Streetscape – Excited Pixels

I recently purchased Conversations with Contemporary Photographers, following my recent reading of On Street Photography and the Poetic Image. As a bit of a surprise, I discovered that my recently purchased book included a strip of exposed Kodak 100TX film. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or held a strip of physical film before and I certainly haven’t ever tried to digitize it before today.

Given that this was a bit of a lark I ended up using Filmbox to create quick digital scans. This is a an iOS application where you hold the film a few inches away from a white screen and, then, use the application to capture any given frame.

I can’t claim that the process is perfect nor that the results are spectacular. But they do have the effect of letting me see more clearly what the different frames on this thing strip of film more clearly look like.

None of these photos were made by me. I have no idea where they were made. But I suspect the film is from within the past 20 years or so, based on the clothing when when the book was published. All of them are reproduced, below, with the only ‘edit’ being to fully convert them to black and white.

In the late fall of 2022 I decided that I’d turn one of my street photographs into a postcard for each month of 2023. I just received my proofs for 2023 this week and I’m happy with them; the full order will be made in the next week or two.

I also, however, will be posting the preceding year’s images to Excited Pixels. So, this January I’m posting the January 2023 photograph, in February I’ll post the February photograph from February 2023, and so on.

In addition to the street photograph that was made into a postcard I’ll also be publishing my favourite landscape/streetscape from that month. Despite making a reasonable number of landscapes/streetscapes, this will be the first time that I regularly publish some of them.

January 2023: Streetscape

I made this image of an under-construction part of the University of Toronto in my last few weeks employed with the institution. It is, in many ways, a deeply personal photo that reflected my passage to a new space. The tape and barriers being knocked over was figurative, in the sense that what once was a warning to keep me away was now a path to follow out of frame, and into new experiences and adventures after working with the same employer for almost a decade.

January 2023: Street Photograph

This photo was made January 1, 2023 and it remains one of my favourites. The emotion in the subjects’ face draws me in and the steam and garbage lends this part of the city (home to the country’s largest banks, stock exchange, and other financial and legal institutions) a kind of grittiness that belies its proximity to wealth and power. The photograph, also, speaks of how you can build a story in a frame that might look one way, but which doubles in meaning and context once grounded in the space and time wherein it was made.

I kept coming back to Bay and Richmond throughout the year and was regularly rewarded with rich images. The fluidity of the location, with updates to the built infrastructure in the form of temporary construction scaffolding, and the steam emerging from vents in this party of the city, just made it fun to keep coming back to.