Murder On The Streets

Tourist season

2009-11-06T21:19:00.006-05:00

This is where they work

2009-11-06T21:07:00.003-05:00

My first assignment

2009-10-01T18:41:00.004-04:00

My first assignment for my photography class was to shoot a roll of slide film under different lighting conditions and exposures and then to present it to the class.

I chose Velvia film and quickly went on an expedition.

I have a personal rule where I try as much as possible to exclude people from my compositions. I just don't like them. I'm a misanthrope, in a way, and I find that, if misused, people can be an easy way out of a bad picture. They tend to be full of emotion, expression, variety, and they stray from my objective aesthetic of photography.

However, with this assignment, I failed.

It all happened when I was shooting at a strip mall in NDG. I found myself face to face with the head of a mannequin peering through the window. A phonebooth. Te key lighting from the evening sun. All perfect elements. I snapped one, with nobody in the frame, then lowered my exposure. I snapped another one, but this time, a man walked by.

I knew instantly that this would make 'a picture,' as they say. So I continued.

Next, I shot the mechanic who was trying to sell me an old Chrysler outside his garage in St-Henry.

Perfect. Good shot. A long exposure, coupled with his head movements, made him anonymous and ghostly. He had his arms crossed. He was a tough guy with a strange accent - not quite french, not quite english.

Finally, I shot my friends with their new bikes, and myself on a mechanical horse.

Still, I think my favorite is that of the electrical post. I'm a purist, a minimalist, and I have an addiction to simple compositions and objective documentation of urban planning and human constructions.

I'm satisfied. It's been ages since I've shot film, and returning to the medium was a wooing experience.

A day at the mall

2009-09-21T08:58:00.003-04:00

Cavendish boulevard starts at the bottom of NDG, on St Jacques street. It crosses Sherbrooke through the Benny Projects and makes its way north through the suburban landscape of NDG and Hampstead. It's quite nice and there are parts of it lined with oak trees that dim the sun as the light falls on small, post-war bungalows.

However, things start to go wrong when Cavendish crosses Van Fleet. The houses stop and you discover acres of land that were cleared for the construction of tall housing projects - these constructions are immense and are generally made of dark, grey concrete. They cast large shadows on top of other large structures that obscure the horizon. The landscape is grim and punctuated by the occasional lowrise office building or strip mall. This is a habitat for the elderly and wealthy jewish Montrealers who commute like ants between these large and cumbersome structures.

Cavendish exhausts itself within the next four large city blocks (perhaps because there is a giant rail yard that city planners could not bypass) and that's when the blandness climaxes in the form of a large shopping plaza.

Cavendish mall is a giant complex that was built in 1973. Today, a large part of the mall is vacant, and this includes a covered loading dock at the back which now basically serves as one large pigeon coop.

At first glance, the four loading gates appear to be still active - but there are no stores in this portion of the mall, so no deliveries are made. Feathers carpet the asphalt and blow chaotically in the wind. A red dumpster sits askew in the corner and odd piles of wooden debris cluster by its side.

I counted two beheaded pigeons amongst the feathers, only noticeable because of the black crows who plucked at their carcasses. This was my introduction to the Cavendish mall. The lighting was bad so I took no pictures.

The mall is large and dark. The elderly collect here in large but atonal crowds. On that day, I saw a nurse strolling her patient through the boutiques - I'm guessing she worked at a "retirement" home. She was an old lady with a pretty coif but an outfit that suggested she had been dressed hastily by someone else. Her head was tilted to one side as she gazed into nothingness. A dead, blank gaze.

Her feet dragged on the linoleum floor as her legs hung loosely down the front of the stroller. She had no energy, no life, and the nurse seemed to have contempt for her company. Together they paraded through the mall, purely for the sake of movement.

An mechanical horse in the abandoned wing is the sole indicator of regular activity. It has a glossy pink finish with gold highlights and I found it to be beautifully kitsch. Occasionally, someone strolls though the back entrance of the mall and slowly wanders passed the closed and empty storefronts. In one photograph, I captured an old man and his cane inching by the pink machine.

A few palm trees under a skylight were set up, perhaps by the mall's management, to lend character to the vacancy. It fails. Beyond the horse, to the left, a store called GLOBAL GURL remains closed. Only the sign persists.

The mall is tragic and widely known to NDG residents as a pit of despair. I urge you to visit it. You will appreciate your remaining years much more sincerely and openly, I guarantee it.

Here's what Wikipedia says about it.

I have since returned to the mall with my film camera for a class assignment. I will post more pictures of the mall shortly.

The night

2009-09-21T00:08:00.006-04:00

I shot these pictures quickly, on the streets of NDG. They all involve a blue cloudy sky and lens flares.

To keep things going...

2009-08-27T17:51:00.008-04:00

I've fallen behind on my small commitment of regularly adding content to the Internet. The web hasn't suffered my absence, but if I am not posting things on MOTS, it means that I am also not taking any pictures.

Lately I've been preoccupied with cycling and the general bliss procured by my emancipation from the retail world. In other words, I've quit my job as a stock clerk and everything in my life is better. My breakfasts taste better, the city air is sweeter, even Donald the drunk who pees in our bushes has developed some sort of innocent charm. My days are mostly spent sitting in parks, repairing bicycles, reading books, and drinking cold brews whose dewy exteriors drip down your fingers in relief of the hot summer air. I'm currently working as a bicycle courier until school starts, upon when I will deliver part time or find a job at a local bike shop.

When I start my photography classes at Concordia, expect to see a few more posts.

Cheers.

Here, for now, are some "b-side" shots of city life, if you permit the expression.

1) Rebuilding a road bike from scratch. 2) A man is arrested on my street after a high speed pursuit on the highway. 3) Hervé enjoys a cigarette as we look for shooting stars. 4) Alex and Kelly on the rooftop of their old Ottawa apartment. 5) My newly assembled track bicycle. No breaks, no gears.

Around the city 06/08/09

2009-08-08T03:21:00.005-04:00

It was after the storm, and the streets were still drying. I didn't really know what I wanted to shoot, so i headed for Cote-Saint-Luc where the massive, bland apartment buildings meet the rail yards. This is a particularly uninteresting corner of the city and I was originally disappointed because there was nothing to shoot.

It was only when I took a wrong turn through the parking lots of clustered low rise apartments that my little trip was beginning to produce. The scene was dead except for the loud clamor pouring out of the open windows. Piles of wet trash awaited pick up between buildings in dark alleys.

I also found an old shopping plaza on Cote-Saint-Luc past Cavendish and a cool housing project next to an empty junk field.

The setting sun made from some interesting light.

New Brunswick is a fine place

2009-07-19T12:36:00.006-04:00

I haven't posted anything in a while, mostly because I've been occupied with everything cycling related. I've been fixing up my old bikes and riding them as much as I can.

Here's a set I should have posted when I got back from New Brunswick, after visiting my parents. Instead I put it off to the last minute.

I must say that New Brunsiwck is a beautiful province, and this set reflects the landscapes, architecture and relics of the small coastal roads and towns.

This isn't my favorite set, but by far the most unintentional one I have taken. I did not know what to expect from spending five rainy days in an unknown part of Canada, but as we drove around the Shediac area, I discovered so many small pieces of the landscape that needed documenting, from old houses to stranded, roadside mailboxes set against the atlantic ocean.

Mailboxes on Highway 535. What a great way to get your mail.

Some people live in fancy seaside cottages, some live in trailers. Nice view.

The eccentric neighbor collects license plates and nails them to an old shed.

A gable belonging to an old blue house, which like most in the area, is lived in but looks look practically abandoned.

An abandoned cottage, somewhere near Sackville.

Another cottage in Shediac.

This is where the Bates live. It's a shame that all these wonderful old farmhouses are left to rot.

There are hundreds and hundreds of the old farmhouses everywhere in the province. They are legacies, passed on through generations, and most are in excess of one hundred years old. Despite being somewhat maintained, most look in a state of disrepair.

A local artist's studio: she makes pottery out of the ever-abundant red clay of the region and she does it all from the comfort of a hundred-year-old town hall.

An antique dealer's mural. He does in fact have an impressive collection of gramophones.

Mmm... Food. My parents and I eat some of the best damn cheeseburgers in all of New Brunswick.

The flight back took me over wonderful cloudscapes. I'm pretty sure I saw Superman somewhere in the distance.

Otto e mezzo

2009-07-08T09:39:00.008-04:00

An abstract from the MOMA website:

Fellini created a remarkably personal cinematic confession in this film about a director who is mentally unable to commence work on his latest production. Suffering from a psychosomatic liver ailment, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) takes to a spa for physical and spiritual rejuvenation, only to be haunted by the specter of his professional and personal life. In the black-and-white-tiled world of the spa, Anselmi confronts his problems, his boyhood memories, and his lusty fantasy world. Yet interruptions keep coming at him—from his producer, who wants to get the production of an outer-space adventure underway, and from his wife Luisa, upset about his mistress. His imagination serves as his escape: in imaginary sequences, he brandishes a whip instead of a megaphone to orchestrate his actors, and he also fantasizes that he is the master of a harem of women demurely under his control.

The containment of 8 1/2 within the artificial world of the spa manifests a subjective, self-created reality, one that Fellini populates with priests, journalists, and Saraghina, the mythical prostitute who initiated Anselmi into the self-created mysteries of sex in his youthful days. Like Anselmi's incomplete film script in the story, 8 1/2 relied a great deal on Fellini's gift for improvisation. The film's title represents the total number of films made by Fellini before this production: seven plus three collaborations (each counting as one-half). This uniquely autobiographical work is enhanced by a musical score written by Nino Rota.

Patricia Erbelding

2009-06-29T16:50:00.005-04:00

Patricia Erbelding is a french painter who travelled to the United States between 2001 and 2005, documenting the landscapes and atmospheres of the american southwest.

Her photographs are plain and they seem to be taken in a hurry, almost spontaneously with no real premeditation - they seem to be a product of her drifting across the desert highways and smalltown roads of Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada and New Mexico. In one photograph, she even caught (accidentally) the antenna of her car as she photographed a passing motel.

Much like Robbert Flick's work, which I talked about in an earlier post, her set called "Interstate" adheres to a simple aesthetic - bare subjects often captured with a minimalist or objective point of view.

A lot can be said about the concepts at play, but the set remains interesting to me simply because it offers a glimpse of the United States I adore so much - the abandonment-prone desert towns and finite traces of human existence that time has managed to dissolve back into the natural landscape. It is the America where things are preserved and human vitality seems so indistinguishable.

In her own words, during an interview with Tita Reut:

The voyage is linked to dream, as my dream of America and its mythical roads, themselves frontiers, lines, crossing desert landscapes and ghost towns. The photography is a dreamcatcher.

On her website, there is a directory of about fifty images which you can freely preview. Not all have been published, but they are available to view. Most are interesting snapshots of Americana and barren landscapes, and the rest are "of the moment" snapshots captured through a car window or by the side of a busy highway.

For me, it was a good way to waste a rainy day with the nostalgia of traveling down sunny desert roads.

Attempted murder on the streets

2009-06-22T17:32:00.010-04:00

Last night a taxi driver was stabbed and robbed in NDG. As he bled from his wounds, he stumbled from his car and lay on the corner of Marcil and Sherbrooke where he waited for help.

Within a few minutes, the police were by his side, attempting to save the dying man in the company of a few television and newspaper reporters.

The men with cameras danced around to capture different angles of the victim who lay on his back, blood pooling by his side. One reporter was gnawing at the thinning patience of an officer who gave up what little information he had. Another climbed a small flight of stairs to get a birds-eye view.

Meanwhile, I positioned my camera on my tripod and took long exposures. I did not use a flash - flash, I thought, is for idiot reporters who want headlines.

"These goddamn reporters," I thought, "they don't have an ounce of compassion for this dying man."

And yet, through the calm terror, something very sinister came to be. My intent to document this scene was in actually a conscious choice that I had to make. I've always wanted to be a journalist but, as they say, meeting your heroes is always disappointing.

I talked to two men who worked for TQS.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Attempted murder" he replied.

I told him I was studying to be a journalist but he ignored me and called his boss instead. This would surely get a segment on the morning news.

I saw their press badges dangling in the wind and I said to myself: "I'll be that asshole reporter, one day, who cares more about a newsreel than a life lost for a few dollars."

I chose to document things, not to please people or to entertain them, nor to render justice or to fight crime and corruption, but simply because events in this world need to be documented.

A journalist's craft isn't to lack compassion, but to resist it.

Today, an orientation was held at Concordia for the new journalism students. "Being a journalist is one of the most noble professions in the world," a teacher said.

It's been almost a day now and the blood is still there. Let's hope he's right.

Full story.

Graffiti and the dog days of summer

2009-06-16T11:12:00.017-04:00

My longtime friend Lukasz came down from Gatineau this weekend to spend time in Montreal. After a few beers, and tons of catching up, I met up with him again on Sunday in St Henri where he was doing a guest graffiti piece with the Crazy Apes Crew.

The CA Crew are probably one of the best in Montreal, and they were voted #3 in 2009 by the Mirror. So I guess Lukasz (who's known as Credka or Credk when he paints) was pretty humbled by their offer to participate in one of their productions.

The day gave us spectacular weather so I biked down beneath the overpass and snapped some pictures. There, a giant wall stretches alongside the abandoned Babcock & Wilcox factory under the vaulted cover of Highway 20. The wall serves as a ever-changing canvas for some of the best graffiti art in the city and has likely doubled in thickness from all the layers of paint caked together since its construction.

Watching these guys work you might have thought that they were born with Krylon cans in their hands. Armed with a variety of shades and colours, they spent the whole day marking their own little piece of concrete in an otherwise huge city.

This got me thinking...

These guys spend copious amounts of money and effort to buy specialized paint and they spend entire days in the hot sun in order to do something marginally illegal. Since most pieces have a shelf life of around 4-5 weeks (depending on how good the location is, and how talented and well respected your crew is - a newbie piece will be the first to go) the art is somewhat ephemeral. The only remaining records of the world's great graffiti can be found in photographs spread across magazines and web sites.

By the standards of say, an Ansel Adams photograph, or a Monet, graffiti art is temporary, fleeting almost, and it follows very naturally the evolution and changing cultures of a city. It appears when buildings and tunnels are built, and disappears when there's no room for new art.

In short, it was a pleasure to watch these guys work and I'll be looking forward to their new pieces. The Crazy Apes Crew have done some pretty impressive damage over the past few years.

Go check out their website or their Flickr.

Also, check out Lukasz's Deviant Art profile. A must see.

Here's the CA piece:

And here's a cool piece Credka did in an NDG tunnel. He plugged my blog. That deserves some props and a 'lol'.

Notes and photographs about New York

2009-06-11T18:28:00.020-04:00

We took the last bus from Montreal around midnight. With stops in Albany and the American border, we were in Manhattan by nine o'clock in the morning. The weather was balmy but grey, and we thought the forecasts had belied us, but by midday, the clouds opened up and sun poured onto to the city.

After a delicious breakfast, we walked uptown to Central park, saw the Met, and decided we would walk to our hostel at 129th street and Madison. For 20$, we got a clean bed and free breakfast, and it gave us a chance to see Harlem.

There is something sinister about crossing the 110th street divide. There is such a clean break from the awnings and doormen on 5th avenue to the corner shops and streets vendors of Malcolm X boulevard. As a Canadian from a homogeneously white suburb, there is a quick realization that you don't know the true meaning of the word "uptown," at least not as it's connoted in any New Yorker's vocabulary. Uptown means black and tenements owned by the city. It means that nobody gives you attitude, just friendly directions.

After a quick stop at the hostel, we headed back downtown and spent time on Broadway. Walking just for the sake of walking was great, but if I hadn't been with Leandra and Sylvia, I would have probably found and old tenspeed somewhere and biked from sunrise to sunset.

It seems, though, that Montreal has a much larger bike per capita ratio. I got the impression that a majority of the people on bikes in New York were cycling because it was their job. The obvious profession there is bike messengering, but there is also a shocking amount of food delivered on two wheels citywide. It makes sense. With comparatively little snowfall in the winter and extreme traffic congestion, nobody gets around faster that cyclists.

Fixed gears are everywhere, but again, most are for professional use. This also makes sense in the city because there are no hills, ever - Manhattan is flat like a bad pint. The few who have fixed gears as a pure novelty often leave their two-thousand-dollar track bikes locked in front of the coffee shops they frequent for people like me to gawk at them like pornography. It's so gauche to drive a car in the city.

The next day was spent in Brooklyn eating an incredible lunch and mingling with our young counterparts. Williamsburg is a fine place to catch up on trends and to be judged by the hip Brooklyn elite.

I also wanted to visit Bed-Stuy to see if I could find Radio Raheem, but that didn't happen. I guess we spent our time much more wisely.

Our day ended rather quietly on the lawn in Central Park collecting our thoughts and reviewing our photographs. Our last cab ride took us to the Port Authority where we embarked on a cold Greyhound set for Montreal.

All in all, it was a great weekend and we had some good times.

Things about New York in point form:

New Yorkers speak funny. Instead of "I can't believe you ran over my bike!" it goes something like "How you gon' go ahead and run over my shit like that."
Wine Warehouse on Broadway sells wine bottles for $3.99.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows anything about Montreal or Canada, or even that Montreal is in Canada.
Harlem is a great neighborhood and anyone who tells you different is ignorant.
Watch out for the express subway trains. You could be at 42nd street and next thing you know you're in fucking Kansas.
Don't eat in Little Italy. It's a big scam and the waiters are Eastern European assholes.
Don't block the box.

129th and Madison. Our hostel can be seen to the middle-right.

SoHo. The architecture is great.

Waiters from a place called Sweetypie that sells 75$ sundaes.

Around the city 01/06/09

2009-06-01T18:21:00.013-04:00

You can see the strips of steel stretching into the distance, cutting across the city flawlessly, and you think that they might even reach all the way to New York or Chicago.

I've learned to admire the stark emptiness of large-scale urban development. There is so much wasted space in the city that it would almost be a shame if it weren't so perplexing and ultimately ignored by most people. From the Wal-Mart at Namur Metro to the hippodrome and all the way to Place Vertu there is nothing but office parks, empty lots, and bleak industrial facilities punctuated occasionally by quiet suburban clusters. It's an interesting bike ride and makes for very interesting photography.

Neutral spaces

2009-05-25T18:53:00.007-04:00

The top picture was shot by the docks, next to the Five Roses factory. I just couldn't get past the question: who sleeps in a trailer parked next to huge grain silos?

The bottom one was shot in East Montreal. This strange mural involving people and their leisurely activities goes on for a while, and this was the only section of it unobstructed by parked cars. Notice Pavaroti, Santa Claus, and a pregnant lady.

A new bike

2009-05-25T10:54:00.006-04:00

Lewd Acts, "Lung Patrol"

I bought an old Peugeot road bike this weekend for a ridiculously small chunk of change. It's a steel frame Super Sport from 1982 and, from what the owner told me, it has served well in its 27 years of service.

I was ecstatic when he sold it to me because my intent had always been to find another old road bike and gradually turn it into a fixed gear by, oh, let's say August. A modest deadline.

Currently, I ride a Beekay with a smaller frame which is in great shape and has just recently been tuned up. It has new tires, new wheels, new gear assembly, new brakes, and a new chain.

The Peugeot is in great shape, but I was hoping to find a slightly smaller frame in order to build my own cheap fixie.

Anyone wanna trade?

Does anyone have the body shape to ride this gigantic bike? Even after a seat adjustment I find it huge, and it seems to me that if I were to invest in this bike I should start with a fitting frame.

So, let me know if you have an old ten-speed lying around that you might want to exchange.

At dusk we set the sky on fire

2009-05-23T22:12:00.019-04:00

M83, "I Guess I'm Floating"

Sunsets have a way of becoming magnificent in their ephemeral brilliance.

Around the city 21/05/09

2009-05-22T19:46:00.002-04:00

All in a day.

What a wonderful town

2009-05-19T22:10:00.003-04:00

Lately I've been thinking about New York. For me, the romanticism of the big apple comes from jazz quartets and musicals. It comes from the reverb in Carnegie Hall and Gershwin's keystrokes. It comes from Miles Davis and Harlem night clubs when it was fashionable to wander uptown and mingle at the bars. It comes from The Catcher In The Rye and Woody Allen films. It comes from the lens of Berenice Abbott and the personality of Keith Haring.

In my ideal moments, I am wandering through central park in autumn and spending long nights over my Royal DeLuxe writing up another short story about Brooklyn. I sit on an old fire escape on the West Side's hottest summer day and I look over the old tenements. This is not to say that I am bored or unamused with Montreal. Quite the contrary. I am more in love with my city than I have ever been, and as summer approaches, the city blooms in its full concert of optimism and liveliness.

Markus Hartel

It's just that my longing for New York is very profound, and almost juvenile. It is the sort of longing that one had for the old west when watching Clint Eastwood fire his Colt, and the urge to become a cowboy at the age of seven. For me, the city has been galvanized in a sort of romantic alterity, much like a still photograph that is perfectly motionless and presents only a fixed impression of its subject.

When Alex (my roommate) and I went to New York City last year, in April, it was my first time. It was a spontaneous trip which we started at one o'clock in the morning as I was about to go to bed. We decided, there, chatting in our dormitory, that we should go to New York. No maps. No bags. We literally followed the road signs to the big apple. We drove through the Bronx at nine in the morning and we were parked in Midtown by ten. We walked around on what was an unusually warm day. It rained a bit, but we didn't care. We rode the subway, where we saw an acapella group perform for change. There were hoodlums of the sort you'd see in eighties crime movies, with leather jackets, bandanas and leather boots, playfully boxing each other on the R train.

Elliott Erwitt

It was all a big giant cliche and we basked in it with the bashfulness of young tourists. We flipped off cab drivers and Alex wrestled the downtown rush hour like a true New Yorker in his small Daewoo. It was a great, balmy New York day. When we crossed the border back into Canada, the temperature had dropped below freezing and there was a snow storm. The melancholy was mute, but it was felt. We had spent a great day in a lively and tomorrow we would have to go back to class.

Nonetheless, we had a great trip and we are currently planning our return in early June.

Motel

2009-05-19T21:07:00.002-04:00

Clerks

2009-05-16T13:24:00.014-04:00

These are some of the people I work with at Pharmaprix. I went in one day and started shooting the employees.

Ok, let me rephrase that. I started photographing the employees.

My goal was to overuse the flash in order to make them seem isolated from the rest of the store, almost as if the store was dark and empty, yet they remained radiant and modestly triumphant in their minimum wage labour.

This is a set in progress and I intend to photograph all employees. I will even aim for the hard ones; the store owner and store manager. One of them is a bit shy and the other one is a tight ass. One clerk doesn't want to be photographed in his uniform because he fears that all the girls at his high school will see it, thus hindering his sex life.

Tough bikes

2009-05-15T20:13:00.008-04:00

Back in October of last year, I purchased an old Beekay road bike for thirty dollars. It ran okay except for a loose back wheel and some shady brakes. It's safe to say I got my money's worth; I rode it till the first snowfall, twice in january, and I've been riding it since March almost non-stop. To tell the truth, I always took it for granted until one of my radials snapped today and my rear wheel started wobbling like pudding.

I took it to Recycle Bicycle on De Maisoneuve in NDG and this guy called Mundo put it on the rack and assessed the damaged. He told me it was an excellent steel frame of amazing quality but that almost everything else had to be replaced. Mundo had this passion about bicycles that was all too apparent and he proceeded to disassemble the bicycle with his eyes through a strangely methodical expression of his love for two-wheeled machines. He was very thorough and explained everything to me in great detail, which is good, because I don't know shit about bikes. New wheels, new tires, new freewheel assembly, new chain, new pedal axis, new cables, new bike! Considering that most refurbished road bikes run from about 400$ to 600$, I was more than willing to invest 250$ to get my bike in perfect condition for the summer.

Around the city 13/05/09

2009-05-13T18:06:00.007-04:00

Sunny days in Montreal are best spent biking around, discovering new places, and shooting a bunch of pictures. Today I went down to Lachine through Montreal West and snapped a quick set.

1) An old locomotive in an abandoned Lachine factory lot.

2) A motel on St. Jacques street in NDG.

3) A building in the old port.

4) A lone tenement stands at the edge of an industrial lot in Lachine.

Lockdown

2009-05-13T17:21:00.004-04:00

Many Montrealers get around on bikes. It makes sense. The city is bike-friendly (taxi drivers not included) and there are tons of bike paths that take you pretty much anywhere. Owning a car here feels a bit like owning a CD player. You're not really going to use it unless there's some sort of extraordinary circumstance that arises.

I found this video on Streetblog.org. A bicycle mechanic teaches us how to properly lock our bikes because, apparently, diligent bike thieves will pick anything that's not locked to the earth's core. Check it out.

Correction:

After reviewing the story, and losing a back wheel to a pothole, I feel that the city has a lot of shit to work out. Bike paths are not limitless, as was implied, and there are many areas in town where you have to wrestle with traffic and put yourself in dodgy situations. Also, I've had an entire day where I almost got killed because drivers were being especially impatient. That being said, Montreal is a great city to bike in. You discover so much, even at the expense of your safety.

The vast expanse

2009-05-13T12:26:00.012-04:00

Robbert Flick is perhaps my favorite photgrapher right now. He has documented the modern American landscape through simple and honest compositions. He has done to urban sprawl and vast spaces what Ansel Adams did to Yellowstone. His early works have a minimal structure, void of any specificity, and are in themselves abstractions of certain elements, like a telephone pole in the middle of the desert or the corner of a cinder block wall.

His more recent work focuses on Los Angeles. With no implicit intent, Flick took to the streets in order to capture the sprawling boulevards of a city whose arteries consist of 16-lane interstates and large avenues. He created long strands of continuous photographs by digitizing video which he shot from a moving car. The result is a grid-like assembly of specific frames depicting the vast expanse of Los Angeles.

Here's an excerpt from the Flintridge Foundation website:

His early black and white photos depicted the stark expanses of Midwestern landscapes and the striking architectural geometries of an Inglewood parking garage near his studio. In 1979, for a documentary project on the city, Flick abandoned the single frame image for a framework that would re-conceptualize L.A.'s vast and diverse topography. He shot sequential views of streets and neighborhoods, arranging many single photographs into a grid. Flick continues to investigate Southern California, constructing panoramic composites of cityscapes, desert, sea and canyons. In 1990 he shifted to a video camera, mounting it in his van. This allowed him to take "long continuous sweeps ... following predetermined trajectories or by systematically rendering parallel streets." Flick digitizes selected frames, creating bands of interlocking images which, when printed are "a collection of visual textures and phenomena" that capture the "visual complexities and simultaneities of the Southern California metropolitan area."

All in all, his work has been very influential to me. The simple, honest beauty of his work is an aesthetic which I admire and try to emulate. Flick is a professor of fine arts at USC, and I'm looking forward to his new projects.

Portfolio

2009-05-12T02:10:00.010-04:00

Back in March, I had to assemble a portfolio for admission in both photography and journalism at Concordia University. I would have opted for more recent images, but I felt an impulse to dig through my hundreds and hundreds of colour slides shot during my two North American roadtrips to assemble a decent set of photographs.

I called it "Americana." The word invokes folklore and nostalgia for a bygone era where people travelled on two-lane roads and ate 15-cent burgers.

All pictures date from the summers of 2005 and 2006, and I've already posted a few from my 2005 trip in a previous post entitled United States of America. These pictures stood well on their own, but I intended this portfolio to impress the photography faculty as much as the journalism faculty. I decided to write captions.

Here's an example:

Most are spontaneous and endured minimal revision. I tried to keep them concise yet descriptive while maintaining a journalistic tone. Perhaps the words help emphasize the pictures, or perhaps they hinder the mystery. They're laid out before the images so the viewer gets the circumstance and the setting before even getting a visual impulse. I also added a line to describe the camera, lens and film that we're used (purely a department requirement).

Either way, both departments were impressed and I received my letter of acceptance this morning.

The PDF is available to download for any who wish to consult it and give their opinion.

Download portfolio here from Mediafire. (Safe and fast!)

Blood + Chili

2009-05-10T02:33:00.013-04:00

Tonight, my roommate and I threw a bloody chili party where the theme consisted of amazing chili, fake blood and "c" slasher films. We were also blessed with free Red Bull, a gratuity which has become somewhat of a standard for every party that we've thrown. We aren't officially sponsored (mostly because we're not that prolific at partying) but we do have a giant sign in our living room. We are also coincidentally friends with someone who works for the marketing division, so cheers to us! Thanks Nat for hooking us up.

We told our guests to bring some chili but we decided to make a huge batch to share around. We snatched a delicious recipe from the Internet that won some prizes in Louisianna or something and modified it enough to rebrand it as 'Alex & Alan's Fantasmic Chili.'

We weren't too sure if the gore/chili thing would go down well, but the two parts meshed quite well. We told guests to wear throw-away t-shirts and clothes in order to spray them in our bathroom/slaughterhouse with fake blood. The lame guests didn't participate while the cool ones got to pretend like they had been beaten or stabbed.

So we ate tons of amazing chili and watched terrible slasher films (courtesy of Dan, aka La Marquise), one of which, Pieces, was about a man who assembled his ideal woman out of various collected body parts. The result can be watched here:

All in all, the night was a success. Everyone left drunk and amused. The only problem is that cornstarch-based fake blood coagulates and becomes next to impossible to remove. Shit.

The United States of America

2009-05-09T20:08:00.006-04:00

The Apartment

2009-05-09T15:17:00.014-04:00

Whenever I find myself in an empty, virgin space, such as a vacant apartment, I somehow find the need to document with simplistic perfection every detail, every angle, and every aspect of the space. In this case, I found that the entire apartment radiated with a sense of purity. Since everything had been cleaned in order to accommodate potential tenants, the white surfaces and crisp tones made for mute colors and subtle differences between shades of white and wood.

Saint Henri

2009-05-09T12:31:00.001-04:00

2008-05-18T18:57:00.023-04:00

	Alexi Hobbs A Montreal photographer with a great body of work who studies photography at Concordia.
	Jeremy Cohen A great photographic portfolio and other stories of interest.
	Photo-Documentation From The Field Photographs posted by Alex right as they happen. Real time blogging?
	So Much Pileup A blog about graphic design, stamps, and the visual culture of the twentieth century.
	Patricia Erbelding A photographic trip through the lost panoramas of deserts, mountains, old motels and small highways of the American Southwest. Check out her website, too.
	Seven Inch Punk A great place to find that rare punk 45 that makes you want to smash your television in the streets.
	Sturm Und Drand Marie Gretchen, fille aux yeux doux.
	Sucka Pants Interesting pictures by Tod Seelie that I found by accident, mostly about traveling, building rafts, and simply fucking shit up.
	Stille Photography A friend of a friend; Jamie Rosen studies photography at Dawson College, in Montreal. Some beautiful portraits and photographs of the city.
	Le Champion du Monde Paul Galipeau is from my home town, or at least, on the other side of the Outaouais River of it. Great photographs. Check out his blog, too.
	Tasty Brews Steena and Stef talk beers, a subject that isn't taken lightly around these parts. Let them take you to school on which brews you should be chugging, and which ones you should be feeding to your cats.

2007-12-05T13:07:00.002-05:00

I'm from Gatineau, Quebec, and I currently live in Montreal where I study journalism and photography at Concordia University.

My favorite things to shoot are places of solitude and simplicity that are disconnected from my daily life. I find refuge in photography.

My earliest and proudest work is a series shot in the United States during a five-week roadtrip across the small roads of rural America.

From there, I've shot a bit of something, a lot of nothing.

I'm currently working on a final project which will capture changing commercial and financial spaces and examine their place in my city, in my world.

To contact me...

toomanybatsovergeorgia@yahoo.com

(514) 813 7964

2007-10-18T12:42:00.003-04:00

	The United States of America A few photographs from my five-week roadtrip across the States.
	Clerks The people I once worked with at a large retail store - a work in progress.
	Around the city 1 The first of few trips to new places in Montreal.
	Neutral spaces These were two of my favorite photgraphs shot in the summer of 2009.
	Around the city 2 More from new areas of Montreal.
	New York City A traditional, black-and-white diary of New York City - not my favorite work.
	New Brunsiwck is a fine place What postcards from New Brunswick might look like - abandoned houses, rural exodus, and bland panoramas.
	Around the city 3 I surprised myself yet again for finding new things to shoot that people don't really care about.
	My first assignment For my Intro to Colour Photgraphy class, at Concordia, I had to shoot a roll of film, something I hadn't done in a long time.
	Tourist season A very short series about a maritime province slowly creeping into the winter months.