close your eyes and hope for the best

Athabasca Glacier below Mount Andromeda, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.
(click image to enlarge)

Working with this photo upset my smug convictions about photography and Photoshop, to the point where I’m no longer sure what is legitimate and what isn’t.

What is real and what is illusion? That has been a frequent, fertile theme in fiction, film, theatre and philosophy, but for the most part photography seldom lent itself, transparently or otherwise, to such a question. Then along came John and Thomas Knoll, and now many a too-good image provokes the skeptical “yes, but has it been Photoshopped?”

That digital editing software had turned photography from a reliable witness into an untrustworthy, potentially perjurious one was a lament which I used to consider misinformed and misplaced. While photography usually told the truth, never was it necessarily the whole truth or nothing but the truth. A scene of apparent pristine wilderness could be framed to exclude an adjacent clearcut or dump, and every ski photographer knows to steepen slopes with a slight tilt of the camera, to give just the simplest of examples.

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Drummer, Arctic Bay, Nunavut Canada (click image to enlarge)

My Father sent me with a one-way plane ticket to work on Baffin Island at the tender age of 16 - not too happy about it then…

Canada’s Arctic has been part of my life for many years. I started reading about it when I was 14 - R.M Patterson’s classic - The Dangerous River; a story about the South Nahanni River quickly comes to mind. My Father sent me with a one-way plane ticket to work on Baffin Island at the tender age of 16 - not too happy about it then (made enough money to get home - true story) but the seed was planted. I have returned many times to live, work and more recently to explore the landscape with my camera.

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I paused by the woman with the super hero cat - it had a cape, therefore it’s a super hero.

It’s bizarrely coincidental that two of the photographers from this blog were in Cuba at the same time. Despite the repetition, I like the shot so much I’ll carry on with our tour of this often confusing land of faux-capitalist socialism.

In Cuba, a taxi driver earns more than a doctor as they have access to the tourist trade that plies them with “convertible” pesos worth roughly 25x the value of a regular Cuban peso. This is probably one of the reasons that a large number of Cuban taxi drivers and street vendors could use their doctorates to sew your leg back on if the taxi toppled over in the street.

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Old House, Kitchen (click image to enlarge)

…the saddest thing of all was a “Do Not Resuscitate” notice taped to the refrigerator door.

The new owner had hired me to photograph the old house. It was to be completely renovated. The images were for archival purposes and would be used as a reference for the renovations.

I wanted to capture the feeling of the house. I didn’t know much of its history but the little I did know certainly contributed to its forlorn atmosphere.

The house was built around 1902. Despite its rundown state it was still solid. Perhaps the anti-mold qualities of the old growth douglas fir wood with which it was built, had prevented rot from setting in.

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Cuban Taxi (click image to enlarge)

We finally arrived in the middle of a Cuban slum where we thought we were supposed to meet our models. Mangy half hairless dogs and an old guy name Luis kept us company while we waited for our models to show.

A working holiday, that’s what I told my wife and family. It was to be 7 days in the Caribbean sun. That didn’t mean that I was to have a camera permanently slung around my neck like some surveillance collar. There would be some downtime, but my primary purpose was to get some stock photos that I could potentially make some money off of.

The red eye flight left me sleepless and bleary-eyed . I knew something was amiss when I noticed the local airport workers were wearing pants and jackets. When we arrived in Santa Clara the island had been battling a week of tropical storms and the sunny skies and warm temps I had expected were no where to be seen. Still, for my brother and his family who just came from Winnipeg where it was -30° C it seemed positively balmy.

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