Archive for the Category ◊ Culture + Society ◊

27 Jul 2010 Counselling And Support Referral Resources In Toronto

'til death do us part

As part of my participation in a University of Toronto research study a week ago about psychological health in women, I was given a resource list that I thought would benefit the greater Googling public in the Toronto area. I want to write more about this, but as usual I’m short on time so I’ll just post the list for now.

Distress Lines

Distress Centre of Toronto 24-hour crisis line: (416) 408-4357 (408-HELP)
http://www.torontodistresscentre.com/

Gerstein Centre Crisis Line: (416) 929-5200
http://www.gersteincentre.org/

Referral Services

Women’s Counselling, Education, and Referral Service: (416) 534-7501
- free service offering referrals to therapy
http://www.wcrec.org/

211 Community Connection
- information on government health and social services
- dial 211 or visit: http://www.211toronto.ca/

Low-cost or Free Counselling Services in Toronto

  1. OISE/UT Counselling and Psychoeducational Clinic
    - individual psychotherapy with graduate students, runs Sep-May, sliding scale
    252 Bloor St. West, 7th Floor (Bloor/St. George)
    Tel: (416) 978-0620
  2. Catholic Family Services
    - individual and group psychotherapy and wellness groups — sliding scale to no fee
    1155 Yonge St., Suite 200 (Yonge and Summerhill)
    Tel: (416) 921-1163 (they also have a location at Yonge and Finch)
  3. Family Service Association
    - individual psychotherapy, sliding scale
    355 Church St. (Church and Gerrard)
    Tel: (416) 595-9618
  4. Women’s Health in Women’s Hands
    - health services (and therapy) for women of colour in the Toronto area, no fee
    2 Carlton St., Suite 500 (College and Yonge)
    Tel: (416) 593-7655
15 Jul 2010 Random Thoughts In Editing Mode

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After hours and hours of staring at photos I begin to memorise people’s faces. One of the other peculiar things about what I do, but may prove to be useful at some point in the future. After staring at people’s faces, I think of my own and how long it took me to reach the conclusion that perfection is totally overrated.

I feel qualified to say this as someone who was not just a wallflower in school, but dreaded school photos like the plague. Someone whose face has somehow caught up with her teeth (or rather, the size of her teeth) and whose nose doesn’t look as awkwardly flat as it did once, or maybe her face just grown into it. I had buck teeth as a child and my parents didn’t have money for braces or the dentist, so absolutely nothing had been done to correct my teeth since getting fillings around 10 years old. I’ve had dental coverage for over a year, and I haven’t used it yet. I still have the same fillings, the same buck to my teeth, the same everything that I had when I was 10. But strangely, my face changed enough so nobody notices my teeth anymore, not even me. How did that happen? Or rather, not happen?

Same thing with my nose: when I was in high school one day and my class was heading outside to witness an eclipse, I remember one classmate making a joke about my face colliding with a dog house. Seriously. I still have the same flat, bridgeless Filipino nose that I had when I was 14, but I don’t even think about it anymore. It took a long time to ignore it — it’s smack in the middle of my face! — but I finally did.

Maybe I’m thinking about all this because I’m participating in a research study about body perceptions at the University of Toronto (my interview is on Tuesday). It got me thinking, and while I’m looking at faces and bodies all the time editing portraits, I think about it further. Women are particularly hard on ourselves, dwelling on things that ultimately do not matter. Maybe if we had nothing better to occupy our time than the business of attracting a mate, it would merit a greater amount of attention. But this is 2010, and for many of us it may not even be a consideration. While women in the developing world still struggle with equality in the workforce and in other areas in life, for the rest of us in the developed nations who experience struggle to a much lesser degree there should be less time and money spent on the pursuit of beauty and more on general health — especially mental health.

When I edit portraits, I never alter bodies. I only ever touch up faces and even then my rule is I don’t remove anything that’s a permanent part of the face; I usually just end up applying digital makeup: clearing up skin, brightening eyes, reducing reflections on glasses, that sort of thing. Once in a while I’ll get a specific request for Photoshopping from a client, but thankfully this has been rare. Perhaps it’s easier because I’m on the other side of the lens, but I do study people’s attitudes and reactions to photos and have an idea of what angles are more flattering to people. I also consider my own experience with self-portraits and I try to do the work in-camera than in post-production.

One thing I do know, though, is that I have a more global idea of beauty than a Western-centric or Eurocentric idea of beauty. I see beauty in skin of all shades, in eyes of hues both light and dark, in hair of all types, and I value the diversity of people. I hope this shows in my work as much as it exists in my mind.

Back to editing….

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28 Jun 2010 A Happy Scene In Toronto (Because We Need It)
 |  Category: Culture + Society, Toronto, Videoclips  | One Comment

The intersection at Keele and St. Clair was full of flag-waving Argentinians, so I should’ve guessed St. Clair West would be jammed because Argentina won their game Sunday, but I was dumb enough to land right in it. I’m happy for them, but my just-purchased containers of ice cream were melting in the traffic jam.

Like everyone else in this city, I’m embracing practically anything non-G20-related (Sunday was dismal, too).

27 Jun 2010 Vicky + Mike Are Married!

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Yesterday’s wedding was one of the most fun events I’ve ever shot, and much of the credit goes to the bridal party who were all from New Zealand. The Canadian groomsmen were no slouches, but special mention goes out to the Kiwis. This bunch were stellar!

I’m still going through the photos, there are around 1,800 of them…! Major shout-out to Jan, who was my hardworking second shooter yesterday.

++++++++++

There should Be T-Shirts: “I Survived G20 Saturday”

Who would be wearing these t-shirts?

  • The police whose cruisers were set on fire;
  • Peaceful protesters who shouldn’t be lumped in with the minority of those who resorted to vandalism and wanton destruction and drowned out everyone with legitimate causes;
  • All the brides and grooms (including mine) who were married yesterday in downtown Toronto amidst the colossal inconvenience of the G20;
  • All the vendors who had to work through it, just like any other Saturday, but with 10x more hassle;
  • The baby of the Maid of Honour, who fell off the church pew during the ceremony…

… but especially the baby — she didn’t even wail!

14 Jun 2010 Some Old Bajans Taught Me How To Play Dominoes
 |  Category: Caribbean, Culture + Society  | 2 Comments

I spotted these fellows in Speightstown engrossed in their game and walked up to them, asking if I could watch. Dominoes is very popular in Cuba, too, but when I was there I tried to photograph it on the sly, whereas in Barbados I wanted to photograph the players openly and learn something about dominoes through conversation. It is also through something as common and simple as a game when I find it the easiest to slip in my culture-related questions without sounding too interrogative, like a reporter, and take photos. I asked permission, and they weren’t bothered by the camera after I hung out with them for a while.

Several of them taught me how the game is played, passing on various strategies while I chatted with them about fishing rights, hurricanes, ladies, and whatnot. They would slam their dominoes down on the table so hard it made the tiles (“they’re called cards”) jump, but they toned it down a bit for the camera instead of the other way around — I know this because I watched them play from down the street before I introduced myself. I could hear the slamming from that far away!

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06 Jun 2010 Blessing The Neighbourhood

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I completely forgot last week was my fourth anniversary of moving into this neighbourhood, until today when I heard the singing. I moved to Roncesvalles Village on June 1, 2007. My friend Arliin helped me move and told me that locals call it “Roncy” for short. She said I’ll really like it here, and she was right.

The first Sunday of June is when I hear the singing (if I’m around), a group of voices singing in Polish. It’s quite a large crowd that gathers, but the only sound you’ll hear is the singing, there’s no chatter. They go from one house to another in a processional. I don’t know how the houses are selected, but for the last four times I’ve observed them in my area it’s been the same houses. (Post from 2007.) This time there was a girl handing out pamphlets about Katyn, and probably also the plane crash that claimed the Polish president and nearly a hundred others a couple of months ago.

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I went back to my archives and found some video clips from the 2007 I hadn’t uploaded (I don’t think Flickr had the video feature back then).

{ continue reading… }

21 May 2010 Up In The Air
 |  Category: Culture + Society, Rants, Travel, USA  | 2 Comments

over the Pyrenees
[over the Pyrenees, Barcelona to London]

I have many aerial photos. I’ve got more than a hundred tagged as aerials in Flickr, but I upload only a small fraction of what I actually shoot, and I’m not a completely disciplined tagger, either. I’ve shot aerials from a range of aircraft, from helicopters to biplanes to WWII cargo planes to airliners.

I find the view from the sky as intriguing as the view from the ground, if not a little more so because I spend less time up there than down here. And coming from a previous life that revolved very much around aviation and getting up in the sky at every opportunity, I am offering another point of view. To go along with the view.

east of Vancouver
[Winnipeg to Vancouver]

Vatnajökull glacier
[over the Vatnajökull glacier, the largest in Iceland]

Hudson River, facing north
[over the Hudson River, upstate New York]

eastern shores of Lake Michigan
[eastern shores of Lake Michigan]

Detroit Rock City

This last pic above is Detroit. If you’ve flown over it, you’d probably guess it from the aerial. And if you’ve flown over it, you’ve probably been to the airport, which is pretty nice as airports go, and from this one I saw a spectacular sunset a couple of years ago. I’ve been to more airports than I’ve kept track of, but one trip I counted 11 — just in that one trip. It was only six years ago, but it feels like forever. I’ve been in many airports since, but I still like Detroit’s.

I’ve got airports on the brain because I just saw “Up In The Air” (2009). The opening aerials to the film are very interesting, showing the variety of settlement and farming patterns on the ground from a bird’s eye view. (And as I am writing this, there is news of an Air India crash. So I’m a little conflicted about continuing on my topic… I need to acknowledge that flying is not without its risks.)

I’ve also got Detroit on the brain, because I had planned to visit this weekend. There is a segment of the film which takes place in Detroit and is related to why I wanted to go in the first place. Moreover, this afternoon I received an email from another traveller in our original Detroit-bound group. She said:

…just a side note: I talked to 3 people who’ve been to Detroit before and all of them said that Detroit is a pretty boring city to go and pretty much reminds [x] of Buffalo. And 2 out of 3 advised to go to Cleveland instead.

I tried to tone down my response because initially I was more than a little ticked off, but she was just passing along information that was given to her — she’d never been. I have visited, but this was more than 16 years ago and much has happened to the local economy since then. Regardless, I still wanted to go, for my own reasons.

And this perhaps is why I get ticked off when I hear people pass off subjective statements about places (well, anything that is subjective) masked as “advice” — it is really NOT advice, it is opinion but without information!

“That movie is crap.”
“That restaurant is a waste of money.”
“It’s too dangerous to go there.”

It is very irresponsible for people to pass along an opinion without at least some clarification:

Why didn’t they like it?
What did they do?
What were they looking for?
Were their expectations out of line with reality?
Did they do any research?

I remember a few years ago when I told people I was going to Iceland, no-one could think of a single reason to go. “Iceland? What for?” I’m thankful I didn’t listen to anyone but myself. After all, who knows what I want to do better than me? (I often wonder about people who can’t seem to make a decision without consulting everyone around them.) I was pretty fascinated by Iceland, but it seemed at the time no-one knew anything about the country. Now that one of its volcanoes has wreaked havoc on air travel and closed down airports in Europe, suddenly people know at least ONE thing about Iceland: it has volcanoes!

The reason why I’m jumping to the defense of Detroit is because it is precisely the place that SHOULD be visited. For one thing, they certainly could use the tourist money. Everything I’ve heard from people in Toronto (who aren’t photographers) has been negative except one friend whose father is an architect and talks up the unique features of Detroit’s buildings. Otherwise all everyone seems to talk about is Detroit’s crime rate and the depressed economy. I simply cannot believe Detroit has nothing to offer, because media tends to dwell on BAD NEWS. I’m not denying the facts or reports, I’m saying there is more to Detroit than what you see on the news or read in newspapers.

It’s not that I’m looking to move to Detroit, anyway, I just want to visit and take photos and meet the locals. Anywhere that produces a sound like Motown is someplace I want to visit. Detroit has a long history of producing groundbreaking modern music, from rock and roll to techno to rap. And you know what? Their hockey team does pretty well…

While I’m on the subject, The Jackson Five were from Gary, Indiana, Madonna’s from Bay City, Michigan, The Black Keys are from Akron, Ohio — these are all considered “unexciting” places. I’ve made the observation long ago (and felt it somewhat proven by Iceland), that the more isolated a place, the starker and bleaker the winters get, the more creative people become. When there is “nothing” to do, that is when you start creating, because it is borne out of a human need to stamp out boredom and connect with other people.

I have one basic tenet, one guiding principle that is the foundation of how I travel: if people live there, it is worth visiting. I am not an academic, but I take an academic approach to most things: few things are categorically ‘good’ or ‘bad’, just ‘different’. It’s like people: not everyone gives a great first impression, with some people you have to get to know them first. It’s why I moved to Glasgow after living in Edinburgh, even though all the tourists go to Edinburgh instead of Glasgow. I believe Detroit’s one of those cities: it’s maybe gruff and scruffy, bruised and battered, knocked down… but far from out.

17 May 2010 Would You Wear A Chicken Suit?
 |  Category: Culture + Society, Vancouver  | Leave a Comment

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Or maybe the question should be: “At what PRICE would you wear a chicken suit?”

He looks like a very unhappy chicken, if you ask me. I can only say that from his posture and gait, which doesn’t translate well into photos in this case, thanks to the suit, but he looks a little forlorn in the lower photo. Is he a university student? Someone who just lost his job? I’d love to know but I think he’d probably like to keep his dignity intact by keeping his identity under wraps.

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Day 1: saw grey whale in front of Science World and a house being towed in Georgia Strait
Day 2: spotted man wearing chicken suit (East Cordova)

By Day 3 in Vancouver, I was expecting to see more absurdity, but that didn’t happen until Day… oh, nevermind (inside joke).

22 Mar 2010 The Cove


I’d like to see this, and with my pescetarian friends if I can swing it. I know it won an Oscar for Best Documentary 2009, but that wasn’t what persuaded me. It was listening to an interview on CBC Radio last night with the director, Louie Psihoyos, who was a National Geographic photographer for 18 years, talk about Richard O’Barry and why the crew took the risks to make the film. (Incidentally, two of the crew are Canadian, the expedition director and one of the free divers.)

I’ve stated my bias against dolphin shows on my site as long as I’ve been writing here (nearly eight years), but I’m fairly certain watching this film would encourage me to be more vocal about it than ever. The only way I can bring myself to watch the dolphins at the Vancouver Aquarium with my nieces and nephew is that the facility has a no-capture policy in place since the ’90s, but even then I can’t help but feel sadness about any animals in captivity. I’m aware of the wealth of research going on behind the scenes, it’s the “scenes” that don’t sit well with me. Rescuing creatures from harm is one thing, but capturing for the benefit of human entertainment? No thanks, I’m sure we can come up with a better way to fund the research than trap wild animals and force them to live in tiny, artificial environments and perform stunts for food.

28 Feb 2010 Red & White Celebrations
 |  Category: Culture + Society  | One Comment

lots of red and white
[April 2008]

With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics finally over and ending on a note of utter jubilation (a record 14 gold medals, the last one earned this afternoon in a thrilling hockey finale), the country can return to wearing other colours beside red and white. After some major partying tonight, that is. And the hangover tomorrow.