I QUIT

Everyone’s favourite even-keeled, superhirsute Iranian-Canadian photobloggeur, Sam Javanrouh (q.v.), addressed a capacity crowd at Hart House last night. He walked us through various of his photos and slideshows and demonstrated, in a just-barely-comprehensible fashion, what he does in Photoshop to turn sow’s ears into purses. Sam also recapitulated a Spacer-style autobiography by telling us he hated Toronto when he moved here. I guess that problem’s been solved.

And this is what he looked like.

Balding man in red plaid shirt faces away and stands in a bay window between empty wooden easels

Actually, I walked smartly up to the podium the minute Q&A ended, surprising the much-beloved émigré in the process. I all but forced the man with the notoriously thick lens to stand between the nearby denuded easels for another back-on shot, which I described as “schtick by now.” Sam gamely complied, if with some almost-fully-concealed bewilderment and annoyance.

He claims to be shy, but this is clearly situational, as he has no trouble addressing a crowd. Mostly he claims to be shy to ask his infrequent human subjects for permission to be photographed. Often he compensates by publishing photos in which people are unidentifiable.

But look at the shot James Tilberg got. There seems to be a trend of shooting the shooter from behind even as that same shooter also tries to shoot human subjects in an unidentifiable way. If splorpist photographs are ambiguous, seemingly timeless street photos à la Splorp.com, are javanrouhist photographs carefully composed so that no faces are visible?

Well, I think they are, but then again my nonce words scarcely ever catch on (save for standardista).

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.02.02 13:05. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2006/02/02/genre/

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