10 stories for 10 photos
Taking photos out of moving vehicles:
(This is my attempt to move into another kind of artist statement, for a package of semi-unrelated photos, meant for the albertan bienal, its really bloggy, I don’t know if it works.)

1. Before I went away to school, when my grandparents were still alive, they used to take me to my great aunts cabin in the shushawp. I would have a drugstore 35 mm, and it would take blurry, awful photos. Because we couldn’t stop as often as I would have liked, I would point and shot from the Buick my granddad drove. They were often of similar things to what I take photos of now, trains, rocks, interesting buildings, factories, and various water features.
2. The two years I was away at school, I often did not have a camera, and so photos were taken for us. On parents’ day, a recent graduate would put up a table with lists of photos he took, and samples. Because they believed that nature was good for a boy, in the 19th century Canadian way of noble canoes and even nobler hiking, the photos would be a combination of the spectacular (pine trees, lakes, mountains, rock strewn moonscape like summits) and the snapshot (eating, walking, the big group show at the end.) The photos I wanted to take, were pictures of school bus wells, the hitch that held a dozen voyager style canoes, the pick ups that came to meet us on the shores, details that were missed, details that were less heroic. They wanted us to be like the boys in the novels we read for English (White Fang, She, Dog Runner, Mrs. Mike) I had enough danger, I wanted to avoid it, or be an arms length observer.
3. When I came back from going home to school, my dad took me to Vancouver for the first time. It was a place where he positioned himself as a bohemian, a place where he lived for a few years, and then left to go back to Alberta, to get married and eventually had me. It was the first time I ever fell in love with a city and I took photos everywhere, from another cheap camera. I lost or dropped things, and my family didn’t have a whole lot of cash, so need turned into a vernacular aesthetic. I remember most, the photos I took from the windows of the monorail, the sky train. Even the name seemed like something from Buck Rogers, and I liked being above everything else. Technically this was impossible, and I got rolls of interesting blurs. Bad photographs were as pretty as Good ones sometimes.
4. I took some photos during high school, with one use cameras. I wanted to be Warhol. They were cheap and disposable. I felt cheap and disposable. They ere high trash, like how high camp makes the aesthetic of unfulfilled desire into political theater, this made being broke into something similar. That, and they were easy to shoplift. Packs of 6, with a French name, just outside the photo department, in the Superstore in Claireview, it made me feel punker then Warhol. The interesting thing about this was that this was the first time I tried derive, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I wandered the city, on buses as far north as Castledowns, and as far south as Ellesry,to Millwoods, down stony plain road, I would spend weekends doing nothing but taking photos from the windows of buses, with these cameras I stole from the supermarket. Sometimes I developed them, I must have developed all of them, but I don’t remember that part of the process. It was shooting a roll of film, like shooting a load of cum, that relaxed me. The solipsism of adolescence, or something like that.
5. After High School, I went with a tour group to spend 3 weeks in London. I spent most of the time away from the group, in pubs, restaurants, galleries, and museums. I took loads of photos, snapshots and artshots, the two were less separated in my mind. My favorite was a picture of Scotland, from the air, just 45 minutes before landing in Heathrow. The ocean, and green land, white trees, an abstracted pastoral. I have failed to take anything as good from an airplane ever since—looking at Wolfgang Tillimans, much later, I realized that his were better then mine because they looked uglier.
6. I didn’t take pictures for a long time, after London, because of some failures, and general boredom, and other business. I met Raymond in a class, and after a while, he invited me to take his camera, and shoot at the railway yards. It was a nice machine, with lenses and a case, and he was much more of a tech junkie then I was. But I got the thrill, I remembered how much I loved trains, and how much it didn’t matter what other people shot. I learned about technical ability, and figured out that shooting a moving vehicle, from the outside, when you weren’t in it, had a thrill that was different then being encased in the vehicle. Ballard talks a lot about symbiosis with machines and bodies, in Crash and I re read it a few weeks after my encounter with Raymond and his camera.
7. About this time, I went to a conference for Canadian University Press, with an asshole of a photog, who shot for the Gateway. He wouldn’t take pictures of me, and played keep away with my camera, because I didn’t have an SLR. I managed photos of him, squished in the back of a Civic, and of things on the highway, sometimes when we went out for piss breaks, sometimes from the windows of the car. I figured out that it was the image that mattered and not the equipment, and that the linguistic similarities between equipment meaning dick and equipment being camera were not cocncidental.
8. A little while later, during my second or third year of university, Raymond and I lived together. We would often go shooting, trading shot for shot, then roll for roll, as our styles became closer and closer. I developed two kinds of language for talking about film, the visual language of composition and the verbal slang that devolped between he and I. We would travel, driving around the city, out to the coast, up to wainright, once. He drove a mid80s Firebird, and the thing would make noise—sometimes we would take pictures out of the window of this firebird, but the best thing was saying STOP and jumping out, suddenly, to take a photo of a sign, or a post, or a building, or something interesting/ ugly/ beautiful/sublime/pretty/etc. The movemovemovesSTOPmovemovemoveSTOP pull and tug of our shooting became a new way to think of bodies, vehicles and machines. I collected these in little blue books, showed people at parties, proud of the odd shot, but didn’t think of myself as a photographer. A writer writes and a photog takes pictures, though.
9. In the year after I flunked out of University, I spent two weeks in a monstary in Kentucky. I took some pictures there, with a digital camera my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. It was too dark to take photos on the trip there, and leaving early, I didn’t know how to be polite enough to ask the monk to stop, so I could take photos of certain things, it even seemed rude to take the camera out in the minivan and take photos of the highways. I still remember the list of things I wanted to take pictures of: Robbie the Worlds Largest Rooster; Various Baptist Churches, The Cathedral of Bardstown, proof that there was a Stephen Foster Avenue, The Jim Beam hand painted brewery sign, 30 foot signs on the interstate advertising truck stops, bait shops, waffle houses, and Girls Girls Girls; the signs for interstates themselves, and the minivan itself. The grammar of unspoken signals, of things not shot from vehicles, I think was stronger then if things were left in the open.
10. A few weeks ago, a friend and I went from my house in the suburbs to Millwoods, where he lived. We were going to toboggan. To get there we had to pass all sorts of industry, refineries, warehouses, and the supporting infastructure that happens on the edges of industrial towns. I took maybe 40 photos out of the window of his Honda, and he asked me if I wanted to stop. I didn’t, because the kid would be restless, because it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, because taking photos with someone is intimate for me, and I didn’t feel that way about Gerard, because I finally felt confident about my ability to take a good shot, with shitty equipment in less then ideal circumstances, because there is something transient that’s important about traveling down hiway 21 and having to be quick in order to take a photo.