Panoptikal*: It's Not Pretty (June 25, 2005)

Saturday, May 8, 2010

It's Not Pretty (June 25, 2005)

I'll tell you what's not pretty: it's this. And this. And this. And from a little while back, let's not forget... this and this. (There's even more here.) Seems almost as if they were looking for an excuse. But why?

I thought it was appropriate that I should comment on the latest news and relate it to the photo (taken at Toronto Pride 2005, when I marched with the Gay Geeks). For once I'm going to express a political point in my personal blog, and here it is: I don't want to live in a country where Pride parades, women's groups and the arts lose funding, where the government members can say they "hate" the city in which I live and act on that, where information is withheld from the public on a regular basis, where the MPs are allowed to engage in sketchy/crass behaviour with relative impunity, and where, overall, I simply don't trust the government to govern in anyone's best interest but their own.

This ridiculous crew of meritocratic, homophobic, sexist, classist, racist rowdies must be tossed aside, assigned to the past along with their repugnant attitudes, which are not those of the majority of Canadians. We've got work to do.

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More about...

The pictures I post here were taken between 1994 and today. There are some breaks during that period, generally because I had no working camera, or because I processed many negatives and made few prints (generally this is the case for 1994 to 2000 or so). I also have many prints from that time that have not yet been digitised.

The reason I call this a "photojournal" is that I tend to document my life with images, where possible, rather than words. I find it much easier to remember moments, and then events, when I have some kind of picture with which I can associate them. This is probably why I've always taken pictures when I could--even when there was "nothing" to photograph--and why I have such a difficult time keeping up a written diary or journal of any sort.

Technicalities

I've used a number of cameras over the past 15 years or so. The bulk of these were SLR, manual or semi-automatic, and of course non-digital (35mm film) cameras (photos shot from 1994 to 2004, roughly), though for a period I used both (low-quality) digital and film (around 2002-2003).

I first used a fully manual camera when I was 14, which was borrowed; the first SLR that I owned was a Vivitar, which rapidly deteriorated. It was followed by a Pentax, and after that, the Minolta XD-11 that I have used for film ever since. I use it with a 35mm or a 28-70mm lens with telephoto and macro. In addition to these, I also used Mamiya 220 and 330 medium-format (120 film) cameras while at NSCAD in 1997-8, and very occasionally, I used an old Agfa range-finder (from roughly the 1940s) which produced 6x9cm negatives on 120 film.

The first digital camera I used would probably have been in 2002, and I used it periodically over about a year (it was borrowed). In 2004-05 I again used a digital camera (also borrowed; specs not available); I stopped shooting on film beyond 2004 because of the expense. Finally in October 2006 I bought a Sony CyberShot, 7.2 megapixels, a very small camera (not an SLR) that I used for almost 4 years before replacing it with a CyberShot DSC-TX5, in July 2010. This camera now travels with me almost everywhere and is the only camera I use regularly.