Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Mike invited me to a party. He said there’d be a girl there. The whole thing would be recorded on video. Streamed on the internet. I could wear a mask if I liked. I don’t know why, but while he told me this, I was wondering who he voted for in the last federal election. I didn’t ask, of course. I didn’t want to make him feel awkward.
I met Amry outside a dental office in Cabbagetown. He was leaning against a poster of a big perfect smile, smoking a cigarette.
Freddy was sitting on a bench in Allen Gardens tuning his guitar. I went up to him and asked if I could take some photos of him doing his thing. A couple hours later, after (among other things) a trip to a Timmies where I bought him a coffee, we parted company on Carlton Street.
At a time when the weather should be cold and dull, a streak of bright warm weather comes as a boon to street photographers. People are out being people, doing all the varied things that people do, maybe with more gusto (desperation?) because they know it can’t last.
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.
Getting Made is that magic moment when you discover that despite your best efforts to maintain your cover as you photograph in the street, the people in your frame know exactly what you’re doing.
Shooting skateboarders is like shooting wildlife (or small children): they don’t sit still and pose. If you’re lucky, they’ll stop at an intersection.
Creative Silhouettes is the name of a printing business that does vinyl wraps. I make no comment one way or the other about the business, since I’ve never used their services. However, I do like the name…
I’m not much of a street photographer. Purists say street photography requires a kind of invisibility. You have to capture people unposed. The object is to produce an authentic documentation of life on the street. You’re like a birder in a blind. Or an anthropologist in camouflage. Personally, I find that hard to do. Inevitably, I end up connecting with the people I photograph.
Mixed media artist, David Hynes, has a conundrum. Maybe you’ve seen it. I saw it in the Distillery District as part of Panamania. It’s a canoe with raw hide wrapped taut across the gunwales to form a giant drum.
I read an article (I can’t remember where) that suggested the selfie stick is no longer simply a fad; it’s gone to the next level and has become a cultural phenomenon, whatever that means. I think what the author was getting at is that its presence in our daily activities is symptomatic of deeper cultural rumblings. It captures something of the zeitgeist.
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.
All the tourists go to Times Square in search of the real New York. What they find is each other … and people hustling them (which may, in fact, be the real New York).
This is related to my previous post about “commerce on the ground” only, in this post, the money is more obvious.
When I think of commerce in New York, I tend to think of Wall Street, but there’s commerce on the ground, too: people doing whatever it takes to earn a living. Here are samples that run the gamut from shoppers in the flagship store of the world’s most valuable corporation to buskers in Washington Square Park.