New

you know?

We suffer from disinheritance. We are bequeathed a world that is fragmented and incomprehensible to the point where we don't know the difference between reality and hallucination. We are driven to insanity, disillusionment, and alienation when we search for the definite, absolute, scientific order behind the illusions that we impose on cultural phenomena.

All culture is mysterious and potentially meaningless: cryptic jacobean theater, anarchism, communication media, capitalism, communism, music, entertainment, drugs, academia--these all show promise for meaning and order, but since it is all so inconceivably complex, we can't help but fear that it is all absurd. By questioning and pursuing meaning, we see the world as potentially meaningless. We become likened to paralysis.

But not to try is to become paralyzed in actuality.

beginning.

Acrid smoke hung languidly in the air and an etude played serenely from a gramophone. What was the piece playing? Something by Debussy? Liszt? Chopin? Bach? It wasn't important. What was more important, at least to the young man sitting in the corner of the cafe that evening, was time. It was half past eleven and the person he was supposed to meet nearly an hour ago, at her request no less, was nowhere to be seen. Blowing a strand of jet black hair away from his eye, he looked around, his face leaving his wrist-watch for the first time since sitting down at his table. 

The smoke began to dissipate. There were two waitresses. Twenty-somethings, making much small talk with the patrons. Their warm, yet empty smiles kind of bothered him. It was like the glow of neon lights, he thought - artificial. He quickly blinked away the idea. Intellectually, he knew he shouldn't judge at face value. However, he couldn't help it. This place was far removed from intellect. The patrons of the place puffed on their pipes, played cards and laughed raucously all around. 'Why do they have to be so loud?' came the all familiar question.

"They're just having fun." 

He looked beside him to where the small, mousy voice had come from. Had he actually spoken the question out loud? Stupid! It was a petite, brunette girl who had spoken up, wearing plain, unremarkable clothes and having even plainer, more unremarkable features. She had just sat down at the table next to him and almost looked statuesque, the shadows of the lingering smoke adding a marble-like characteristic to her already pale complexion. Arching a brow nonchalantly, he opened his mouth to say something, but then stopped himself, simply turning away. 

"What do you have against fun?" she piped up.

He looked back towards her and grimaced. He really didn't want to have this type of conversation today. "I wasn't judging them," he said as calmly as he could. "I honestly just can't figure out why people have to be this loud." He looked back at the noisy crowd. "It's an unnecessary expenditure of energy, as the same sentiments can very well be communicated with a regular speaking voice." He paused for a moment. "It also must be very exhausting."

"But if you've never been exhausted, then how can you say you've ever really done anything?" Her eyes were lively and warm, almost a complete contrast to the artificiality the waitresses gave off. Their glow, he thought, more than made up for the plainness of her other features. 

Still, he didn't see the need to continue with this diversion. "Crazy," he muttered, brushing off her remarks.

"Like a fox."

"A fox with dementia," he said as he moved to get up. Without another word he had left his table, moving past the crowd to the front entrance. It was obvious that the person he was supposed to meet wasn't going to show. This was definitely the last time he'd reply to an anonymous internet forum message. What was he thinking? Being stood up by someone he's never even met before, with no leads, the week before he had to turn in his research. What could be worse than this?

As he reached the exit and lifted a hand to turn the doorknob, he felt a dainty finger poke twice his shoulder. He looked back and saw, as expected, the tiny, statuesque girl. "Hi Len," she said simply. "I'm Jade, the one that contacted you about your research."

At that point he knew the answer to 'what could be worse than this?'

goodbye

I've been intentionally inexpressive about the recent loss of a friend, because I knew anything I could have said or done would have been insufficient, and even as I type, I find these words destitute of the situation's deserved earnestness. I didn't want to change my display picture to an image of both of us, or quote a lyric from one of his compositions, or cite hollow gone-but-still-here platitudes, because I felt that those gestures could not, do not, do the emotion justice. Saying anything is an uphill battle for me. But I guess Sisyphus continuously pushed his boulder upwards not because it was functional, but because the alternative would have been to let it crush him.

What I remember most vividly of our interactions were the candid talks after our shows, during drives, and verse writing. He wasn't only a peer musically, he was a brother in private times of intuition and contemplation; in shared righteous indignation at plutocracy masquerading as equal opportunity. He was a deep dude both in verse and in thought, and I hope he knew how much I learned from him.

I was never under the assumption that the world was a fair place, but this cements that sentiment in cold granite. The revelation that I'm still here though, motivates me to continue to try to do what he did every day that I've known him: try to change it for the better.

the city: a (de)construction

Written originally for the TUPF.

You could make the argument that photography is humble. It’s an art-form where the artist takes a backseat to the subject. The “subject” is the draw. The photographer sets a stage to prop the subject up and distills it through personal contexts and connotations (though even this is brought into contention elsewhere: see Death of the Photographer). Be that as it may, the subject is still the proprietor of our attention. And it can of course come in many forms, but for the purpose of this writing, let us turn our attention outwards to examine the oft-glossed over subject of urban/street photography: the city itself.

Photo illustration by Hubert Blanz

More than half of the world’s population currently live in cities and that number is growing. According to sustainability and environmentalist pioneer Stewart Brand, “cities are the drivers of history if we look at history.” Put another way, cities are where stuff happens. And this stuff, this history, is still happening. Street photography in a way captures this history all around us, the photographers acting as sort of unsung micro-historians. The “Global Village” analogy, oft romanticized, probably needs a touch-up to something more along the lines of “The Global City.” 1.3 million new people a week come to town, and this trend continues week after week, month after month, year after year. The villages of the world are drying up along with subsistence farming. As Stewart Brand says, “I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, mainly because I never lived in one.” There are continuously more opportunities in bustling metropolises. The fact of the matter is, city life is less physically grueling, better paid, private, safer, and well, more exciting and dynamic.

This dynamism is perhaps something that makes the idea of urban/street photography so interesting. Over a million different stories are happening at any given time, all and everywhere at once.  The city is temporal. It is ever-changing and impermanent. Buildings are draped in graffiti that wasn’t there a week ago. A week later they may have transformed yet again or may have even disappeared entirely. City skylines are as dynamic as its people (Cliff once told me that there are only two seasons in Toronto: winter and construction). Our cities both shape us and are a natural extension, shaped by us. The relationship is reciprocal and symbiotic. And this allusion to biology doesn’t stop there.

In 2008, a joint project by Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Alessandro Flammini of Indiana University in the U.S. took data of street patterns from roughly 300 cities as diverse as Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Venice and found that cities’ road patterns have much in common. In fact, not only mathematically was this similarity apparent, but also visually. This was interesting for two reasons: the first being that the similarity between the cities in the data was unplanned and unintentional. Street patterns in New Delhi and Venice were markedly similar, even when they were built continents and even centuries apart. The second reason this is of interest is that these models of road networks create patterns and imagery very similar to those in biological systems, like the veins or petiole on a leaf. It seems that there is an unconscious imperative, as we approach more and more complexity, for manmade systems to mimic natural biological systems. Kevin Kelly of WIRED Magazine calls this “up-creation.” That is, complexity increases as we move “upwards”. Author Steven Johnson talks about this as well: that slime mould cultures, even neurons in the brain mirror city streets and interconnections, and similarities occur serendipitously across different scales of reality.

Scaled down from aerial shots to street shots, we begin to see movement along these makeshift veins and petioles. As Coriolanus III of Rome said, “What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.” It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to extend this comparison of winding interconnected city road networks to neuronal axon-dendrite connections in our brain or even capillaries in our circulatory system. And drawing from Peter Ackroyd and Cliff Davidson, if roads, walkways, and rails are the veins and arteries of the city, they only exist to direct the flow of blood/people. The people are a city’s life blood. In fact, without people, along with their movement and circulation, a city would die. Continuing with the body analogy, the blood is pumped to the ever-beating heart. And what else could the heart be but  the place where industry and commerce reside and are centralized? It’s where stuff happens the most. This may be the reason why the majority of street photography focuses on busy downtown. Just spend an afternoon walking around Toronto’s Dundas Square and you’ll never have a shortage of photo opportunities; of stories to tell and histories to capture.

But in this gravitation towards the heart, there are things that get lost in the shuffle. The organism of the city does create a sort of schism, but I would argue that this in itself is a driver of one of its most endearing qualities. As if shunting occurred, with blood being brought from the extremities to the vital organs, so do people rush towards ‘progress’ and away from the suburban and culture specific outer-limbs. People cluster in this way, like specialized cells forming organs, they form pocket cultures. However, each one of these brings something novel to to the aggregate whole. Ali Madanipour, author of “Public and Private Spaces of the City” comments on the “inner city” and its epitomizing social exclusion (and subsequent inclusion), with urban ghettos or enclaves of like-natured people “spatializing” together, often around the same religion, culture, careers or socio-economic status. It’s inevitable that at least in some capacity these subcultures will interact in daily life, blend with and influence one another. It’s a phenomenon of constant breaking up of and building up of new patch-work communities whether in schools, work or play. This fraying and blending effect perhaps accounts for the boundless variability and identity in cities. You will never find so many people as eclectic and different from one another in such close proximity as you will in the hustle and bustle of city-life (and it seems that some of these differences, juxtaposed, can be very striking, and maybe even not so different).

Let’s return to the analogy of city roads as capillaries in our circulatory system. As previously denoted, these same pattern correlations are repeatedly found in many biological systems. The city “organism” in this light, even with its granite buildings and paved roads, seems very humane. So much so that certain urban planning think-tanks (like the Inria/INSA Lyon team ‘Urbanet’) who are continuously investigating potentialities for cities of the future, are directly noticing these similarities and basing their suggestions on our natural anatomy. Maybe this serendipitous similarity, this “up-creation,” has to do with the fact that cities are all human creations. The city then is paradoxically both very foreign and very personal – both separate and simultaneously “us.” This idea is what physicist Geoffrey West has been recently consumed with: the fact that cities are just a physical manifestation of your interaction, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. Stated another way, the city is just a symbolic representation of us. We’re interested in it because it’s our continually unfolding story. Stripped of every formal textbook and city planning definition, maybe the crux of the city organism is… well, humanity.

And in that case, perhaps I was a little too quick in the beginning of this article to praise photography as humble. The city is many things: a home, a canvas, a playground, a workplace, a storybook. However, macroscopically, with all just described, is it that much of a stretch to add “mirror” to that list? And in this day and age, as evidenced by social networking, what mirror would be complete without a camera naturally poised against it to vainly capture a self shot?

death of the photographer

Written originally for the TUPF.

The French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote the essay “Death of the Author” in 1967 in which he proposed that the original intent of the author in his or her writings did not matter, and that the reader’s interpretation was the only thing that ever gave writing meaning. The implication is perspective changing. Although Barthes focused on literature, the underlying philosophy can be (and arguably has been) adapted to anything man made. Photography as an art form has not escaped this fate. The last decade has perhaps been the most cataclysmic in terms of changes in the medium. This is particularly noticeable in the consumerist hodgepodge that is the city. And although the proliferation of increasingly cheaper and more accessible cameras is nothing new (as evidenced as far back as the Kodak Brownie), I would argue that there has not been a point in history when photography has been more accessible, cheap and ubiquitous as it is today. It is so simple, so portable, and ultimately, now embedded in such a necessary device. Equipped with a camera phone, everybody is a photographer. The urban landscape has become flooded with amateur shutter-bugs who snap and click at every inclination simply because they can. This has created a common repeated criticism I have heard within photography circles: that technology, having become cheap and commonplace, has created art that is also cheap and commonplace. Browse almost any Twitter feed and you see an accompanying Instagram account flooded with pictures that seemingly lack rhyme, reason or any premeditation. The idea of ‘saying something’ has apparently become co-opted by the idea of ‘showing anything,’ as snapshots of things as arbitrary as a hamburger and fries are posted, but with a sepia filter to assume the look of something non-trivial and deep. As Barthes would argue however, who’s to say what has meaning and what doesn’t?

I love the city. Having lived in it all my life, in all its kinetic energy, to see that chaos captured perfectly still in a photograph is the oddest, most visually striking thing to me. I took the above photo downtown in some park, exact location forgotten and irrelevant. I wanted to capture a sense of that aforementioned frenetic “motion.” Passing a playground with children and parents and animals bustling about, it occurred to me that this little playground ecosystem was like a microcosm of the city energy that I wanted to capture. I set a relatively high shutter speed, threw a stick in the direction of some pigeons, waited for some motion, and clicked the shutter. I was quite pleased with the result and showed a few friends. Their interpretations of the shot surprised me to say the least. There were notions of nostalgia. There were interpretations involving the simplicity of childhood, and the loss of that serendipitous joy in the park. There was an interpretation that focused on the haphazard ordering of structures and subjects in the picture, claiming an endearing “symmetrical asymmetry” was present. Some loved the birds in mid motion, while some found the black-and-white in a scene that was typically portrayed very colourfully to be unsettling. Still, some found absolutely no meaning in the photograph at all. Having gotten the interpretations of close to twenty-some people, it occurred to me that similar themes kept reoccurring: that of nostalgia and simple joys of youth. These were things that resonated with people the most across the board and it is noteworthy that these elements were completely absent from my original intent. In that same token however, they’re also much more profound, and upon personal re-evaluation of the photograph, oddly, I found them to be much more fitting as well. What does this say about the actual proprietors of a photograph’s meaning?

The urban landscape is synonymous with multiple interpretations and dualities. The lights of a city street corner for example may represent warmth in an otherwise cold world, or indifferent man-made artificiality eclipsing the natural starry sky. The above photograph is of a dreary street corner on Toronto’s east end. It was taken on an evening testing out my newly handed-down flash-bulb and more specifically, it was the last photograph taken that night, when the battery of the bulb had already burnt out and all that was left to illuminate the otherwise all black canvas were the street lights. Truthfully it was an accident (though one I particularly like). Friends’ perceptions of the photograph range from it being the unfocused P.O.V. of a drunkard, to it raising a feeling of fear, unease, and/or nihilism. And once again, there were central themes throughout: coldness, isolation and loneliness. Like with the first picture, it is interesting that across many interpretations, several key feelings resonated even without the photographer’s cueing or hinting at them. It is as if my original intent (or admitted lack of it) could not stop the picture from becoming what it was ultimately meant to be. Perhaps there is something in the aesthetic formation of a good image that captures specific feelings that escape any presupposition and planning.

In the age of Instagram picture saturation, perhaps the photographer’s lack of purpose in taking a picture isn’t a problem. Perhaps the conclusive message of a photograph is something that can be completely detached from whatever the photographer’s intentions (or lack of intentions) happen to be. And as a habitat of mostly man-made structure in itself, the very city to me is Barthes’ idea actualized: edifices and objects that offer themselves to a multitude of perspectives and comprehensions. With every new picture I now take in it, I pause to consider whether I unknowingly pulled things unexpected from that floating ether of meaning, birthing the formation of ideas that I didn’t even know existed.

star gazing

The universe is a thoroughly stupefying place. Two nights ago, a friend and I took time off from our regularly scheduled nothingness in exchange for a more elevated form of nothingness. She and I escaped the urban sprawl, lied down amidst the shadowy blanket that surrounding brush provided, and looked up at the night sky. For the first time in almost a decade, sky-watchers that night were able to see all five naked-eye planets together. That is, the classical naked-eye planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - would be appearing together during a single night; a phenomenon that hadn't occurred since 2004. As Geza Gyuk, an astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago describes, "it's a bit like looking at an astronomy class in a nutshell."

It was both a humbling and elating experience. To think our ancient ancestors had looked up in wonder at the same sparkle laden quilt and since then have derived everything from stories of both grandeur and superstition, to Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference, to the models to explain the approach and reproach of the ocean's tides (yes, you CAN explain that), to the Galilean grand revelation of Heliocentrism - all from the acknowledgement of celestial bodies. And to think that with the same evolutionarily derived pair of eyes, homosapiens of yestercenturies saw the same sights, but thought very different, very untrue things. That perhaps the moon was some heavenly godly beacon, or perhaps, akin to the Greek's Selene, a godly entity in itself. That the darkness all around us that night was due to Ra's defeat by the atramentous Set. Perhaps they thought that our own lives up to and including that night were simply a soul's dream, a passing test by some indifferent 'greater-than-us,' and not, as much neuroscience now shows, a very real and beautiful corporeal reality, and one that we had both felt and shared in, not because of any calling or binding destinies, but just because we could.

Our ancestors, in their first clumsy attempts to describe the truth of nature, created stories to (erringly) explain away the mysteries. They were wonderful stories, but only that. And when others searched and found with greater precision more approximate truths, instead of accepting or rejecting them based on the merit of evidence, we xenophobically shut them up. And why wouldn't we have? It is something of great fear and apprehension to have your whole planet destroyed. Every time a new theory enters into the aggregate social mind and an old one is thrown out, the Earth is reinvented. And humanity, in its macroscopic infancy, reacted with all the harshness, confusion and trepidation that a child would when told Santa Claus didn't exist... and I shudder at the thought of what this scorned child has done with armies at its disposal. What a display of ego and ignorance is the presumption that "I know everything." What an ugly, yet necessary, stage of growth it was to believe in things without any substantiation.

In the 18th century, a period called the age of enlightenment occurred, one that accompanied the scientific revolution. It was characterized by the intellectual movement that advocated and encouraged reason rather than blind faith. Philosophers such as Nietzsche felt that the relatively new scientific method explained natural phenomena without supernatural intervention, thereby denying the need for a god. In one of his later works, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' the titular character in the fable proclaims almost psychotically, "God is dead, and it is we who have killed him." With the admittedly relieving but ultimately limiting psychological distortion of 'faith' poetically downed, a new resolve began to emerge - one that still fearlessly searched for answers but did so with an honest gait; with a love for truth. In the words of John Locke, "one mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." In this way, humanity had begun to shed its childlike phobia and ego, and instead had vulnerably accepted its ignorance. And though undoubtedly with some uneasiness and dissonance, had begun the long path to maturity and actualization of potential.

Still, embers of bronze-age barbarism and cowardice are left to be snuffed out. Today, just as the belief of Iraqi nuclear weapons prompted the United States to go to war, the belief in a god (perhaps fear of such a being) is the sole reason many people do many things (at best unnecessary and at worst fatal). Like current pop culture icons, the Christian god and his all time best seller have been the fuel for an entire multi-billion dollar industry (for centuries). The rich, poor, and the marginally insane all benefit by catering to the faithful legions. Hollywood churns out a ceaseless series of biblical “reenactments”. All of them are instant box office hits that fatten the already obese wallets of the wealthy. In the troubled corners of the world, millions of statuettes are fashioned from mud, then painted by feeble hands in the likeness of a virgin mother and her son. They are then sold off to rich tourists by many poor laborers of the third-world. Some people just sell grilled cheese Jesus sandwiches for $ 28,000 on eBay, to help other people feel like they are in touch with the eternal one. Not to mention the so-called "pro-life" activists bombing doctors' clinics, and countless deaths over essentially variations of the argument of who's deity is more peaceful.

When my friend and I looked up at the stars two nights ago, I saw them not as heavenly personages imbuing cosmic "luck" depending on the arbitrary day of my birth, but rather as the light remnants of gravity-held luminous, tremendous spheres of plasma, originally lightyears away, and thousands of years gone... probably. I posit that it is only in that great admission that "we do not know for sure" that relevant answers will be found, and I revel in our slowly emerging admitted collective ignorance.

As the night progressed and we watched on, I wondered what star gazers in a thousand years time would be thinking of as they watch those twinkling specks that, both poetically and technically, maybe existed only yesterday.