This is a selection of photos I shot while walking along Bloor Street & chatting with whomever I bumped into. There are times when the camera becomes a tool not so much for making images as for setting aside the customary barriers between strangers and enabling connection. This strikes me as ironic if we accept the usual modernist schtick that we (especially those of us who live in cities) live in alienation both from our world and from each other; the camera further underscores our alienated condition by placing a hunk of technology between our eyes and everything we encounter. However, I’ve never regarded myself as a particularly modern person, and I think it’s quite possible, in the words of Adam West (as Batman), to hoist the modernist schtick on its own petard.
My photographs of strangers never begin with an explicit intention to make a photograph. Always, they begin in conversation about something else–a genuine expression of interest in whatever happens to be engaging them at the moment. Feeding a bird for example. “Isn’t that amazing,” I begin, “that you can get a bird to eat from your hand like that.” As the conversation goes, the man suggests that if I want a picture of the bird eating from his hand, I shouldn’t point my camera at the bird; I should include his face. I’m amazed at how often it happens that people don’t want simply to participate in making the photo; they want to collaborate in making it a good photo.
