The flag, flying at half-staff to mark the workplace death of a city employee. The city hall tower and 'freedom arch' that spans the reflecting pool. A street sign, "Hoskin Av", and maybe a University building behind it. Sun reflecting off of a perforated steel wall. Crowd barriers stacked and ready to deploy.
The ROM is happy to welcome you back.
I suppose these are, technically, "multiple exposure" photos, but to me that implies a definitive Thing, with images artistically overlaid before moving on to expose and re-expose the next frame. These aren't that. Instead, I'll call them "incremental exposures", which has the film advanced only slightly each time the shutter is fired. The entire negative is filled with an unbroken palimpsest of disjointed images, with no distinct 'frames' or 'photos' except for the ones I find after the fact.
The actual process – recording, scanning, editing – is actually a bit more complex than that, but that's not particularly important at this point. The key is that it combines many of the things I like best about my projects, especially random chance within a set of limiting rules, in ways that can surprise me.
I don't have a name for the project yet, but there's lots more work to do before that matters. For now my working title (and organizing keyword) is "panortho", which is simply naming it after its methods.
Three key takeaways from this photo:
Black lives matter.
Our city government is a disorganized and elusive structure.
It's done under the legacy colonialism, here represented by the statue of an unloved king and his horse.
The "Pano" part of the working title is from the camera and the final presentation format. These are recorded with a panoramic toy camera, with each frame overlapping incrementally to take advantage of its vignetting and edge softness. And my plan is to use a 5:2 panoramic ratio for the bigger prints, making that more expansive view a foundational part of the project.
And the "ortho" part of the panortho working title is the film that I'm using, Ilford Ortho Plus 80 in 35mm format. (I thought about calling it Ortho Pan, but that film joke is too photogeeky even for me.) Orthographic films don't see red ('pan' films do, hence the joke) which darkens things like our streetcars, warning signs, and the Canadian flag.
This makes a surprisingly huge difference in the urban environment – red is everywhere, and it's usually used for emphasis. That's too easy to wash out with other films and techniques intended for landscapes; instead Ortho gives it extra weight. It's a key part of the look of these photos, and something I'll remember for other times, as well.
My goal with these is simple: take photos of how I've been feeling during The All This.
Disposable, uncertain, anxious, afraid, overwhelmed, and a little angry.
It is, like the current situation itself, an ongoing and changing thing. These images are all from my first roll of film, which I shot while going to the places that appeal to me during my regular life. They're almost all taken on my walks to and from work, or from walks downtown on my lunch breaks. My second roll, already in progress, will be of different things but still reflects what matters to me now.
And after that, who knows. I don't have an end-point in mind, but imagine spending at least a couple more rolls on it after that. We'll have to see how well my plastic camera and I handle the winter darkness and cold.