marginal…
By: gazeshift
Tags: black and white, Canada, Canon A520, digital photography, downtown, Eaton Square, homeless, human condition, human subject, monochrome, photo, photo composition, photographer's guilt, Toronto, Yong Street
Category: creative
was a warm august afternoon…came upon Steve with his only friend in this world, Rex, a german shepherd…bang in the middle of downtown Toronto…Yong Street and Eaton Square, bustling with tourists and itinerant Canadians…and their urban rhythms of life…
that was the first time that i had taken to a human subject such as this one…loaded with a general compunction about using another human and his or her human condition as a matter that would satisfy my aesthetic quest with the camera…unlike inanimate subjects, humans have complex consciousness…and how would i take for granted my shots of them, without fully knowing how they would feel about it…
he was listening to a CD of Sir Paul McCartney and the Wings on his small portable sound-box, having sunned a few dry cells for a while…Band on the Run helped me initiate a conversation and quite a few minutes later, i asked for his permission for a few shots…he agreed and wanted to know more and more about me: where i had come from; what i did for a living; what i thought of Canada; so on and so forth…
all the while his Rex twirled his watchful and protective eyes from his crouch on the sidewalk…not too sure of my intentions…and neither was i…they had separate bowls and mugs to collect not only coins but also the spillover food items toward the human and the non-human consumers…shared a longish smoke and then i drifted away…towards the waterfront and more shots…though the unease never quite left me and on the way back, some hours later, i remember that i had taken the other side of the road…perhaps i had felt guilty of trying to be clever, merely for appeasing my appetite for shots…
in my shot, i tried to show him as a human, not without pride…or self-belief…
gaze shift mind drift 
Interesting how so many homeless seem to have an animal with them.
Beyond companionship the animal provides, it makes one understand the deep compassion the homeless have for those who cannot help themselves even as they fight for their own lives.
Nice work.
Best,
Louis
thanks…and you are so right…the value of compassion itself perhaps gets amplified in their minds thru their own hapless destitute lives…more than the rest of us, they do come to realise the full worth of human compassion…best and cheers
True enough.
It is only when you have lost everything that you realize humanity places too high a value on material possessions and too low a value of human relations. Nice shot. I hope you gave him something for his time.
Cheers
A