlife (or small children): they don’t sit still and pose. If you’re lucky, they’ll stop at an intersection.
You wouldn’t think a solid grounding in calculus could make someone rich, but in the case of mathematician, James Stewart, his textbooks for high school and university students made him rich beyond imagining.
Thunder Bay has a vibe that reminds me of Victoria. There are a lot of young people, especially the sort of young people who don’t hang out at Conservative Party conventions. They live counter cultural values, buy local, vote Green. And express themselves accordingly …