Paris, France. October 2014.
Night at the Cafe
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Category Archives: Instagram & Poladroid
Extraordinary Ordinary
Yokohama, Japan. September 2014.
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My partner Monna is offering an e-course over at MonnaMcDiarmid.com, called The Geography of Now. It’s a six week course with an exercise every day in noticing, photography and what Monna calls “skinny prose,” a form of narrative verse. Today’s exercise is one I used to use with my photography students. The idea is to take 10 or more photographs of the same object in order to find an extraordinary way of seeing an ordinary thing. It’s a good exercise, worth doing if you’ve never tried it. For tonight’s exercise, I thought about my favourite wall in Yokohama. It’s not an entirely ordinary object I guess. It looks like there was ivy growing on it at one point, and now the remnants of it are plastered to the wall like footprints or snake tracks. I’ve photographed this wall before, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to really explore what continues to draw me to it. {I used the same Instagram filter on all of these photographs so that the primary difference between them is perspective.} |
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Walking with Friends
Yokohama, Japan. May 10, 2014.
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Some days are for walking. It happens that two of my closest friends were born on the same day, a year apart. Seems like a grand coincidence to me, though I’m sure the astrologers would say that it makes perfect sense. Every year, when their birthday comes around, I try to spend at least part of the day walking, taking pictures of what their birthday would look like if they could spend it with me, since I am so very rarely able to spend it with either of them. This year, their birthdays fell on a Saturday, a day without obligations, a day I could spend as it chose to unfold, the kind of day that is best spent with friends. Is it odd that thinking of far away friends can make you more present where you are? Some of the very best things are odd. |
Ginza
Tokyo, Japan. May 2014.
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Sometimes we forget to be tourists in the places we live. Having visitors helps. On this occasion, we ventured into Ginza, headed for the Laduree Tea Room, but arrived too early and had to wait outside a bit before we could go in. The waiting was exceptional, as the day was clear and temperate and given to people-watching. I took this photograph in the window of a department store. A line of brightly coloured pedestrians makes its way through the monochrome of sand-dune beach-brush, a black-and-white couple sits on steps imagined from the crosswalk zebra and a spectrum of silver sand spills out into the city streets under facades of glass and brick and the signage of the city while an icon of fashion turns the other cheek. Even as the spring becomes the summer, it’s all about the layers. |
After the Typhoon, Part I
Yokohama, Japan. September 2013.
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We are expecting a typhoon tomorrow. Typhoon Wipha, number 26. A big one. A once-in-ten-years kind of blow-down throw-down. Apparently the last time a storm of this magnitude came through, they had to pick up the front gate of our school down the street from the parking lot of the gymnasium. School has been cancelled, we bought some groceries and are battened down for the night. There was another typhoon, number 18, in September. In its wake, the particulates of industry were washed out of the air, nature’s version of high-definition clarity. The windows were covered in dried-in-place drops of salt sea-brine, and as the sun set, the colors lit up a cloud-painted sky. |
Over Under
Yokohama, Japan. April 2012.
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This is how we go. To move in Yokohama is to go over or under; it is a city of overpasses and underpasses, of foot bridges and elevated highways and subway trains. Much of the city is built of land reclaimed from the sea, seamed together with waterways and canals under a network of pathways held up in the air by riveted pillars and boxy beams, a strangely graceful curvature of concrete and metal woven into a future as it was imagined in the industrial age. Over and under we go. |
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