I have decided to post some recent colour photos. It has been an unusual year with the Covid-19 pandemic, and I have mostly stuck close to home. However, this has not deterred me from taking my usual photos.
When I take a walk with my camera, I’m always on the lookout for the unusual–odd scenes, quirky juxtapositions. To me unusual things are more visually interesting. They demand our attention in different ways than traditional beauty does.
Do you remember those unforgettable Hipgnosis album covers? If you are around my age, you probably spent a lot of time in your teenage years listening to LPs and studying the album covers. You would play side one, then flip over to side two, all the while contemplating the meaning of the prism on the cover. The album art was sometimes humorous, but often it was surreal and enigmatic–very artsy, and unusual.
When I got a camera some years later I remembered those cool Hipgnosis creations (by Storm Thorgerson) and looked for photos with similar moods and juxtapositions. A discarded door on a sidewalk, an odd reflection in a mirror, a blank sign–this lead me to produce a series titled: Wish You Were Here. Thorgerson was good at isolating odd elements in the image, much like the painter René Magritte. It was clear what you were supposed to notice, but an intended meaning was not so clear. This ambiguity can draw you in and keep you looking for a long time.
I take photos for many different reasons, but am always on the lookout for those quirky, off-beat scenes–the ones that make you do a double-take.
Here are my favourite photos of 2020. What a long, strange trip this year has been–one of isolation, uncertainty, and sadness as the pandemic spread around the world and took so many lives. It’s also been a year of hope– people have been brought together in unexpected ways, and a vaccines have been developed in record time. We can only wish for a better year in 2021.
The photo above seems to symbolize my year. It shows a twisted web of grape vines in the fog, illuminated by a flash. It has been a foggy year, but not without it’s moments of brightness. My year started out in Nagoya, Japan. My family was on a big trip through Europe and Japan–the trip of a lifetime for us. We started out in France in November and finished in Budapest, Hungary, in early March. We had to cut our trip short by three weeks in order to get back to Canada before the pandemic. The trip was fantastic in every way, and has provided a wealth of memories for my family.
I have continued to work on my photography–selling prints from my website Shop, and putting together photo books. The most recent is Toronto In Colour: the 1980s.
This was taken on the Tokyo Sakura Tram in late January, 2020. It is the only streetcar left in Tokyo, running between Minowabashi Station and Waseda Station (12.2 kilometers; 30 stations). The slow pace of the streetcar seemed out of step with the bustle of the city and reminded me of what Tokyo must have been like in the old days.
Taken along the Meuse River in Liege, Belgium, where I went jogging everyday (sometimes I did more photography than jogging!) It’s a juxtaposition of the new and the old, a thing I noticed a lot in Europe.
The metro in Prague was beautifully designed, with wonderful colours. I waited for the train to start so that the door was framed in the center of the entrance.
A train station in Budapest, Hungary. I remember having to hold my phone high over my head to get this photo. I just realized that all the travel photos so far include some means of transportation. Interesting!
Back in Canada in March to a pandemic lockdown, and snow. We saw almost no snow on our four month trip, but weren’t surprised to see it in Nova Scotia in March.
I really missed visiting my mother while I was away. She has dementia and is almost deaf, so communicating through glass with a cell phone proved to be challenging. But it was much better than not seeing her at all.
My Wish You Were Here series aims to challenge the viewers’ attention in a subtle way by finding everyday scenes with elements of whimsy and surrealism. Like Rene Magritte, and Lee Friedlander, I want to make the familiar seem a little strange, but without Photoshop and image manipulation. These photos come about through observation, using juxtaposition, reflection, typography, and scale.
This project has been ongoing for several years now, and also have a black and white series called Wish You Were Here – Monochrome Dreaming. As 2020 has been such a strange and unusual year, I thought these 2020 photos, since the start of the pandemic, may be appropriate for the times.
Here is the introduction to the book, self published in 2018: “When I was a teenage boy in the mid-Seventies, living in rural Nova Scotia, I spent hours studying the album covers created by Hipgnosis, the London-based design group. This was before I grew interested in photography, but, as LPs like Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or “Ummagumma” played on the turntable, I scrutinized the covers, trying to penetrate the mysteries of the evocative, layered visual compositions. My “Wish You Were Here” is an ongoing photographic project that’s been in the works for several years. I aim to capture images that have a sense of the surreal yet are readily seen in everyday life. Additionally, I try to capture the sense of whimsy and humour that I liked about those album covers. The images come about through observation, rather than with Photoshop or other manipulations. For me, that’s an important aspect of the project–there’s no manipulation of the image. Reflections, juxtaposition, and scale all come into play.”
