Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/05

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Subject: [Leica] Small town v. big city photo ops
From: Mark Langer <mlanger@ccs.carleton.ca>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 10:36:05 EST

Paul,

Having been born in Toronto, grown up in Chatham, and living in Ottawa, I feel
uniquely qualified to comment on this.  Sylvia Tyson (then Fricker) lived
near me and used to play her guitar on my uncle's back porch in the 1950s. 
When hearing strains of folk music from outside, visitors would ask, "What's
that" to which the reply would be "Oh, that's just Crazy Sylvia."  And if
you think Sylvia was considered weird in the narrow culture of
Southwestern Ontario back then, you should have seen her younger sister
Valerie riffing on an autoharp.  I can only imagine what memories the
Fricker girls have of us rubes from Chatham.

I recently went back to Chatham for a visit and was shocked by how
devastated the downtown is by the conversion from civic to suburban strip
mall culture and by the closure of the local factories.  But the derelict
buildings made for terrific photo ops that could easily compete with the
best that I've seen in Ottawa and Toronto.  Ottawa and its environs are
rich in photo ops -- wonderful Victorian architecture downtown, interesting
commercial structures in Chinatown and little Italy, incredible scenery
(particularly in the fall) in the little mill towns and hills surrounding
the city.  I think that one tends to take the familiar for granted.  While
I tend to go all squiggly about the chance to take photos in Austrian
graveyards or among the temples of Ankor, often the exoticism of the
subject masks the deficiencies of the photographer.  With some care, I've
found equally interesting subjects in Beechwood Cemetary or in the ruins at
Kingsmere. The real challenge in photography, be it in Chatham, Ottawa or
Toronto, is to find a worthy subject in the quotidian surroundings in which
we find ourselves and make it interesting.



Mark


Paul Chefurka writes:
> 
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Johnny Deadman [mailto:john@pinkheadedbug.com]
> >Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 11:28 AM
> >To: LUG
> >Subject: Re: [Leica] Visit to Victoria
> >
> 
> >Besides, if you didn't bring up your kids in a backwater, 
> >they'd have no fun moving to the big city.
> 
> I remember a quote from Sylvia Tyson, a success Canadian folk singer who was raised in Chatham - a small farming town halfway between Toronto and Windsor.  when asked about the town of her youth, she replied "Oh, Chatham is a great place to be from!"
> 
> I don't share your enthusiasm for Toronto, Johnny, though I'd much rather live there than, say, Boston or Atlanta.  For me, Ottawa is the perfect city - big enough to have attractions, small enough to have human scale, and Canadian tax dollars all come 

he> re to die.
> 
> The only problem is that except for a smallish section of downtown it's really too bougeois to make a good setting for sterotypical Leica-style street photos.
> 
> Paul
> 


- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Langer

Email address: mlanger@ccs.carleton.ca
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