Last Friday, I found myself in the town of Taos in New Mexico which was setting up for a weekend fiesta. According to Wikipedia, Taos is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America (more than a thousand years).
Insure Your Gear!
I was taking photos of a graveyard when a photography colleague yelled: “The spirits will punish you!” I spun around. “Huh?” And the lens that came with my Mark III kit, the EF24-105 mm popped out of the body.
Shooting with a Kodak Instamatic
I shot this photo of my grandmother in 1968 when I was five years old. It’s on a beach in Florida.
The Malak Karsh Garden
I have a thing for visual jokes, ironies, unfortunate circumstances, so I couldn’t resist this scene looking across the Ottawa River from the Gatineau side.
Rob Ford in Street Art and Public Protest
I make no secret of the fact that I intensely dislike Rob Ford. If it were simply a matter of concern for his substance abuse issues, I could cut the man some slack.
Williams Farm, Midland, Ontario
My brother-in-law, John Williams, has a certified organic farm near Midland. Apart from fresh produce and maple syrup, the farm makes a lot of good photographs.
World Pride Toronto – 2014
This is my “Hello World” post to kick off the blog part of davidbarker.photography [subsequently rolled into nouspique.com]. And what a way to kick it off! With a massive party. I staked my ground on the northwest corner of Church and Bloor right where all the participants are marshaled and I let it all flow…
The Gay World
In 1970, W.E. Mann edited a volume titled The Underside of Toronto (McClelland & Stewart), perhaps an early effort to dispel the Disneyfied image of Toronto the Good. In Part Four, titled “Deviant Behaviour and Deviant Groups”, he includes William Johnson’s “The Gay World”.
Love-locks Wreck Ponts des Arts
On Sunday evening a portion of the “Love-locks” bridge (Pont des Arts) in Paris collapsed. This is the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine connecting the Louvre museum to the St. Germain area.
Nine and a Half Weeks (Of Shopping)
Elizabeth McNeill’s erotic memoir of a love affair is celebrated for the fact that it’s told from the submissive’s perspective in an SM relationship. The unnamed man slaps, cuffs, spanks, whips, beats, humiliates the narrator who leverages the pain to a heightened desire. At least that’s how the novella-length memoir is celebrated. My take on the book is that it has less to do with sex than with shopping.
Crucified Woman in Ice Storm
In 1995, Oliver Sacks published a book titled An Anthropologist On Mars. It’s a collection of “case studies” about people with neurological disorders. The virtue of Sacks’s writing is that it’s accessible to the lay reader: he presents his subjects without technical jargon while preserving the important questions which their conditions raise.
The Cult of the Amateur
When cultural commentary turns its gaze to online technologies, it grows dated in the blink of an eye. It’s like watching Joan Rivers and the accelerating pace of her plastic surgeries. The minute one thing gets tacked in place, something else droops.
Narcissism as a Strategy of Resistance
This morning, while staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, I had a thought about narcissism. I wanted to take a selfie to capture the moment but was concerned about what people (in this instance, my wife) would think of me. The last thing I want is for people to think I’m narcissistic.
Robert Elsmere, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Suppose somebody told you they were reading a novel about a man who joined the ranks of the clergy, married a religious woman, found himself plagued by doubts (in university, he had moved with a crowd of mostly rationalist atheist science types), left the church, found himself in conflict with his wife and worried that the situation might destroy his marriage, poured himself into social justice causes and became a community organizer.
Stay, by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Yale University Press, 2013) is an odd book. It’s odd in that there seems to be a divide between what it claims to be and what it is. Note that I didn’t say it’s a bad book. It’s a good book. But it’s not the book it thinks it is.