Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Another debate, when shooting street photography, is whether to be obvious or discreet. Sometimes, the answer is determined by legal considerations. For example, where a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy, the general rule of thumb is that no permission is required.
There are all sorts of debates around street photography. One of them is the colour/black and white debate. There’s a convention that street photos should be in black and white. My own feeling is: it depends
Took a walk around Guelph the other day. Was there to pick up my daughter from school, so didn’t have a lot of time. Just used my little mirrorless camera.
Remember these things. They’re called payphones. In the olden days, people would put coins in them and use them to make telephone calls. Now, they are display cases for graffiti and old coffee cups.
Last weekend, I went to Lion’s Head on the Bruce peninsula which extends out between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. It’s part of the Niagara escarpment so there are spectacular limestone cliffs along the water’s edge and, of course, the Bruce Trail, winding its way along the summit and, sometimes, down to the water.
I shot this somewhere on Wellesley Street. Liked the textured rust of the sign set against the blurred (& therefore untextured) background of the apartment buildings.
A year ago, early on a Sunday morning, I walked past the Gardiner Museum as they were hoisting Jun Kaneko’s giant ceramic head onto its metal pedestal in front of the building.
Meigakure is a Zen principle of aesthetics used especially in Japanese gardening but no less valid in photography: it is the representation of a part to suggest the whole. It is analogous to the Classical Greek rhetorical principle of synecdoche.
I shot this photo of my grandmother in 1968 when I was five years old. It’s on a beach in Florida.