Plumtree @ HMV (October 3, 1997)

Part of a set that I took at the same show.

Ravens, Tower of London (March 11, 2008)

Hopefully the joke needs no explanation here--well, it's more of an amusing arrangement of visual elements than an actual "joke".

The humourously threatening-looking ravens are, of course, famous residents of the Tower, carefully tended by an assigned Yeoman-Warder.

Outside York Fine Arts (February 28, 2007)

Can there really be any adequate explanation for this? More importantly, should there be? (Laughs)

Couch Poser (August, 2002)

Another of my last cat, Winnie. What a little poser.

Lindsay (April, 1996)

Taken in high school, when I was 16. This room, which was a classroom used for English, must have had nice light--I have a few pictures taken in there. Lindsay was a classmate (in the same year as me, though certainly not in many of my classes).

I remember when I showed this picture in a class at NSCAD (probably in one of the continuing education classes I took there, during high school), the instructor was fascinated by it. I think there was something about the half-sentences on the blackboard that was evocative, together with the soft focus (graininess again--it would have been Agfa 400 ISO B&W film) and the evident concentration she has on something being written. This is one of those portraits I took in high school that looks, in retrospect, like a freeze-frame of accidental beauty (I had to shoot when no-one was looking) that has survived long enough that I can look back and call it "precocious".

Detroit: Look Up (March, 2004)

Detroit and Hamilton, Ontario (where I was living at the time I took this picture) share an interesting common heritage as "has-been" cities, both former industrial heavyweights that took the wrong turn in an economy headed for the informational. However, Detroit represents this shift on a more massive scale, a whole shell of an urban monster left as rotting evidence of unsustainable industry. Though naturally this isn't the whole story for Detroit, it's hard not to come away with a certain impression of massive urban decay that somehow foreshadows some larger, Gilliam-esque post-apocalyptic doomscape spreading throughout the urban centres of North America (see: Los Angeles and Bladerunner, for a similar example).

AA Road Sign (December 15? 2000)

Taken on the way--well, while trying to find the way--from Auckland up to the Coromandel, in New Zealand. We did end up taking a bit of a detour, but New Zealand is so small that the alternate route merely brought us to the coast prematurely, and we were able to turn around and go back the way we came without much loss of time, and pleased by some extra exposure to the countryside (just southeast of Auckland, heading for the Firth of Thames; beautiful rolling farmland, much of it).

I also took this picture because of the "toilets" sign, I'm sure--in New Zealand both the yellow AA road signs and the available public toilets would seem strange to Canadian eyes, though they are common enough where I grew up. Public toilets are almost always available since they are not inside malls, restaurants or other privately owned/commercial spaces.

Musical Instrument Museum (May 16, 2007)

The museum was inside the Castello Sforzesco, Milan; the castle contained several museums. This one also included a large hall full of antique keyboard instruments.

London Wall (March 4, 2008)

City man chats on his mobile while casually strolling through the remnants of millennia past.

I do enjoy these encounters between the detritus of human history and the casual repetition of everyday life (which is, of course, also history--eventually, or even by tomorrow--more like an accumulation over time that eventually becomes distant enough to earn the name).

This picture was taken when I was on my way to the Museum of London (highly recommended!) with my sister Natalie; so it was not far from the Barbican. The London Wall was of course built initially by the Romans--who also gave their distinctive stamp to the urban layout of Milan and Paris as well as London.

Highgate Graves (August, 2004)

Another shot of the glorious Highgate. There was no real boundary between grave sites and what looked like a wooded garden crawling with vines. I admit, I wouldn't mind being buried here (after I'm dead, of course).