Yesterday, a fist fight broke out at Queen and Spadina. I’ve been following the street photography edict that you should always shoot with a prime lens that has a focal length of no more than 50mm; if you need to get closer to your subject, let your feet be your zoom. That edict is all well and good, but Spadina is a wide street. By the time my zoom had taken me to where the action was, the fight had broken up and I walked away disappointed.
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. As I stepped in line with him, he made a comment about my camera. I walked a couple steps past him and turned around to face him. It was a deliberate move on my part. There was a beautiful light shining full on his face and I wanted to position myself, you know, just in case …
I asked if he’d mind me taking some photos of him. He shrugged. Sure. Why not.
He said his name is Agustín. Not with an “e” at the end and not with a “u” after the “A”. He has an aunt in Buenos Aires who’s a famous photographer, so he gets it. The whole photography thing. She was training to be a ballerina but had an accident so couldn’t realize her dream. Instead, she became a photographer and is known for her shots of the ballet. I asked if, with family in Buenos Aires, that’s where he’s from. No. He was born here. But, yeah, he has lots of family from South America. I got the impression some may have come here from Chile after the coup in 1973, but I may have misheard.
He says that, nowadays, people don’t get photography. They run around pointing and shooting without thinking about it. The discipline. Knowing the proper exposure. Just like people don’t get drugs. You don’t do drugs just because it’s fun or feels good. People forget what the point of drugs is.
I think maybe he was talking about spiritual experiences.
Agustín is working on a graphic novel called Autonomous Man. Maybe, when it’s done, I could take shots of each page to help him digitize it. Sure. Sounds interesting. I give him my URL and say, when the time comes, he can contact me through the web site. He writes the address on a slip of paper and I notice that he doesn’t write serially. It’s as if he shakes all the letters in a cup then tumbles them randomly onto the paper. A “d” here. An “r” there. But they all end up in the proper order. I wonder if maybe he sees a word as a complete visual entity, so it doesn’t matter which part of it he writes first.
Agustín has a collection of odds and ends sitting on the window ledge behind him. There’s a pair of drum sticks. He says he needs them to stay sane. There’s a blue plastic garbage bag. It comes from the TTC. The TTC has the best garbage bags. There’s also a plastic press for bread so you end up with an image of the Virgin Mary on your toast.
Sitting on the curb is a stack of old boxes including a box with a picture of Mr. Clean on the side of it. Mr. Clean gives him the creeps, like he’s a Nazi or something. I take off my hat and tell him to take it easy on us bald guys. No, he says, it’s not the head; it’s the way he stands there all white with his arms crossed. Everything about him.