Working Stiffs

It's been a while since I've written anything about, let done anything with a backlog of images dating to summer of last year.

First some background. My day job was (note the use of the word was) working as a flight coordinator for a charter airline. The airline flew oil company personnel to and from work sites in Northern Alberta and British Columbia. With the current geopolitical situation driving oil prices to below the costs of production (let's face it, the Western Sedimentary Basin and the Oil Sands are not low cost production environments) the flying started to slow down and my shift switched from a four on, four off rotation to three days on the weekends. All well and good. I had to do something productive with my time so I took in upon myself to write a boat load of software (something I did in a previous life, back when dinosaurs ruled and Borland was still a real company) for the OCC to streamline our operations, revamp the operations handbook and develop a series of online courses. Oddly enough this kinda sapped any creative juices I had left and I only photographed in fits and starts.

Well, as you can surmise, the flying kept going down and I got laid off about two weeks ago. No big deal, shit happens. I'll just re-invent myself, again (even though it is getting a litle stale, this re-inventing business, it being the third or fourth time; I've lost count).

Wouldn't you know it, I was able to return to the backlog and there, the creative juices started to flow. I noticed that I had a quite a few images of the working man, the guy that BTO sang about in opening verse "Takin' Care of Business". You know the ones: the ones who deliver the beer, make sure the traffic flows, make sure that the lads don't get out of control. The ones who build our buildings, clean our streets, catch our fish. I went back to some off my older images, and found a seam of hard working souls that had gone unrecognized.

I'll be adding to this collection and what is in the post gallery will change over time as images get added and deleted as the concept unfold.

After the parade, the sweeper comes always comes out. It's a tiresome job and it never seems to end.

Sweeper

New York cops, like the boys from Joisey have a natural knack for hanging out. These guys in Times Square on a hot and very muggy evening were watching the usual goings on with a sense of ennui that only comes from having seen it all night after night after night.

Another Night at Times Square

Steveston Docks is where you can buy fresh fish in Vancouver, right off the boat. It was one of those cold, damp, foggy days; the Scots would call it dreich. This fisherman kept warm by a space heater at his feet and bundled up in a parka was selling this morning's catch of spotted shrimp

Shrimp on Ice

Calgary has its dreich days as well, usually in early March when the rain is mixed with wet snow. This delivery driver is loading up in Chinatown with beef from a hole in the wall butcher shop.

Beef

Finally, this old timer was photographed in Nobleford, Alberta. He's retired, but had worked as a rig hand across the Prairies and from north of the Arctic Circle down to the Middle East. We spent a pleasant while yarning about the patch (I've worked the rigs too) and I was able to make this image.

Rig Hand

So here's to all those folks: the ones who make sure things get done. 

You can view the project here.

Insecurities, Navel Gazing and Just Getting On With It

It's been a while. I've been sitting on three photo shoots from all over and have really dragged my ass in getting them into something workable. The reasons are manifold: converting the backroom to a studio, the normal vicissitudes of domestic life and, more to the point, wrestling with what goes in, what goes out and what gets filed in "Maybe Later: The Nascent Project File"

For the past while I've been watching the photostream of the G+ Communities I subscribe to with a certain amount of disquiet; nothing overt but more a Columbo-esque "somethin's been botherin' me" kind of niggle in the quiet recesses of my brain. The best way I can put it is like this: "Is it just me, or are people just posting 'happy snaps' and passing them off as photographs? And why is it that frequent posters are not showing any improvement in story telling, technique, drama tension, humour or composition?" I have other questions that I can't articulate yet but it all forms quite the interesting cocktail party in that area of my brain. Admittedly G+ contributors are all enthusiastic amateurs (in the best sense of the word) like myself so perhaps these perceptions are realistic given the population of these communities.

On top of this there have been several insightful articles with titles such as "Kill Your Babies" (on editing your work) and "Street Photography Has No Clothes". These are but two but you get my drift.

It is with this in the background that I pulled back completely to ponder my a) editorial process, b) my entire process of engaging with the environment in which I work on any given day and c) am I getting any better or is just random chance that I make an image that is decent and finally d) are any of the images that friends and family say are good, good or is just a mercy compliment?

I finally decided that all of this was, in the end, just mental masturbation and that I should just get on with things. It was in reading Minor White's article in the first issue of Aperture that kicked me out of my funk. If you don't have it, buy "Aperture Magazine Anthology - The Minor White Years" and you'll see that many photographers today are just treading the same road as White, Lange, Newhall, and the rest trod all those years ago.

With that, I'm going to start with a my second shoot and work my way around to the other two in future posts.

I was in New York this summer for about a week (never long enough) and walked. I think I logged about 25 miles a day. After letting them stew in LightRoom for a few weeks I edited down the equivalent of 20 rolls of 36 down to 14 images that I thought were OK. After shuffling the order around to see what narratives and groupings popped out I found that I had 3 things running through the 14: Children, Workers, and Isolation.

Children

It was odd that I had taken so many images of children as I normally don't photograph them, more out of respect and not wanting to be a creep, but I was presented with such rich opportunities that this is what fell out:

 

Workers

It was brutally hot in NYC when I was there but the hard work of making the city run has to continue.

 

Isolation

I've been working on two projects called "Converse" and "Communion". They're not very strong projects yet, but I think there is some meat on those bones I can make a decent stew from given some time. Conversation's obverse is Isolation and even in Times Square (which in the summer at peak tourist season makes a Japanese subway car at rush hour seem spacious) there are moments of isolation.

 

All Said and Done

Looking at these, I think there is one great image that could stand on its own without any other context. Perhaps three others that are strong enough to be included in a portfolio. Kill your babies.

Conversations in Vancouver

Toys in Window, Robson Street

Vancouver is a strangish place to photograph. Having grown up there, the layout of the city seems to be imprinted on my DNA, yet what is now there only partially resonates with what was imprinted all those years ago.

I love the light however. On the west coast the light is gentle and on a misty day with the sun peeking through it has a special luminosity, specialness that I’ve never found anywhere else.

The street can be challenging as, like New York, there is always the risk of descending into cliché; especially when you wander towards the east side of downtown YVR. The cadence however is different from NYC. New York never really sleeps. Even early in the morning there is a vibrancy and a pulse that Vancouver doesn’t seem to have; well it does have: around 1100 in the morning everyone pushes back from their desks, toddles off for and elevenses of a venti Americano decaf low foam no sugar extra shot and then off to a resto with a one word moniker like “Bleen”, “Food” or some such for a lengthy lunch. Later at night, until the clubs close, there is a sort of pulse, but you are dodging binge drinkers, the “lads”, and the ubiquitous rough sleepers.

Like many cities, the west end of Vancouver is posher than the east end. Denman Street acts a demarcation between the posh condo’s bordering Stanley Park and the newer condos and street scene of Robson and Davey Streets. A collection of low buildings that has the feel of the Vancouver I knew. A well-heeled crowd, by and large, and relatively free from the tourists that now prowl Robson make up Denman’s street scene.

I was standing on a corner watching the flow and saw two gentlemen walking down the street deep in conversation. I was lucky that they had to wait for the light to change.

Passing Knowledge

After a foray to the other (east) end of town I commented in my notebook:

“When confronted with the filth and squalor of the DTE in YVR it’s very easy to revert to the cheap shot rather than try and find the basic humanity of the people on the streets.
-Not sure how to approach (coward?) so I avoided it”

I did make on image though that, I think, does capture the dignity of the people there. On Carrall Street, just off Hastings is Wings Café; it’s been there in one form or another as long as I can remember. I walked back and forth along this block and just out of the corner of my eye on one pass I saw the door open and these gentlemen step out to continue their conversation over a fresh cup of joe and a smoke:

Wings Cafe

I gave this one a Kodachrome look, because by now I was starting to flash on Fred Herzog. The light matched, my mood matched, all was good.

Herzog holds a special place for me. His images capture the Vancouver I grew up in and I have a hard time separating his images as an artist from the images in my memory. In some I can still smell the fug of the inside of a BC Hydro trolley bus on a rainy day.

His images of what is now the Downtown East Side are especially poignant for me. I remember walking these streets, from the Army and Navy, on to Woodwards, Eatons and then The Bay. Of course you never went down to Gastown (we called it Skid Row then) but Hastings (although in decline) was still busy street. I’m not going to get into what happened or why; I don’t have all the information and enough has been written by urban planners, sociologists and everybody else and their dog.

I’d like to contrast Herzog’s Hastings with how I found Hastings this past February. This is a picture made by Herzog around when I was about 4 or 5, looking east along Hasting at Columbia.

E. Hastings and Columbia (c) Fred Herzog

I had no idea that I was treading familiar ground when I lined up and made the following image. It was only afterwards that something twigged when I was looking at the images in the hotel room.

Hotel Balmoral - East Hastings

This is confirmation, I suppose, of Geoff Dyer’s thesis of the “ongoing moment”: all of us are treading the same paths and, unknowingly influenced by what went before, we make our own interpretations of similar subjects at particular place and time.

Gotta Learn Something (or I’m wasting my time)

I think the hardest thing for a documentary/urban photographer to learn is concentrating on treating your subjects with respect. I really dislike 90% of the images presented as street photography. Some of them are just sloppily composed, exposed and/or processed. Some don’t say anything or don’t even try. Others cheapen the subject, cheapen the genre and are trite and clichéd in the end cheapening the photographer. Photographing a homeless man passed out in a doorway says what? It says nothing, it asks nothing and it does nothing to advance the human condition.

I’m not trying to change the world, just ask questions and tell a story about life and I guess I expect other photographers to do the same.

I’m not one for the “in your face” style of work that seems to be all the rage. A bit of refined distance is, I think, permitted. It requires patience and the ability to fade into the walls until the right moment but I’m OK with that.

I find that my favourite images of a period of making images are those made when I’m in the zone: that wonderful feeling of nothingness and everythingness, of a complete connection with your environment where every pattern of light and dark and colour set up a vibration so deep that you can’t but help to trip the shutter. B.A. Baracus would say: “Damn fool on the Jazz, again.”

Technical Stuff

I really try to downplay the technical aspects of my images as it really doesn’t matter; it’s the story what counts. In this case however, I’d like to share a very useful set of tools. I decided to process the colour images using a wonderful set of Lightroom plugins that mimic the Kodachrome films of old. You can find them here:

http://x-equals.com/blog/in-memoriam-kodachrome-1935-%E2%80%93-2010/

These are the best that I’ve found so far and for the price (free) highly recommended.

NYC Conversations

One last tranche from my fall trip to New York and then on to other work. To paraphrase “The Naked City”: “There are eight million conversations in the naked city.” These images show some of those conversations: public or private, intimate or contentious, posturing or honest.

This couple was walking hand in hand past Madison Square Garden enjoying the fall evening, enjoying each other’s company. At an intersection, laughing at a shared joke they embraced; an honest embrace, a deep embrace, an embrace filled with love and laughter.

Embrace

Of course some people have the contrary image: the abrasive, argumentative New Yorker. I had passed this group of friends several times and at a stage in Times Square they stopped to visit. On the surface this image would confirm the stereotype. In fact the opposite is true. They were listening to each other intently (Times Square is noisy) and the very next instant all of them burst out in laughter. In another post I ranted a bit about people wanting their images to reflect the reality as they saw it; well, this shows that you can manipulate that reality using space and time. Once again, context is everything.

You talkin' to me?

As if it's not hard enough to develop human relationships in the "Naked City" we seem to sabotage our attempts by erecting so many artificial barriers. These four friends pulled up in the Village and no sooner had they crossed the street than out came the iThingies; other people more interesting than the people they were with.

iThingies

How different from this group of friends, in the moment, using the same technology to come together.

We were here

That's about it for New York for now. The remainder of the images can be found in my Smugmug gallery, here. I'm really looking forward to my next visit and work on some of the themes that I've written about. Brooklyn beckons as well.