Mondays are just young Fridays

One year since. . .

The death toll rises each day in this certain uncertainty. A geopolitical conflict, its consequences spilling out across this planet and onto the streets of my city. Distanced from the direct atrocities of another war, it is more than tension we feel in the neighborhoods where we live.

Every day the headlines speak to me. Every day there are more questions than answers.

How many bombs?

How many dead?

How many prayers?

How many times, in my lifetime, have I heard about the possibility of Middle East peace?

I, still, can only try to understand.

I too live with the fear, the grief, and the polarization of it all.

10/07/2024 j.g.l.

It’s not nothing

I would like to think it is nothing, at least I’d like to try. I know I can’t, but I will fool myself into believing it was less than what it is (I’m gullible that way).
Still I know, deep down, it was more than what I was expecting. Certainly it was more than what I was prepared for.
It’s always something; really, anything is.
There is something in anything, worthwhile or not, that captures your imagination or sends your soul circling.
Nothing matters then.
It is always more than what you were counting on, even when there is nothing to compare it to.
Always unlike anything else, you try to twist and turn it into something familiar, or something you can relate to, all the while knowing that nothing has been like that, or felt like this: ever.
Yeah, it’s like that.
It’s not nothing, but it can’t be everything. . . or maybe it is.

a deeper conversation

Ever the questions,

no response, until now. In the wake

of all that happened all that time ago;

even recently, as details were

unearthed convincingly.

Negligently we accept responsibility

for secrets and sins unacknowledged.

The government, the Church,

the children. The shock of it all.

Tears now stain history books. Truth.

A deeper conversation.

We talked about it, yesterday.

Too long society,

more specifically “we”, have turned

a blind eye to ways of a world

we thought we never knew.

Lord knows what they were thinking

and did nothing.

10/01/2024 j.g.l.

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the essence of the neighbourhood

Posted on July 30, 2024 by j.g.lewis Leave a comment

I took my camera out for a walk yesterday, I felt it was time.

For the past couple of months, I have been focused (excuse the pun) on other aspects of art, refamiliarizing myself with my paintbox and attempting to capture my world in a different sort of way. I’ve been enjoying, even benefitting, from the change.

Creating any form of art is not only how you fill your time, but also how you fill your mind.

The camera has been a constant companion of mine for a good five decades, both personally and professionally. Photography, always, has been my preferred art form. Photojournalism has long been a passion more than a profession.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been attempting to make photographs that do not look like they were taken for me. I might be the only one who recognizes it, but after a lengthy tenure in the newspaper world you find yourself relying — perhaps subconsciously or by habit — on certain angles, lenses and depths of field that become overly familiar when you see what’s going on through the viewfinder. A camera lens can actually limit your perspective.

Yesterday I set out to make a serious attempt to capture what summer can be like in the concrete confines of Toronto for no other reason than it is summer, I am in the city, and I had my camera with me. How serious is that?

My journal entry earlier in the day explained my intentions: I’ve not spent a lot of time looking through the lens lately, and today just seems like it would be, or could be, a beneficial way for doing exactly that.

Ending up on Spadina Ave., caught up in the congestion that has become downtown Toronto, I continued along the path to Chinatown and its vibrant street-front retail scene where you can buy pretty much anything off or along the sidewalk: produce, gemstones, trinkets, shoes, socks, and sundries.

For no other reason than being there, other than wanting or needing to spend time with my camera, I set out to study the essence of the neighbourhood a little closer.

What I see through my lens is only a small portion of the world around me, but yesterday that was enough.