I sat chilled and stinking and anxious and repeated it to myself like a mantra: Fuck the police. Fuck the police. Fuck the police.
Tag: Photography
Photography: Toronto’s Yellow Fire Hydrants
Certain fire hydrants suffer from performance anxiety, praying each time they hear a siren that the fire truck doesn’t pull up in front of them: “Oh please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. The last time a fire truck stopped here, I pissed a river and had a bladder infection for three weeks.”
Photographs of Insects in Late Summer Haliburton
In the afternoon light, I wade through the reeds and stalk mature dragonflies and damselflies. As I kneel in the water to photograph a dragonfly on a blade of grass, another settles on my back and sits there until I’m done.
Low Key Photo Walk on Canada Day 2021
At the corner of Yonge and Hayden, a woman was leaning against a utility pole, her back to me, head bowed as if she was texting or scrolling on her smart phone, purse tucked under her right arm. But the kicker was the leopard skin print dress.
Homeless Man Sleeps While Pigeon Hops On His Chest
I think there’s something offensive about the longstanding tradition that art has a redemptive quality which can magically elevate a man’s misery. Too long it’s been used to justify apathy in the face of unjust social relations.
Photographing My Favourite Downspout
What distinguishes this downspout is the fact that it’s caked in a layer of bird shit—pigeon shit if specificity is important to you. Pigeons sit on the eaves overhead and, whenever one takes flight, it lightens its load by excreting on the downspout below.
Beavers Cut Down Trees in Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works
When the quarry was first excavated, it exposed a local geological record going back 130,000 years, right down to a bedrock of shale that, itself, is probably half a billion years old. Near the bottom, at the 130,000 year mark, the geologist, Arthur Philemon Coleman, discovered the tooth of a giant beaver.
Road Trip in a Lock Down
As buildings approach this ultimate dissolution, they undergo a shift from human time to geologic time, no longer measuring the transformation in human heartbeats, but in the barely discernible rhythm of tectonic rumbles.
Getting Back Into Street Photography After A Long Absence
He bangs his mallet on his guitar, the lid from a plastic bin, and then his head, all in quick succession, like he’s a drummer in a band. I step up and shoot a quick burst. How can I not?
April Snowfall Dresses Up Toronto’s Yellow Creek
People in Toronto are fortunate because the city has grown up over a network of ravines that provide easy escape from the usual urban traumas of concrete and vertigo.
Remembering The 2017 Inauguration
It was odd to travel through a red state at that particular moment in history. In fact, the western shore of Florida was experiencing a red tide and people with respiratory issues complained that it was difficult to breathe. No kidding.
Making Art in a Pandemic
It has become a commonplace to observe that the Covid-19 pandemic exposes some of the weaknesses inherent in the way we organize ourselves as social beings. For example, through the mechanisms of the capitalist labour market, we have collectively agreed that certain modes of work are not terribly important. We know this because we don’t…
Canada Geese In Fog
They are obnoxious. They remind me of city neighbours who go at one another across balconies. They honk louder than city cars. They’re filthy. They carpet the shoreline in green knots of shit.
Photographing What Is Not There
A photograph is an instance, not an aggregate. A photograph is an anecdote, not a trend. A photograph is a rumour, not a fact.
Benford’s Law and Photography
We tend to think the distribution of first digits in any given data set will be equal; there will be as many ones as eights. However, an empirical analysis of data sets demonstrates again and again that there are far more ones in our universe than any other number.