justinwonnacott

I remember + I forget

These images are of sea creatures that I have handled and eaten recently. These images articulate some aesthetic and political concerns of my own that are partly hidden behind the idea of the still life picture.

When I first confronted my dinner with a camera, I was really wrapped up in the sensual properties of these fish and looking, feeling and smelling what was there in front of me. A taboo word – beauty – repeatedly subverted my understanding of these photographs. Nonetheless; many fish later, although I still have my lusty fascination with these animals my vision of them has changed. Now, the fish all look like victims and I am just another consumer with sharp teeth whose appetite helps to sustain an unsustainable fishing industry.

The fish are beautiful, they are in trouble and they are food.

Somerset Street

Images online Somerset Blog Exhibit Installation

These pictures are from a large body of work made over a decade when I photographed almost every building on Ottawa’s Somerset Street between Bank Street and Wellington Street. This project begins in a cosmopolitan area on its eastern edge, traverses a neighborhood now officially identified as “Ottawa’s Chinatown” and ends in a transition zone on its western extremity.There are thousands of images in this archive.

My personal connection with the street is straightforward - I lived in the neighborhood for a few years, knocked on a lot of doors as an enumerator for two elections and I still live nearby, buy groceries there and eat in the restaurants. This part of Ottawa fascinates me as architecture, culture and historical process. The more I have looked at the street with a camera the stronger it becomes as a metaphor to me for Ottawa and a Canadian experience.

During the last 40 years somerset street has been "colonized" by diverse groups of new Canadians. This place has somehow escaped the urban renewal/city planning steamrollers that have cut down other mature neighbourhoods and replaced them with the new. Perhaps the street evaded development because it is too geographically extended or ethnically diverse or maybe it was just not valuable enough to be a good candidate for investment? I don't know. Sadly, the biggest engine of change on the street at the moment seems to be fire.

I have really enjoyed watching how the street's aging and eclectic mix of vernacular commercial architecture, older apartment blocks and re-purposed homes have evolved and been changed by the people who use it. There is an unstructured and chaotic aspect to this street and I believe that this organic nature keeps it contemporary and relevant to the communities who use it. As a photographer I have also enjoyed the simple pleasure of learning about this place by using my eyes.This project was a way to re-connect myself to a documentary process of working with cameras as a matter of fact that I have not engaged in for a long time.

Although this project visually emphasizes the buildings, people do appear in many images. These people are un-named as a practical matter but they are not being trivialized in the process. They have left marks and traces everywhere I look. The people and the street need each other.

A selection of about 50 prints was displayed at the Bytown Museum in Ottawa for six months in 2009 . A 108 pp catalogue of the exhibition with an essay by curator Christopher Davidson is available from the Bytown Museum in Ottawa. See the links section for more information.

ISBN 978-0-9812860-0-6

Work in progress: untitled and unfinished

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Although I have made pictures on the street for a long time I am now concentrating on making more of this kind of image than I have in many years. Personally, I find seeing people and brief moments a pleasure after making so many images of static subjects and studio work recently. It is exciting and challenging for me to look at the world around me in this way for a change – again. I think that we are in a crucible where new forms of images are being born as well as new rules about how they are gathered and used. The role of the photographer and the nature of photographs made on the public commons of our streets is being redefined.

I am interested in looking at this, partly because I think it is “time” . Now every picture is in color, and with modern gear I can gesture with a camera and see moments more freely than with yesterday's equipment. The experience of walking – and being - on the street is very different compared to the streets of 25 or 35 years ago. For example, the street environment is now filled with advertising photographs and projected images on screens. The bags we put our stuff in and much of the clothing we wear is advertising too. Photographs are constantly being churned out by the cameras on the street by tourists, kids snapshooting with cellphones or by the growing numbers of surveillance cameras which relentlessly monitor parts of our cities for our own protection.

We are living at a very special period in the development of our visual culture. In the late 19th century the introduction of the Kodak hand camera and the use of rollfilm made the use of glass plates and stand cameras into a niche practice ; this happened almost exactly as the printed image exploded in use through the widespread adoption of halftone reproductions in the popular press. Everyman became a photographer, in fact so much so that there were occasions that photographers were identified as a public nuisance with their incessant, pesky snapshooting.

I think there are some strong parallels between the late 19th century image explosion and what is happening now as the size of our contemporary image world inflates exponentially. The growing use use of email, databases and social networks to share images means people rarely look at prints and the distinction between an image, a slideshow or a video is unimportant to many users today . New forms of literacy are being being born along with new paranoias and rules about how pictures are gathered and used. The photographer's role and their use of public space is once again in question. This is also part of my subject matter .

Presently I am working with an archive of two or three thousand images made in half a dozen Canadian cities during the last year. I think I will still have a lot more pictures to take before it will be time to end this work - again -.