How could it not be?? Link to larger version with even more going on. [Alleyway, Montréal]

Link to uncropped version

The counterpoint to this rather amusing scene (yes, she was the driver) was an officious US police officer (standing just off camera) telling me he wasn’t allowed to disclose what had happened.

Sorry to have been absent so long, this has been a very intense work period, complicated by having our house badly flooded by a broken pipe.

Ernestine Pannes was a social anthroplogist. She was a radical, a woman full of life and questions and always willing to push. She was confident enough to be both difficult and warm, and though she often projected a thick shell she really was quite thin skinned. At her age she knew how to cover well, and she often didn’t let on.

When I knew her it was towards the end of her life, and she was writing about the early to mid-twentieth century culture in southern Vermont. It wasn’t exactly the Vermont Life version of reality. I always liked that she said the truth. Now I wonder about her more, and whether she was always that way. (Photo 1978)

Last night was a steaming hot night with threatening thunderheads balancing high above us. Through this week and the beginning of next is a special time in our neighborhood – it’s on these summer nights that the Grand Ballets Canadiens de Montréal gives its yearly free performances in Parc Lafontaine. Each evening in Théâtre de Verdure, a two-thousand seat outdoor theater pushed up against the eastern side of a small park pond, a large company of dancers is generously performs two long pieces. Ostensibly it’s “ballet” but to me it’s more modern dance.

This morning, in my enthusiastic manner I was talking on the phone with a friend across the border in the US about our evening and how we had walked across the street and gone to a free performance of a ballet company, when suddenly I sensed through his quiet how funny and strange this must seem. I didn’t want to probe it, partially because it was a business conversation but partially too because I didn’t want to embarrass him, but I felt acutely balanced between cultures.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was just one of those moments when someone you’ve lived with for a long time, some one you think understands everything about you, looks at you and suddenly you’re earthling and Martian. My recent moment had to do with bread, and why I almost always wrap my food in it.

I’m sure that the question was posed from a place of somewhat discernable well meaning. I’ll grant that my behavior bears explanation, since to wrap for me is almost a reflexive instinct.

Bread, as it’s understood in the United States (at least), is (often) a rather banal substance which bears little or no resemblance to the warm, sweet fragranced, hand-made dough that is baked and then consumed in Middle Eastern cultures. There, dough can be opened up and put in the oven with many variations, from the flat Afghani breads sprinkled with black-onion seed to the paper thin Lavash of Lebanese origin, to the wonderfully varied circular breads riding belts out of funky mechanical-contraption ovens all over the Middle East.

These breads are used as cooking aids, as a kind of edible cooking mitt, as a cleaner and tester for sauces and juices during the cooking process, as serving container, food manager, plate…almost any part of the cooking/consuming process, in fact.

It’s probably true that in some parts of the world there are still communal ovens where you take your leavened or unleavened dough to be baked, but the process as I’ve watched involves people line up often in front of no more than what we would call a doorway and being handed their steaming orders. What ever quantity that order is the pitas are handed over still hot from the oven. Often it’s kids who have been sent by their parents, and they carefully hang the bread on lines or put it on racks to cool, before restacking it to carrying it home.

And this is why Middle Easterners wrap food in it: it’s a soft, neutral, absorbent blanket that takes anything – salad, meat, a sauce, a pickled vegetable, a fried eggplant – and creates a warm delicious package that you hold in your fingers and consume. That’s the problem for our cleanliness and stainless-steel obsessed culture – people here are not used to this way of eating and see it as backwards and unsanitary. I can’t change those attitudes but it’s worth noting that there is a common derivative in the west: those awful polymer-tasting “wraps” that are ubiquitous now in the quick food places. It’s a shame to even mention them in the same breath with the real thing.

So next time when you are offered the chance for shwarma, make sure that you savor it properly. Things may drop out while you’re eating it but that’s okay. And appreciate that warm wrapping, which gives it shape while supporting the flavors. You can even unwrap it a bit and sneak some tabouli in. With the deep purple picked turnips that should already be in there it gives an even more delicious texture to the sandwich, even if it is hard to eat cleanly!!

I have special challenge because I have a beard, and food mixed into that probably is the real root of my partner-based problem!

Full picture

Don’t you wish you could forget about being faced with a camera the way a child can?

I watched my young friend run through about 15 expressions as she and her parents were leaving our home the other night. Almost all the expressions were inherited. How amazing it is - the intimacy with which we absorb our parents. It’s no wonder the relationship often ends up being so conflicted!

One of my first recollections as a child was spinning around lazily on ice.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t on a pair of skates but in the back of a car, and the car was doing full-body slow-motion spins down the center of an ice-coated village street. The car, actually a Willys jeep, had wooden slats that were screwed to the floor in the back where I was getting bumped around. I remember clearly how much they hurt my knees, which isn’t surprising since they probably got pretty well grated.

For those of us now accustomed to industrial-grade child seats having a kid in the back like that would probably constitute grounds for child abuse. In 1953 or 1954 it wasn’t such a big deal. But skidding the car around in circles was. I don’t really understand how my mother avoided hitting a tree or another car, but I’m telling the story as representative tale of my family’s generally traumatic history when it comes to hardware-human interfaces. Of course the Willys had an early version of four-wheel drive, but it’s unlikely that feature would have been in use. Though it probably was the reason my parents purchased the vehicle figuring out how to engage it really would have been out of character.

So yesterday we had just finished eating lunch with my father, who is now 96, when he asked us to help him. He has a small digital answering machine and was having trouble making out the name of someone who had called leaving a message. He asked if we would listen and help identify the person. Not a problem. But wait, there was a problem. Even though these new answering machines are tiny they still have a lot of memory. In a decided display of technical skills my father was running through each of 39 messages (accumulated over the life of the machine) to get to the last one, which was the one he wanted me to listen to. Each message would start “Hi Mounir this is ….” Or “Hi Dad” (some were from me). I waited patiently and with amusement, because this was so totally a family moment.

I don’t mean to make mean fun of my father’s use of the machine’s interface, because though I can handle just about any computer I still choke when I’m faced with comparatively simple tasks on a telephone. And being able to do anything at age 96 is pretty amazing. But I’m trying to explain how I learned to be technically proficient in a family of people who to this day are more likely to abandon an object than to figure out how it functions. For me, it was a question of survival.

Jean Talon Market at start of rain storm (larger and a lot more)

Two small streets – alleyways, really – which bookend my favorite market in Montreal are the focus of a recently erupted fight. The city, citing safety issues, is trying to ban cars from them. The merchants, and many of the shoppers, are saying hunh?

As someone who shops this market often I can say that part of what I like, of course, is the total messy chaos. I like the calls of the vendors, the gentle push of the crowd. No one drives their car through these streets. If you dare take your car in it’s more that you stroll down at the speed of pedestrians, like a boat moving among swimmers.

At one end there’s a year-round fruit and vegetable operation (Sami’s) that owns a forklift. That does dart around, and often you can hear its earnest high pitched horn. It reminds me of the constant horn-banter of Middle Eastern souks, in this so-quiet-city of Montreal.

All in all it’s a totally wonderful and jumbled environment.

I was shopping there yesterday and I’m glad to say that despite the new rules, cars are still inching their way around, and the line for pineapples isn’t any shorter. Right now the Quebec berries are in season, and a full flat of red raspberries is going for $12.

I have a feeling it’ll be the city that loses this one.

I’ve decided someone is after me.

Every morning I turn my computer on and almost immediately the dialog box alerts me to available security downloads. I can’t call up for information about someone I’m married to without first having to give up security codes. Every transaction in the local hospital is preceded by a question and answer period about my birth date. In fact I pretty much have to jump through hoops just to get the mail at the postal counter, if I’ve forgotten my key. This is from a postmaster I’ve known for 10-15 years.

Am I going nuts or is it the rest of the world? Obviously it would be a terrible tragedy if I were fed the wrong medicine, or if someone chopped off an appendage when I thought I was in for well, a small tuneup. But hasn’t this gone too far?? We’re criminalizing social contact, making people afraid of each other. I was standing with a friend the other day on a small rural street. He asked his kids to go around back of the house and play. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders: “too many weirdos around”.

I’ll take it as a compliment, I suppose, that he didn’t mean me.

larger

There have been two discussion threads, one getting buried in the archives and the other more recent, which have assumed slowly diminishing lives of their own even as they wend their way down and off the main page of this blog.

Blogging brings out a lot, and I am indebted and thankful to the readers who have written honestly and openly about their feelings both in front and in back of cameras. These comment threads have brought out a lot of feelings about having cameras pointed towards us.

Obviously I have a bias: I’ve photographed people almost since the day I started photography and if anything I enjoy it more now than I did then. I am guilty as charged at being a real pain in this context. I’ve never had a friend who to me was so uninteresting that they made me want to pop the lens cap on and keep it there. That’s not to say, of course, that I think everything should be photographed…there’s a lot that gets left out. Maybe I put those boundaries too tight, maybe too loose. Maybe I should push it harder, true zealots charge hard. But still, since I started “seriously” making pictures at age 13 I’ve had roughly 40 years of experience recording people infront of cameras, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

I have a particular internal wiring pattern which is peculiar to me, in that over time my mind has been altered through using a camera. In much the same way that your mind morphs from long-term use of a computer, I’ve developed in such a way that taking pictures of other people has become a form (hopefully not a surrogate) of affection for me. Almost every one who I am close to has learned to deal (had to deal?) with me and a camera, and with almost everyone after time a certain amount of transparency filters in. As Rana wrote it’s “perfectly okay to whip out the camera and take pictures…” and so people who are my friends don’t modify their behavior greatly (or at all) and are generous in letting me do my thing, so to speak. What I hope grows out of this trust reflects some of the beauty that both the oldest and youngest friends possess and radiate.

The question for me is does this simply become a kind of glorified life photo album, simply a string of photos taken throughout a person’s (my) life or is there something more to it? In order for that to happen there has to be something that transcends a physical description of the person at a particular time. That’s okay if the goal is a memento, a record, of someone you know or love and always want to remember. That’s been a (primary) task of photography almost since 1839 when it was invented. But for the photograph to mean something to people outside of personal acquaintance, to be something other than a visual surrogate for the real person, it has to include an area that overlaps us all as humans. That’s not so easy to do. And those pictures may not end up being the ones that are the “prettiest” or the easiest to look at. But they are the ones that create electrical flow between us regardless of our cultural and personal backgrounds, and in my opinion they are the ones that are worth keeping.