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On February 16th, 2009, the UK began to enforce their ambiguously-worded counter-terrorism laws that, essentially, call into question the motives of all photographers and cast doubt upon their actions. Photographing any police officer, military personnel or intelligence official is an ‘offense’ for which a photographer can now be arrested. The vagueness of the law is nearly as disturbing as the fact it even exists, because it empowers any police officer to detain a photographer and confiscate both equipment and images under the flimsiest veil of legitimacy.

As I mourned the vilification of my UK brethren, I took solace in the fact that I lived in Canada — a nation fiercely committed to rights, freedoms, and artistic expression… or so I thought.

On March 20th, Vancouver police shot and killed a man they erroneously identified as a suspect in a recent vehicular break-in. It was an event with nearly 50 witnesses, one of whom captured the shooting using his cell phone. Police confiscated the man’s phone and deleted the four minute video of the shooting. Then, on April 5th, Vancouver police shot a suspected car thief. A news photographer, who happened to live nearby, ran out of his home to photograph the aftermath. Police demanded he turn over his camera. When the photographer refused, they tried to wrestle it away from him — manhandling him, and putting him in a lock-hold in an effort to forcibly confiscate his camera. Eventually, under threat of arrest, the photographer surrendered it to police.

In spite of police spokespeople who confirm the department supports Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association reports at least four such recent incidents. Fortunately, local public opinion weighs heavily in favor of photographers, and the actions of a few rogue police officers has not vilified the camera toting members of this community.

Such vilification, apparently, is the duty of Translink — metro Vancouver’s regional transport authority. They recently unveiled a new print campaign featuring an ad in which a man is shown photographing a security camera. The ad encourages people to report this kind of activity to the police. I’ll overlook the obvious irony that Translink, themselves, took a photo of a security camera for their own advertisement, thus self-demonizing the campaign. But what I can’t overlook is TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie’s rationalization for why photographers should be reported. According to Mr. Hardie, “they’re taking pictures of wiring, pipes, electrical panels. Well, I’m sorry, not many people go around doing that.”

You are correct, Mr. Hardie. Not many people go around doing that. Just photographers, designers, artists, architects and people who find beauty and interest in man-made creations. “Normal” people who turn their cameras around backward, holding them at arm’s length so as to take self-portraits in front of tourist sites, are usually not the sort to photograph architectural details. Nor are terrorists, as Bruce Schneier wrote so eloquently in an article for the UK’s “Guardian” newspaper, last year.

I take photos of pipes, wires, panels, and all manner of things that Translink would have us believe are illicit offenses. Last week, the following object attracted my attention:

The way the pipe snaked across the wall, dividing it into dark and light halves, reminded me of the Yin-Yang symbol. There’s even a circular element that conforms to the smaller circles within the Yin-Yang graphic. The fact I even noticed this would probably befuddle Translink, but the reason I photographed it is even more sinister: As a capitalist, I thought it might make a nice CD cover for some band. I even worked on a little ‘mock up.’ So feel free to contact me if you’d like to purchase it.

Now, honestly, I have no problem with citizens being aware of their surroundings and doing due diligence. I’ve been approached several times while photographing some rather peculiar objects. It matters not to me whether these people are suspicious or merely curious — I’ll treat them with respect and gladly tell them what I’m photographing and why. What concerns me is the way in which this Translink ad casts photographers as likely criminals and encourages others to view us in this way.

I recently stood in the middle of a parking lot, in front of a large white wall, and took a photo of a small section in which a brick was missing. It’s the sort of thing few people ever notice, much less photograph. But I caught site of a small syringe within the crevice, so I photographed it. Upon returning home, I could see, in the murky shadows, another syringe and what appears to be a knife handle. It’s a rather eerie photograph. But am I the criminal for having taken it?

So if you ever see me photographing electrical wiring, some pipes, or a blank wall and you’re worried or curious, just ask me about it. I’d be happy to tell you, for example, that I took the following photograph because I thought it would make a nice background on which some company could ‘paint’ an advertisement or slogan.

In fact, now that I think about it, that’s exactly what I’ll use it for:

For a photography blog, these posts certainly skew toward the wordy. Every now and then I need to exercise a little restraint, and simply let the images do the talking. So, in that spirit, I present a few street shots from the last couple of weeks — each of which can tell its own story without my usual reams of imposing prose.

Didgeridoo and Didgeridon’t

After my apathetic reaction to the bands that played Vancouver’s Juno Awards festivities, I wandered one block to the west and found a more photogenic and organic form of both musical expression and audience involvement.

The Polarizing Power of Suggestion

As I waited for the light to change, I spotted this little melodrama directly across the intersection. From appearances, it looks like the embracing couple has inspired a sense of longing in the gentleman. But the woman—to whom his yearning gaze seems directed—possesses a body posture that’s diametrically the opposite. Then again, maybe none of this is transpiring. But that’s the beauty of street photography — it captures a split second, and the viewer fills in the story.

The Old Gang

In 1958, when Link Wray invented heavy metal by poking holes in his guitar amp’s speaker to give his recording of Rumble a grittier sound, this gang probably used it as background music for a few rumbles of their own. Conjecture? Maybe. But I’m still rather certain these guys could take me.

In spite of appearances, the title of this post is not a misspelling, though it is an anachronism. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Vancouver hosted the Juno Awards last weekend. For the edification of the 99.5% of the world’s population that doesn’t live in Canada, the Juno Awards are this country’s annual musical awards event. In celebration, the city cordoned off the only two blocks of Granville Street not currently under-construction, and hosted a four-day jam-fest featuring performances by dozens of dreadfully dull bands from across Canada. Now don’t get all riled up — I’m not singling out the bands that played the Juno festivities, nor am I dismissing the whole Canadian music scene. No, when I dismiss something, I go all the way. And it’s my belief that nearly all modern commercial music, worldwide, borders on the insipid and banal. Competent? Yes. Compelling? No.

Youngsters are likely to suspect that the distinguishing grey strands sprinkled throughout my hair are the ‘root’ cause of my dismissal, but I have a strong argument to the contrary: I’m not dismissing modern music for being different than the music of my youth — I’m dismissing it for being the same. The bands I saw this weekend have progressed not one inch from the foundations that were built by pioneering rock acts like The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Yardbirds. They use the same instruments, strike the same affected poses, play the same chords, and sing about the same subjects. What’s with that? What happened to rebellion? What happened to finding your own identity? What happened to culture? The only currently popular music genre that wasn’t popular when I was in High School is Hip Hop — but even that music has its roots in the 1970’s, and continues to play by rules that were firmly established in the early 1980’s.

Dismayed by the fact that another generation of musicians was failing to make an imprint on culture, and annoyed that I was neither hearing nor seeing anything new, I lost interest in photographing the bands. Instead, I turned my attention and camera to the audience. And that’s when I saw it — the cultural difference between this generation and those that preceded it — the video monitor.

All around me, people were holding up cell phones, video recorders, and all manner of minuscule point-and-shoot cameras — gazing intently into their little LCDs. Nearly everyone watching a performance was experiencing it on a personal video monitor. If people weren’t watching a video monitor, they weren’t watching the band — almost as if, without benefit of a personal viewing device, the event wasn’t even happening.

The photo below shows that, not only is the girl watching the band perform on her camera’s video screen but, zoomed-in, we see that she’s even watching another girl watch the band on another video screen.

After a decade-long diet of reality television, is this what the world has come to? Is reality no longer “real” unless it’s seen on a television screen or computer monitor? Has the “real world” become the “reel world?” Are we seeing a new generation for whom the world’s events don’t actually exist unless they’re on film? Or, more precisely, unless they’re digitized and compressed bits of data recorded to a flash memory device and seen on an LCD video display?

What a curious way to experience life. But what a delight for me, as it has given significance to that sprinkling of grey in my hair. I finally have a reason to shake my fist and say something profound like, “in my day, we actually watched things happen live, rather than on a video monitor… and it was better that way.”

I’m sure my accountant would argue that there’s nothing good about volunteering for a free photography assignment. And, should one wish to pay for such mundane things as rent and food, she would be right. But for me, both rent and food rank slightly below coffee on my list of life’s essentials. So when my friend Mike, who owns Coo Coo Coffee on Davie Street, mentioned that he needed a few photos to boost his business, I jumped all over it.

Mike pulls the best espresso in downtown Vancouver and, because of this, he’s been helping feed my daily habit for the last 8 years. After living for over a decade in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, I’d grown rather particular about my coffee. “Snobbish,” actually. So when I first moved to Vancouver, I was forced to get in my car every weekend and make a special trip to Commercial Drive which, like North Beach in San Francisco, is an Italian neighborhood. The coffee on Commercial Drive was great, but my access to it wasn’t. I had a daily habit to feed, not a weekly one. So, for several months, I attempted to supplement those weekend trips with weekday visits to numerous Pacific Northwest coffee chains. But chain coffee is about as satisfying as a tofu burger to a meat lover. Surprisingly, many of the downtown independent cafés demonstrated absolutely no inclination to improve upon the barely potable brown water served up by the famous chains. Discovering Coo Coo saved me from the indignity of the coffee chain, and it saved me from the withdrawal pangs I felt between trips to Commercial Drive. In fact, I don’t even feel the need to travel to Commercial Drive anymore.

So if Mike’s hurting, then I’m hurting. And, just to make sure no one else gets hurt, I decided not to tell my accountant. After all, what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her, right? Besides, there are some non-remunerative advantages to working for free. For example, your client can’t be even remotely particular about what you shoot. “Shooting for free” means “freedom of choice.” And “freedom of choice” means you get to pull out all those wacky little photo tricks that you never get to use on “real” jobs.

Mike did have one request: He wanted a shot of his yellow La Marzocco, and he wanted some customers to be in the photo with it. Easier said than done. Since the unit is squeezed into a corner of the shop, there’s really no vantage point from which it can be photographed in its entirety — at least not using any ‘traditional’ means. No problem. Free gig = freedom of choice. So, for the photo shown at the top of this post, I used my widest rectilinear lens, the 17-40 f/4L, and wedged my camera into the corner — its back just inches from the trash, and its lens mere inches from the La Marzocco. This gave me a shot of the machine’s long, sleek lines as well as some context of its placement within the shop. The second half of Mike’s request was that the photo contain customers. But photographing customers to use in an advertisement meant I’d have to secure model releases. No thanks. By the time I’d get someone to consent, my coffee would be cold — and this is, after all, all about the coffee. So, with freedom of choice as my guide, I simply chose to stop down the lens and shoot a 1 second exposure. The long shutter meant that people would become a blur and, thus, unrecognizable. It would also give some movement and life to an otherwise static shot. Working for free gave me carte blanche to solve the problem any way I saw fit. And that’s almost as good for my soul as one of Mike’s Italian cappuccinos.

The above photos are representative of other shots that “the freedom of free” allowed me to take. The left-most photo came about because Mike mentioned he’d like a close-up of his new lighting fixtures. That request was a bit of a head-scratcher for me since Mike sold coffee, not lighting fixtures. So, while I’m scratching my head, I’m thinking “Mike didn’t say the lighting fixture had to be in focus. So there you go. Getting a photo request that made me scratch my head inspired me to create a photo that would make everyone scratch their heads.

The photo on the right was externally influenced. I recently started re-watching Twin Peaks on DVD. The night before I took this photo, I viewed the episode in which Jack Nance utters the classic phrase, “there’s a fish in the percolator!” Inspired, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be funny to replicate this statement photographically?” So the next day, I simply stuck my fisheye lens so close to Mike’s La Marzocco that the camera was practically inside it. Work for free and you’re free to amuse yourself in any ridiculous manner you see fit.

That’s “the freedom of free.” Just don’t be tempted to partake in this delight too often and, whatever you do, please don’t imbibe if your client is willing to actually pay you for a shoot. “Free” may be liberating, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stupid. There are, after all, accountants to feed.

After a week of malady compounded further by the medicine meant to combat it, I finally felt like venturing out of the condo yesterday. Well, maybe I didn’t exactly feel like it, but I was beginning to suffer from an opportunistic affliction known as termino morbus. Don’t worry, it sounds worse than it actually is. Like all things medical, it’s a latin term that, roughly translated, means “closure sickness.” Its folksier name is “shutter withdrawal” and, as any obsessive photographer knows, it’s an affliction that causes one eye to close and the index finger to flex up-and-down. While this is a perfectly normal occurrence in a healthy photographer, you must remember that healthy photographers always have a camera in hand. After long periods of non-photography (such as those caused by illness) the brain’s auto-mechanical neural network causes one’s muscles to contract spontaneously as if taking a photo, even though no camera is present. Strangers are often amused by this mildly ‘eccentric’ behavior, but it does tend to frighten loved ones — particularly in its advanced stages where patients begin to make audible camera sounds with their lips.

So, in spite of the fact that my health wasn’t quite where it needed to be, I felt I simply must leave the condo or risk a worsening case of termino morbus. I grabbed my smallest, lightest camera — the Panasonic DMC-LX3 — and, like a newborn fawn (but not nearly as adorable) took my first tentative steps. With an uncertainty reflected in my unsteadiness, I moved slowly over the length of that first city block. But as I gained my confidence, I captured a second block; then another; and another — until I arrived at the Vancouver Library.

Why the library? Two reasons. One, I had some DVDs to pick up. And two, it’s a beautiful building. Buildings are ideal subjects for eradicating termino morbus because they’re immutable. They don’t run away. They’re not shy. They stand patiently waiting for you to photograph them. They’re “chicken soup” for the shaky, enervated photographer, and the Vancouver Public Library — a modern helical take on a classical coliseum — is a mighty fine bowl of it. After spending a mere five minutes triggering the electronic shutter on my compact LX3 camera, the tremors subsided, my eye opened, and my index finger stopped flexing all by itself. My termino morbus went into remission, and I even have a few useless shots of the Vancouver Library to show for it.

I was even lucky enough to score a “candid” shot in the library atrium. Granted, it required a minimum of effort on my part, since my subject wasn’t exactly moving — but he did give me an extra injection of termino morbus anti-venom, which will carry me through the remaining days of my existing, primary malady.

My good friend, Dan Timis, passed away yesterday. I was fortunate enough to have worked with Dan on two separate occasions over the last twenty years — at both Opcode Systems and at Muse Research. Dan was a brilliant digital audio programmer and a very clever fellow. He could see a solution to a problem before many of us even knew that a problem existed. He always had an interesting idea; another angle; or a unique take on a design.

But as much as I valued Dan as a coworker — and he was the best — I valued him far more as a friend. I’ve never met anyone with a greater enthusiasm for life. His zeal was infectious, and his hunger for knowledge was ravenous. Yet he possessed the endearing qualities of innocence, wonderment and purity that are more commonly associated with a child. Because Dan’s musical tastes were as broad and eclectic as mine, we would discuss subjects like opera and Romanian folk music the way most guys chat about football. Dan was a film and television nut so, when I moved to Canada, he immediately drafted me as a human TiVo — supplying him with a slew of Canadian television comedies he’d been wanting to see. But the thing Dan and I shared the most over the last few years was a love of photography. In fact, the week before his heart attack, I told him I was considering going back to film for street photography. Dan thought I might be losing my sanity, so it was for him that I started writing the Like a Leica series of articles for this blog.

Dan was the quintessential ‘backyard’ photographer — literally. By that, I mean his favorite subjects were whatever critter happened to wander into his or a friend’s backyard. These photos always had a certain quirky charm that made me smile. With Dan’s passing, I wanted to take my own backyard photo for him. But, since I live in a high rise, I don’t have a backyard. In fact, I don’t have a yard at all. As I looked out my condo window to contemplate how I could possibly take a ‘backyard’ photo for Dan, I saw the sky change in an instant. It burned a dark and vibrant orange for a period just long enough for me to photograph it. I’m not much for either sunset photos or romantic notions, but I like to think that Dan was responsible for this fleetingly intense show in my Vancouver “yard.” So this photo’s for you Dan. The world needs more of what you offered it.