Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Heart, is for posts that make us feel.
As I walked through the cemetery, I found myself entering a Zen state. First was the enveloping silence. As I pressed further into the grounds, the sounds of the city—traffic, construction, shouts—receded and other gentler sounds drew to the foreground…
Everybody loves a photograph of a smiling baby. Everybody loves a photograph of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. Everybody loves a photograph of a sunset streaking its colours across the sky. Sentimentality has its place, I guess.
This is the endemic neglect one can expect from a long string of mayors and city councillors who have drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid: slash government, lower taxes, defund social spending on things like public health, social housing, road repair, snow removal, libraries, public parks and, of course, the TRCA.
His name is Raymond Joseph Robichaud and he was born near St. John NB to a French Canadian mother and Irish/Scottish father, so he is a self-described mongrel. He asked if I could spare some change; he needed money for art supplies. Seriously, he said.
One could easily accuse the outlying fog of spying on my inner state, or worse, of manufacturing it by drifting into my ears and eyes and nostrils and gaping mouth, and supplanting my accustomed mental chaos with a vague stillness.
I had seen signs around the downtown core declaring a Global Climate Strike on September 26th 2019. Inspired by the outspoken activism of Swedish high school student, Greta Thunberg…
My interest in the Camp Bison Prison Farm is twofold. First is the photographic interest of exploring an abandoned space. Second is more personal: I grew up occasionally hearing my dad tell the story of its most infamous inmate.
A funny thing happened. When I walked down Yonge the first time, all my photos were in black and white. But when I joined the parade and walked down a second time, all my photos were in colour. It was just like in the Wizard of Oz.
The more I tread the same ground with my camera, the more I come to recognize that an unwitting theme of my work is disappearance.
I milled around on King St. each of University for a time, reminding myself that, as a street photographer, I wasn’t there to photograph a parade, but to photograph the people who come to see the parade. So I started walking.
Last night was game six of the NBA championships. Throughout the series, I keep telling myself I’ll go down at night to photograph people going mental in and around Jurassic Park, but I keep playing mind games with myself, inventing reasons why I should stay at home, put up my feet and read a book…
My wife, Tamiko, and I spent a week in Glasgow to celebrate our friend’s appointment as minister of Glasgow Cathedral. Naturally, I came equipped with my camera. The following is drawn from notes I scrawled along the way:
Photography is not a craft; photography is a religion. It is governed by a theology of grace. We do not earn our good images; they are bestowed upon us.
I wish photographs were like memories. They would start out as well-focused images with crisp edges and clearly defined details. But with the passage of time, the images would lose their clarity, edges would soften …
In September of 2017, my wife, Tamiko, and I joined the Linton family in the Republic of Ireland for a cycling adventure to help raise funds for the Sanfilippo Children’s Research Foundation.