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.
Tag: Black & White
Raptors Victory Parade
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.
Toronto Raptors NBA Champions
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…
Photography is a Religion
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.
Synecdoche
Synecdoche is a simplicity that doesn’t lie.
Cliché
For the time being, the images I make are the product of my true vision, and mine alone, but inevitably they will ascend to the pantheon of cliché as do all images, for like all truth the truth of my vision is provisional. It is not my entitlement, but a momentary privilege.
Confirmation Bias
Along with thousands of my colleagues, I pound the pavement, responding only to those scenes which hold precisely the features that confirm my view of what makes a good photograph, repeating the process until I have ground my bias into a cheap cliché.
Would you share your umbrella?
There are two kinds of people: those who share their umbrella, and those who do not.
Doug Ford’s First Day as Premier-elect
For legal reasons, I don’t want to come right out and say “Doug Ford was a drug dealer”, but there are so many stories circulating in the GTA smog that people generally take it as a given: Doug Ford’s claims of business acumen and entrepreneurship stem largely from his experience dealing drugs.
Homeless Selfie
For me, as a street photographer, shooting a homeless person is an ambivalent act. It plays along a line of tension between the need to document lived conditions and the need to protect our most vulnerable citizens from exploitation. As our missionary forebears demonstrated, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between compassion and colonization.
Ben – Street Portrait
Following my personal theory that “scary-looking” dudes are sometimes lonelier than the rest of us precisely because they are “scary-looking” and are therefore dying to talk to people, I asked if he’d mind me taking some shots. Once again, my theory seems to have been validated. He smiled. His face opened up. We started to talk. His name is Ben.
The Quantum Museum
Carrying a camera to a museum, I feel a kinship to the curators who develop the exhibits. How do we classify a vase or a bust or a coin? By geography? Historical period? Influences? Provenance? Materials? How does it speak to us? What do we discover about ourselves when we examine it? And how do we think ourselves into the future? Something similar happens with my photographs.
Atta
This is Atta. I met him in Dundas Square near the Yonge/Dundas intersection. Approaching through the crowds, this is what I saw: a slender man in a hoodie, sometimes still, sometimes moving with an exaggerated animation. He was laying pieces of paper on the pavement and fixing them in place with objects. Gusts blew the pieces of paper away and Atta chased after them through the square.
Ruby Reds & The Silver Lining
On a Saturday night in downtown Thunder Bay, Tamiko and I went to The Foundry Pub to hear Ruby Reds & The Silver Lining. No, this was not a random thing. Our daughter is, as Facebook puts it, in a relationship with one of the members of the band, Quintin Golka. They were really good!…
Long Branch Hotel
Once, it had been a going concern. You can still see the faded letters of the sign: “Truckers welcome” with the image of a cowboy in chaps. There was the motel, a place for truckers to park their rigs, and a restaurant, one of the few places to eat on the stretch of highway between Parry Sound and Sudbury. But then all the big chains set up in Parry Sound. Nowadays, it’s not good enough to have a room and a bite to eat. People want hot tubs and gyms, too. Their modest roadside motel couldn’t compete with the big chains so they gave up the business.