March 25th, 2007
Sometime around the St. Patrick’s Day snowstorm that undid all of the progress spring had made so far, somebody decided to give people in Mile End a bit of an escape from the weather. Photos of green parks, summery shadows and outdoor cafés have been stapled onto hydro poles near St. Viateur Street. Only one of the pictures has a caption: “This is where we make good on life,” it reads in faded blue ink.
March 15th, 2007
These photos are from my first, and so far last, trip to Canada. I actually don’t know much about what they are depicting—so I leave the commenting to you. It’s fascinating though how a crappy scanner, black and white film and the way people are dressed make 1995 feel like ancient history.
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March 13th, 2007
Today, I wafted about the western portion of Kansas City, Missouri’s downtown loop, giddy and elated at the proposition of indulging in my guiltiest pleasure—high dynamic range photography, or HDR. Actually, what I’ve done is more properly known as tone mapping. To put it simply, these tone-mapped photos have been digitally manipulated to reveal as much detail as possible. The effect is somewhat surreal.
In this place photographed dwells the main Kansas City Public Library, converted lofts and condos, office uses, and the occasional fine (and sometimes not so fine) restaurants.
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March 7th, 2007
F train, 8:40am. Photo by Travis Ruse
Whenever I try to read on the bus or metro, my eyes invariably slide up and over to the other passengers on board. Considering I will never see most of them again, reading their faces is far more interesting than whatever book or magazine I have in front of me.
It would seem I’m not alone. For more than two years, photoblogger Travis Ruse has been haunting the subway tunnels of New York, documenting the people on his daily commute. What stands out is not his subject matter—subway life has been documented by photographers going all the way back to Walker Evans in 1938—but his unique ability to capture, on a daily basis and with surprising intimacy, the human richness of New York mass transit.
R train, 6:35pm. Photo by Travis Ruse
February 25th, 2007
Earlier this week, on a remarkably sunny afternoon, I walked down Robson Street and into the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was there to see images of a lost Vancouver.
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February 3rd, 2007
“Neighbourhoods” by Hamish Grant
My first exposure to tilt-shift photography was in 2004, when I visited Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific: Montreal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Commissioned to compliment the CCA’s great show on Montreal in the 60s, Barbieri used a tilt-shift lens to photograph major 1960s-era Montreal landmarks from the air: the Maison Radio-Canada, Westmount Square, Place Ville-Marie, Place des Arts, the Metropolitan expressway and La Ronde, among others. The result was a series of images that transformed Montreal into something as pristine and perfect as a scale model.
Such is the effect produced by a tilt-shift lens, which fools the eye into thinking it is looking at something much smaller than it really is. When used to document urban landscapes, the city becomes, in Barbieri’s words, “an avatar of itself.” Last year, he explained his mission to Metropolis: “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything. After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.” So far, Barbieri has shot Rome, Amman, Las Vegas and Shanghai.
Recently, tilt-shift photography—both the authentic kind and Photoshop imitations—has become popular on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. When it’s done well, it achieves a similar surreal quality to Barbieri’s work, transforming the hard-edged reality of aerial views into something softer and more ambiguous.
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January 25th, 2007
Montreal ’87? Try Montreal ’72. Flickr habitué Colin Rose recently delved into his photographic archives and pulled out some remarkable shots from the early 1970s. Some depict a massive snowstorm that coincided with a blue collar workers’ strike, which left downtown streets impassable for days. Others focus on Montreal’s art deco architecture. Since they are all scanned from slides, the photos have a particularly crisp quality that makes them look as if they were taken yesterday, not thirty-five years ago.
What makes Rose’s photos so interesting is they they reveal so many small details of everyday Montreal life. In his snowstorm set, for instance, you can’t help but notice that English street names have English signs (“Stanley St.“) while French street names have French signs (“Rue de la Gauchetière“). The Expo ’67 logo is still affixed to lampposts on Dorchester Boulevard and Peel Street, a reminder of Montreal’s late-sixties glory. On Ste. Catherine Street, terse 1970s design (check out the classic “banque provinciale” sign) is juxtaposed against the giddy neon of an earlier era.
Then, of course, there are the cars: American behemoths on one hand, tiny Volkswagens and Peugeots on the other.
January 13th, 2007
Lawrence West from David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC
I’m a transit geek. I’m not a railfan—the mundane details of different train models and rail gauges doesn’t interest me—but I am fascinated by public transport. I pore over subway maps and admire ephemera such as old tickets or the unique, quietly confident typeface used in Toronto’s 1950s-era stations. I love how public transit—in the cities where it is a central part of life and not a marginal service for the poor—is a great social blender, bringing people from every different corner of the city together. In many ways, it is in the subway, not the streets, where the true face of a city is revealed.
That’s why I appreciate David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC, an ambitious attempt to visit and photograph all sixty-nine of Toronto’s subway stations. Topping documents the subway’s details, captures its atmosphere and studies its users, revealing the breadth and complexity of Toronto’s urban landscape. “I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born,” he explains on Torontoist. “My Toronto—the part of the city that matters to me—has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair. I felt stuck.” By the end of his tour, he felt he had gained “a genuine curiosity for the city that I thought I knew everything about. There will always be more of Toronto to explore, always be more people to find and places to escape to.”
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November 24th, 2006
Every Thanksgiving night, the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City, Missouri sets aglow amid thousands of revelers. The older, faux-Spanish low-rise edifices are adorned with miles upon miles of Christmas lights.
The first iterations of what is now known largely as “The Plaza” were built in the 1920s in the formerly swampish southern nether-reaches of the city. The area today serves primarily as an upscale shopping and restaurant district, as well as a home for both condominium owners and apartment renters. Offices are now prevalent as well.
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October 10th, 2006
Manufactured Landscapes follows Edward Burtynsky’s photographic exposition of unprecedented human transformation of the landscape.
Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images. Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.
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September 29th, 2006
Both sunrise and dusk photos are among my favorite kinds of urban photography methods, as I find they help convey the more inscrutable, inconspicuous facets of urban form and design that a city exudes, normally unseen in the usual daytime pictures.
Ubiquitous throughout midtown Kansas City, Missouri, are the endearing Colonnade style apartment buildings that comprise a great deal of the residential architecture in the city. They are most frequently found ranging from two to three stories, plus basements.
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September 29th, 2006
Photographer under the Van Horne Viaduct, Montreal
It was rush hour on a brisk evening in early March which couldn’t decide between winter and spring. I stepped onto a crowded bus and clasped the handrail as it lurched down Park Avenue. Fifteen minutes and two metro stops later, I walked quickly through a few corridors and dashed across Ste. Catherine—up an unmarked staircase, Café L’Utopik awaited.
I arrived at this crowded, sprawling café—a maze of brightly-coloured rooms, mismatched chairs and squeaky hardwood floors—to participate in a University of the Streets Café discussion on the flâneur. Ironically, I had come in a rush—just another bow-headed pedestrian pressing forward—but I’m usually what is considered to be a flâneur; my favourite pastime is to wander aimless around the city, camera in hand, recording anything that strikes my eye.
At a little after seven o’clock, as a dozen or so people sat near the front of the café waiting for the discussion to start, Mia Hunt, a doctoral student in Design Art and Urban Studies at Concordia University, got things rolling. The flâneur, she told us, emerged in nineteenth-century Paris, the product of a new bourgeois class and Baron Haussmann’s dramatic makeover of the city. A dandyish figure who strolled unhurriedly down the capital’s boulevards, the flâneur was best captured in the work of Charles Baudelaire. “For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer,” he wrote, “it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity; in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you’re not at home but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you’re at the centre of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody.”
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