May 19th, 2008
One Book: Photographing the city
By Dylan Reid // No Comments
To finish off my thoughts about reading Michael Redhill's novel Consolation, I'd like to look at a theme explored in depth in the later part of the narrative -- the power of photography to both capture a moment in time for the future, but also to shape and perhaps distort our image of a city.
The protagonist of the Victorian part of the story, J.G. Hallam, creates a series of photographs of Toronto for his family back in London, to show them what the city is like and to reassure them -- about his own situation, and about the city they may move to in the future. But he realizes that he is only capturing pleasant images, not the many unpleasant ones that are also part of his experience of Toronto, thus creating a false image of both the city and of his own situation.
He tried to capture a place his wife and daughters could look forward to living in, and yet a part of him felt an ugly certainty that he was creating a little dream for them, one that neither they nor he would ever realize. (339)
Later, his business associate, Claudia Rowe, looks at this series of photos, and proposes doing something similar, a series of photographs of the city, as a commercial venture. He agrees, as long as they take a different, more accurately revealing approach.
"They're beautiful," she said, her voice almost a murmur. "They must have loved them very much."
"They're a lie."
She looked over the edge of one of the plates at him.
"If we do what you suggest," he said, "I want to photograph the city as it is. Not as an advertisement for emigration."
This theme has a strong contemporary resonance for me. In the book The State of the Arts (second in the uTOpia series), my Spacing colleague Anna Bowness wrote an article about the photoblogging phenomenon, which seems to be particularly strong in Toronto (most of the photographs on this blog come from local practitioners of this art). We had previously discussed this subject within Spacing, and at a panel discussion during the launch of the book I spoke about photoblogging some more.
To me, Hallam's two sets of fictional photographs -- the ideal and the real -- parallel two kinds of modern photography of Toronto: the one you see in ads for the city and in postcards, which capture safe, idealized images of Toronto with the ulterior motive of getting people to come here and/or spend money, and the one you see in photoblogging, which captures a much more varied and complete portrait of the city (although still, of course, one that is mediated by the photographer's eye).
And I agree with Hallam that the truer portrait is vastly more compelling. At the panel, we were discussing Toronto's perpetual lack of self-confidence and the resultant inability to market itself in a distinctive way (remember the characterless "Toronto Unlimited" campaign). I suggested that if Toronto really wants to create a distinctive and appealing image of itself, it should use images by photobloggers in its marketing campaigns -- ones that escape cliched subjects and presentations and instead capture small but striking moments of the city's life. Their work is both beautiful and true to the city, and moreover photoblogging has become a distinguishing characteristic of Toronto.
Even when photobloggers do look at the standard scenes of Toronto, they do so in a way that demonstrates real character, rather than safe, conservative blandness. During the panel I pointed out one of the photos Anna chose to illustrate the photoblogger's work, Sam Javanrouh's eerie, mysterious, gorgeous shot of the CN Tower at night framed against moonlit clouds. Surely putting this shot in an ad for Toronto would pique the interest of potential tourists far more than the usual bland skyline shot.
photo by Sam Javanrouh
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