| RECENTLY,
I attended a talk by a well known Canadian art photographer at a local
gallery. It was a pleasant occasion with the usual suspects in
attendance: students, collectors, art dealers and a few souls who
simply enjoy rubbing shoulders with someone whose prints sell for
$6,500 a piece. There was a psychiatrist in that crowed as well who kept insisting on having a particular photo explained to him in detail. The photographer was at the loss for words and I could not help but think of Lewis Hine who famously said: “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.” Hine, one of the first social photo documentarians, understood well that the power of still photography lays in its ability to tell stories in a language which crosses cultural and linguistic barriers of a written and spoken word and provides an immediate emotional connection between a subject of aphotograph and its audience. |
For me, photography has always been about telling stories and interpreting the world around me. At the moment, I call Saint John home and photographing its streets is my way of becoming intimate with a city and its people. It is also my attempt to tell their stories and capture a spirit that is palpable among Saint John’s brick buildings steeped in the history of a once glorious centre of maritime commerce as Canada’s oldest city. Street photography, however, is more than just about telling stories. It is also about asking the viewer to dwell on the scene and make up his or her own story, thereby creating a new narrative. That narrative, based on the viewer’s experiences and the knowledge of the world, is just as important as the one presented and witnessed by the photographer. It is only when those two stories are combined that a photograph reaches |
its full potential as a universal language bridging
the linguistic and cultural divide between the photographer and its
audience. Street photography is uniquely suited for that role because it is impulsive, intuitive and honest. It captures its subjects in simple, every-day situations and because there is no pretentiousness in what it does, it is easy for the audience to recognize characters and emotions as archetypes that can be easily transposed over their own reality. Human emotion and the spectrum of urban life tend to be remarkably similar across time and space. I hope that in these photographs from Saint John, viewers on some other shores will find enough amusement, wonder and emotion to create their own stories and add another thread in the web of our shared humanity. |