The Living Breathing Street

Who cares about the city, about the street?

this is a question i asked myself over and over while plowing through boring street photography website after boring street photography website. The truth is you either get it, or you don’t. It’s cool if you don’t. that’s just A-1 fine. but if you do get it, or when you do get it, then the city comes alive. The humans filling those streets turn from pointless filler to a living breathing street. 

Are you pure? 100% streetcore pure?

no. and neither should you be. that’s bs photography religion. it’s dogma. Pretense, like the idea of the human soul, to give people ways to find meaning in what is hard to make sense of. Which is the ridiculously stupid rush you, as a photographer, get wandering the streets, scanning, always scanning, looking for the right person doing the right thing, in the right light. 

the purists aren’t pure either. if they we’re you’d only see their photos in real life. no digital. digital is about as far from pure as you can get. as soon as you make an analog photograph digital you can just shut the hell up about pure. 

who are you?

just one human with a couple cameras and time. seriously. walking with my camera, despite what sontag said, makes me more engaged in life than i’ve ever found ways to engage in the past. Maybe she’s right it becomes a life of frames. maybe she’s right I’m not directly engaged. But I’m more engaged than I was before, and what I see (through the viewfinder) opens me up to my fellow humans and their bum legs, odd smells, worn eyes and falling hairlines where previous i just filtered it all out. so which makes more sense?

Where do you live?

Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Oil rich. Full of money. full of people with nothing but problems and a conservative government that couldn’t give a shit. it’s an interesting street.

Color Street Photographs? where do you get off?

usually in y0 mama. seriously though, why not color? the world happens in color. it lives and dies in color and that matters. some things just can’t be expressed without color. like, say, color. 

Great, another jackoff with a camera wandering around creeping on people trying to live their lives. 

I know right?