I try to put some pizzaz into my photos from time to time. This self portrait from 1980 does that quite literally. If you listen carefully to this photo, you can hear my stomach rumbling, anticipating a tasty pizza slice.
My personal favourite spot for a pizza slice was “John’s New York Pizza and Spaghetti Palace” at Danforth and Greenwood. I lived just around the corner, and went there often. (It disappeared quite suddenly in 2004.) After that it was Vesuvio’s, Pizza Gigi, Bitondo’s, and The Big Slice. I’m starting to get hungry!
I may have sung this song back in 1985 when I took this self portrait, but never could have imagined the year 2022, or what it is like to be sixty four. Losing my hair, and slowly losing memories. But still feeling happy, alive, and creative.
The future is unknown to everyone, and the best we can do is make good choices in the moment hoping that they will have a positive outcome in the future. In every moment of time we make a choice. Words to live by.
This photo appears in the book: Toronto Days, available at Blurb Books.
Allow Your Shadow in Your Photo Sometimes (Day 30 of 31)
Sometimes your shadow ends up in a photo by accident, but other times it’s not a mistake. Lee Friedlander was one of the first widely known photographers to make use of his shadow as a photographic element, and many people have done it since.
Why would you have your shadow in a photo? That’s one of the marks of a rank amateur, right up there with having your thumb over the lens.
Well, your shadow poking into the frame can convey a few different things. For one, it reinforces the truth that a photograph is not reality. No matter how much we’re capturing the truth of one moment, it’s still only a single moment, and it’s subject to the photographer’s point of view, conscious and unconscious biases, and frame of reference. So the photographer’s shadow in the picture operates at a very meta level, reminding the viewer that a human being held the camera.
A shadow can function as a graphic element, directing the viewer’s attention like a pointer or signpost toward something you want to emphasize in the frame. It can be used to add balance or resonance to your composition.
A third reason for letting your shadow be part of the picture is that sometimes there’s no way around it, if you want a particular shot. At certain times of day, in certain places, the only way you can include all the information you want in a photo is by letting that other piece of information—this is where the photographer was—be a part of it, as well.
And, fourth, it can add a touch of lightness or humour to your shot. A photo that’s not particularly witty or irreverent can take on those characteristics when you let your shadow fall into the frame.
As with many of our photographic efforts, what may initially seem like an egregious mistake may end up being something you like a lot. If you’ve never fooled around with including shadows in the photos you take, it’s a fun thing to experiment with.
(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)
The selfie is more popular than ever, but it is hardly a new phenomenon. Rembrandt painted self portraits in the 1660s “to keep himself busy in between commissions and because of his ongoing fascination with the aging process,” says Nigel Hurst, CEO of the Saatchi Gallery, in London.
The first known photographic selfie was taken by American photographer Robert Cornelius in 1839. Although selfies were popular with photographers and artists throughout the twentieth century, they didn’t become mainstream until the invention of the smart phone. In 2010, a front-facing camera was built into the iPhone 4. By 2013, the word selfie was so popular, it was included in the Oxford English dictionary.
My interest in self portraits started in the late ’70s when I got my first camera. I had been fascinated by some fantastic self portraits Lee Friedlander took in the 1960s. These were far from the typical smiling, head-and-shoulders shots with a famous landmark in the background. Friedlander appeared as a shadow, or as reflection in mirrors or windows. There was a deadpan sense of humour in the photos that attracted me. Over the years I’ve taken many of those, most often trying to emulate that quirky sense of humour I admired in Friedlander’s shots.
Taking a selfie can wake up plenty of the uneasiness that can be stirred when others are photographing us–that feeling of whether we look good enough, whether we’re aging well, whether we’re fashionable or geeky or cool. As a father of two teenage daughters (as well as the partner of a woman I’ve been married to for more than twenty years), I’m keenly aware of how remorselessly photography tracks our aging selves. In a society that persistently judges and comments on women’s looks, perhaps it’s helpful for girls and women to grab the camera back and be in charge of it.
One of my daughters takes dozens of selfies; the other takes very few. My wife puts up with being photographed, but she’s nowhere near as comfortable with it as I am. I think it would be a mistake to read much into these habits. For instance, is the daughter who photographs herself vain, and the other one modest or self-conscious? I see no evidence of that. I like being in my photos, but do I think I’m better-looking than my wife thinks she is? Does she feel less attractive than I do? Possibly not. (Both of us are ordinary-looking people, neither splendid nor ugly, now in our fifties and thus pretty much invisible to society at large.)
Like a mirror, a camera is one more way we can engage with ourselves. The surface is only a tiny bit of who we are–but it’s the only part of us the world can truly see. Who is this person, out walking around in the world, with a head stuffed full of unique thoughts and ideas? A camera can be a doorway though which you get outside yourself–a rare and valuable thing.
