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.
I attended a Black Lives Matter community forum today in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and found it inspiring and thought provoking. As I listened to the speakers relate personal stories of racism and oppression, it dawned on me that it is the black and indigenous peoples who are the true heroes. To have your land taken away, or escape slavery, live in poverty, live with segregation and residential schools; and not only survive, but THRIVE —this should be celebrated, not ignored or downplayed by white people. Imagine being told by the white majority that you are not equal, that you are second class. And in extreme cases, not really human. Imagine this inhumane treatment happening for 400 years. It’s challenging for white people to try to comprehend the depths and reach of white privilege. We should all be proud of black and indigenous citizens and of how they have succeeded in spite of racism and oppression. There is so much white people can learn from them, from their resilience and community strength.
If whites had escaped enslavement or survived residential schools, they would have been lauded as cultural heroes and icons. It’s telling that many of our monuments are for the men who were the greatest oppressors. The colonialists, slave traders, land barons. Why can’t we have more monuments for those who succeeded even when everything was stacked against them?
Black Lives Matter is very important in 2020. For all those who say All Lives Matter, I say that’s true, but imagine living in a world where the playing field is slanted in the other team’s favor (and has been for hundreds of years). Could white people even survive in such an inhumane world?
These are some things I saw today, taking a load of garbage to the local landfill. It’s always fun to take a little road trip–it doesn’t matter how far (the landfill is about 15 km from my home.) And it makes the photos look a bit better when there is a sunny sky.
In the community of Cogmagun, there is this tiny house. I don’t think anyone lives there year round, maybe just in the summer. I take a photo of it just about every time I pass by. It reminds me of the house of folk artist Maude Lewis that is on display in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
This rag-tag collection of signs caught my eye. I’m interested in the Stanley Airport which operated as a pilot training center during World War II. My mother grew up in the small community of Stanley and went to see movies at the base as a ten year old. When I was a boy in the 1960s it housed a parachute training school and I loved to watch the parachutists floating in the sky like dandelion seeds.
There was a very high tide in the Herbert River today. This part of the world has some of the world’s highest tides with tide water flowing in from the Bay of Fundy and filling all the connected rivers. This is a popular place for tourists to watch the tidal bore.
On my way home, crossing the Kennetcook River where I took more high tide photos. I love this view, looking up the hill with the utility pole in the middle of the road. It was a good day for getting things done, and getting a few photos–things I saw today.
This is a short video of me skating on Woolaver’s Pond in Newport, Nova Scotia. I spent countless hours of my youth skating and playing hockey (shinny) on this pond. I imagined that I was Bobby Orr, rushing down the ice to score a goal. My friends and I were absolutely devoted to that pond.
If there was snow on the pond, we’d clear it. If the weather was frigid, we’d bundle up. There was no stopping us. We made wooden goals with burlap bags as the netting and lost many pucks in the cattails.
Climate change in the past two decades has meant that there are very few days in the winter when skating on the pond is possible. It is either unsafe (the ice is not thick enough), or the constant freezing and thawing makes the surface unusable. Also, kids just aren’t into pond hockey like they used to be. On a sunny Saturday in the 1970s there would have been dozens of people on the pond, and even skating parties in the evening. These days, it’s empty.
I was so glad to be back on the pond. I wished that perfect day would last forever.
I should note that the skates I was wearing were CCM Tacks circa 1976. Sadly, they are broken and have become my pond skates. You can see where I have wrapped black tape to mend the holes and cracks in the plastic.
