The stench was overpowering to the point where I was gagging. This was about a decade ago when I was photographing a football game in Brooks, Alberta. I had gone there with the school team as the bus driver and was also doing some volunteer photography when I became overwhelmed by the raunchy odor wafting in from the local abbatoirs.
“How can you handle the smell?” I asked a local who was next to me shooting video of the game.
“What smell?”
Scent blindness. It’s a thing.
A conversation with Rick McGinnis this past week helped me reframe my thinking somewhat. Photographers develop a photographic version of “scent blindness” because we lose the ability to “smell a good shot” where we live. Humans seem to be engineered to ignore the familiar whether it’s what we smell regularly or what we see routinely.
Rick lives in the city of Toronto, which is absolutely amazing to me and utterly boring to him because it is what he sees all day, every day. When I bitch to him about where I live and having nothing to shoot he be all but the open spaces. Yeah, I know about the open spaces, they’re all I goddamn have to shoot. They’re actually exotic to you? Oh. Alrighty then.
I took a couple of disused cameras out on the back roads near Strathmore this evening with one thing in mind. If a landscape was boring I would still try and take a picture of it because it might be interesting to someone, somewhere (like Toronto, maybe?). At least I hope so, because these images aren’t doing it for me.
This is your fault, Rick.
This evening I drove my Bonzart Ziegel Toy Camera for most of the images and my venerable Canon Powershot G1X for the last sunset image. The Ziegel images all have a faux 120 film border identifying themselves as such.
