L’exercice le plus difficile et austère que je connaisse… moi l’autiste asperger qui délibérément choisis l’autre côté du miroir afin de ne pas croiser mon regard. J’avais préparé un autre sujet, je m’étais échappé. Me voici pris au piège pour une présentation sommaire, trois extraits d’Elles, précieuses parmi les précieuses et quelques autoportraits de la partie émergée de l’iceberg… carte d’identité timide.
““The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.””
I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but that quote has followed me almost all my life. It has been moving around in my mind for decades, sometimes slipping to the back, sometimes pushing to the front. I’ve spent a good part of my life being alone and you could say a chunk of my teenage years and my early 20’s being a loner. But although I’ve found the perfect mate, I have two great kids, and a small but tight group of close friends, being alone is an important part of who I am. As a general rule; the larger the group of people, the more alone I feel. But when this is applied to the streets, something is different.
Kids have got it backward these days. They (and I’m generalizing) have this lust to be famous. To be recognised. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I love to move through crowds of people without them taking the tiniest bit of notice of me. I’m a documentary photographer and as we work through 2020 and our Definition project evolves, that should become apparent. I consider street photography to be at least part of my documentary work. Perhaps it’s the purest form of documentary?
Catching a train and heading to the city to shoot on the streets is my drug of choice. I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t do drugs (not even prescribed ones). But I crave the ultimate me-time. Just like being an alcoholic or a drug addict, a loner is always in recovery...we just fall off the wagon more often. It’s lonely out there on the street with only a rectangular box and a piece of glass for company, but I love it. I walk an average of nine miles in a typical day’s shooting. Sometimes I’ll pick a spot and shoot for a while when the light is right and falling the right way. I have places I hang around as the sun is going down because I know it bounces off the buildings and funnels into a perfect pool of light for an all too brief amount of time. But mostly I just keep walking. As Alex Webb has said
“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch, and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the next corner.”
So I savour each trip to the streets. Sometimes listening to the sound of the city, the traffic, the arguments, the beggars, the over-enthusiastic preachers. But quite often I have my earphones in, listening to various movie soundtracks and making the act of street photography that little bit more cinematic (in my head at least). And if you will forgive me for using just one more quote from Robert DeNiro, this time in the movie Heat. “I’m alone. I am not lonely.” On the street at least.
This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.
Two, three times—over the course of this strange, meandering life—I tried quitting. The guitar would go hiding in its case, the synths would go up against a wall somewhere. They’d gather dust for a few months but it never lasted. I once described it to myself as a sort of virus or bacteria, not so much flesh-eating as soul-eating, but just as voracious and cruel in its relentlessness.
As a kid I’d draw fake album covers. As a teenager I’d sit for hours on end, staring at the sprawling double-canvas of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, imagining Slippermen and Lamias on rain soaked New York City streets. Gabriel wailing as Rael. To this day, Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974 affects me deeply—and Lenny Bruce remains emblematic, almost mystical because of it. Those sounds, images and references shaped my mythology and I still vibrate when I hear a Mellotron or a Solina, my brain electrified and unable to resist the drag of the machine.
That hungry, hungry Time Machine.
...
We wear masks to define ourselves. It doesn’t make us dishonest, it doesn’t mean we’re hiding behind a facade—not necessarily anyway. I think we wear masks to better understand the theatre. And on the opening essay of this new series, I need to acknowledge my very first play: before photography there was music. There will always be music.
In heartbreak
devastation & cruelty.
In freedom & blissful exaltation.
I was roaming streets again, unsure of what I would find. We never know, do we? Every exploration always seems impossible at first, like an equation that won’t be solved. But then patterns emerge and slowly, pieces begin to fit.
I was roaming streets again.
New camera around my neck.
Same rush in my bloodstream.
I’ve been away.
Well, we’ve all been away, obviously - the last essay we posted was back in June, and it’s September now! But I’ve been back in my old home country, where I grew up.
Things are different there now - as I anticipated last year, my parents have downsized out of their Toronto home of 56 years.
This was also the first summer they didn’t spend July and August up north on the lake by themselves, they decided to was better if there were some younger folks around to help out while they were up on the island - so we drove up with them, stayed for a week, carried the groceries, and cooked. We also played some cribbage (which didn’t go so well for me)…
“Tel cheval qui boit à la fontaine,
Telle feuille qui en tombant nous touche,
Telle main vide, ou telle bouche
Qui nous voudrait parler et qui ose à peine -,
Autant de variations de la vie qui s'apaise,
Autant de rêves de la douleur qui somnole :
ô que celui dont le coeur est à l'aise,
Cherche la créature et la console.”
R. M. Rilke
J’ai lu dans ces regards des océans de questions. Rencontres délicates et sensibles. J’ai pensé à l’enfant, sa pureté, sa curiosité sans ombres. C’est là, au fond des yeux que la porte s’ouvre, que l’on donne autant que l’on reçoit. Langage du corps, orientation d’une oreille, frémissement de la peau, inclinaison de la tête, souffle nouveau et changeant… je garde en mémoire précieusement ces touches invisibles qui sans paroles me consolent, moi la créature.
In the 13 years I have shot weddings and indeed the 20 years I have studied photography I have never used the square ratio on my digital camera. I may, from time to time have cropped an image after the event but have never seen the world in a square at the time of shooting - aside of course from my old medium format cameras!
Guidance: Make it more sensual.
Assignment: Today you must shoot a single subject using multiple exposures (a series of 6), using a novelty or vintage lens (otherwise pick your fastest glass) and your favorite camera.
With my huge vintage lens collection, it wasn’t the choosing of the gear that proved tricky for this assignment. It wasn’t the fact that I should shoot a series of 6 images of the same subject matter. What proved to be the real challenge here was sticking to the guidance.
Sensual does not equal sexual. It does not have to be. I thought it had to be. But I chose not to.
I chose the senses.
But how do you go about that with only 5 of them around.
I will leave the 6th up for interpretation. I know what it is to me. Do you know what it is to you?
Shot on the Fujifilm X-Pro2 using a 1971 Minolta Rokkor 58mm f/1.2 and a 12mm extension tube.
Guidance: Decorate, decorate.
Assignment: Today you must shoot moving vehicles or individual motion, using a lens closest to 135 millimeters (35 equivalent) and your best camera.
Shoot vehicles or individual motion. I started out using a tripod in the middle of the day with a variable ND. I hated the colour cast and I just wasn’t getting what I wanted. So I moved to nighttime, still on a tripod. I shot light trails over a motorway, but that’s been done to death. In fact, I have a slide that I shot on the opposite bridge to this one from 1979 or 1980. Light trails with a horrible green colour cast, but it worked and it was an important shot in my early development in photography.
So I took the camera off the tripod. I shot handheld out of focus shots of moving vehicles, eventually arriving at the idea to shoot moving vehicles with a moving camera at around a 5-second exposure. Vehicles moving, camera moving and time is moving.
Guidance: Change nothing and continue consistently.
Assignment: Today you must shoot abstract images, in your least comfortable orientation (portrait or landscape), using your longest focal length and your oldest camera.
In my case, this has manifested itself as the original FinePix X100 with the Tele Converter lens.
The TCL wasn’t really designed for the original X100 and I’m not really designed for abstract photography nor vertical orientation.
Going back through my main commercial photography (weddings), I think I’ve shot no more than 50 vertical images in ten years.
