It was strange going out with my camera this morning. I feel like a bear crawling out from hibernation. The light seems too bright. And, god, I’m hungry. Maybe not for food. But I crave the chance to get back into the street-shooting rhythm, wandering throughout the downtown core and talking to strangers.
Things start slow for me, but on the northeast corner of University and Queen where, a year ago, I spent more than half an hour pushing through a dense mob of Raptor fans to cross the road, I meet a guy named Matthew Hayley. He’s pushing a sandwich board mounted on a dolly. The sandwich board announces a hunger strike (which is an ironic thing for a sandwich board to announce) and it lists a number of his concerns all of which are related in some way to Covid-19. He wants to encourage people to take a middle path between concerns of health and a need to open things up. So, for example, not everyone needs to wear a mask. If you don’t need one, don’t wear it. That makes more masks available to those who do need them.
I get the impression that, for Matthew, opening things up is less an economic concern than a mental health concern. He’s open with me about his personal struggles with ADHD and bi-polar disorder. Hence the hashtag he started (#MentalHealthIsVisible) to counter the tendency to treat mental health issues as something you should hide in the closet.
Personally, I have no doubt that Covid-19 is as much a mental health issue as it is an infectious disease issue. Even people with no history of mental health concerns complain about feeling anxious and depressed. Self-isolation and social distancing shrink our network of emotional supports, so I can well imagine that, for someone like Matthew Hayley, who struggles enough without the added stress posed by Covid-19, opening things up means re-establishing vital connections.
When we finish talking, he offers his hand, and seeing my reluctance, he says that the important thing is just to ask what people are comfortable with. We end up bumping feet.
Bookmarking my day is a chance encounter at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton. I step up beside a guy waiting to cross Jarvis and I notice that he has a bearded dragon clinging to his chest. How can I not get a shot of this? I ask if he minds but I already know the answer. Nobody ever went outside with a bearded dragon clinging to his chest and then claimed he was camera shy.
A few more days like this from here on out and, photographically speaking, 2020 may not be a complete bust.
