The Urban Refugee

I’ve been called out on some blog I had not heard of before for a comment that I never made. The comment was apparently left by someone else named Sean, but the link provided goes to a blogger profile that is not mine. While I didn’t leave the comment, I’m certainly in agreement with it and feel badly that I didn’t think of it first.

I’m not interested in debating the global warming aspects of this post. Either you’re intelligent enough to follow and understand the math presented at climateaudit.org, or you’re not.

What irks me is the following:

Wow a nature photographer who is also anti-environmentalist. What an interesting contrast, I wonder how he reconciles that?

I’m not a nature photographer. I am a fine-art photographer who occasionally includes what could be called nature photographs in my oeuvre. No reconciliation is necessary.

One of the recurring themes in my work is the ephemeral nature of man’s presence on this planet. It doesn’t take too many walks through the prairies where I live to realize just how easily man’s accomplishments are reabsorbed into the earth. Pioneer homesteads collapse and rot. Stone buildings crumble. Metal vehicles and equipment rust into nothingness. Nature will triumph and erase all our works, good and bad, save for the odd trace left to be found by whatever species replaces us long after we’re gone.

So I’m not worried about climate change or any other kind of change. If nature can be described in a single word, that word is “change”. My job is to preserve slices of time in photographic amber, to capture them before the change comes upon them and they’re gone forever. I’m not documenting nature, I’m documenting the present and attempting to hide it away from nature. This is obviously a far cry from nature photography. [spit]

The person who made this judgment evidently didn’t look very hard at my work or make any effort at understanding it.

One ringy dingy…

“Meadowlark PC Repair, Sean speaking.”

“Hello. My name is Gurvinder and I’m calling from Capital One.”

“Hey, um, I thought you guys weren’t supposed to be calling me when your company is suing me over a credit dispute.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“Can I have your full name please and title please? I’m going to have to notify my lawyer that a representative of Capital One made contact with me in contempt of the consent decree that we signed.”

“A consent decree?”

“Yes, and the financial penalties for that can be significant. This could be considered harrassment under Canadian law. Your full name and position please?”

“I’m sorry, I uh, I cannot, um…”

*clik* 

One ringy dingy…

Two ringy dingies…

Three r***clik!

“Meadowlark PC Repair, Sean speaking.”

“Hi, this is Dingleberry calling from Some Generic Company. We’d like to make you aware of a special offer we have on our Pitney Bowes postage meters.”

“Holy f#$%!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Postage meters? For sending items by postal mail? I thought they would have put all of those antiques in museums decades ago!”

“Um, well, uh…”

“Hell, I do all of my invoicing by e-mail now. If I’m feeling retro, that’s when I send a fax. But snail mail! Man, that’s something my grandparents did.”

“Well, uh, no, actually, sir, we do have many customers who still use regular mail for a great deal of their business.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. I suppose they have their secretaries type all their mail on typewriters with three carbons and then drive the letters to the post office in their Edsels! Hey, tell me, do you guys sell Betamax systems, too?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“THEN YOU SHOULD BE! BWAAAHAAHAAAHAA!”

*slam*

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re Warren Kinsella, everyone looks like a defendent.

The newer the vehicle, the greater the number of deer that are attracted to it as it drives down the highway.

As a photographer’s proficiency with a camera increases, so does the number of weddings he finds himself invited to.

It’s going to take some time, but I’ll get the locals trained not to talk politics with me. Swear to God that I will.

Read the rest of this entry »

Um. Holy shit. Nobody dusted here while I was gone? ‘Cuz the damn dust bunnies have gone feral.

Help!

I’m please to announce my new photoblog: Neutral Hills Stills. Please stop by and visit.

The Urban Refugee is going on hiatus. I won’t say that I’m shutting down the blog because I may come back to it, but it won’t be anytime soon. My interests lie elsewhere, mainly with all matters photographic. It’s what I think about and what I want to talk about.

Some time back, before the layoff and resulting flight from civilization, my wife and some friends and I launched a photography eZine. We only ever published a single (albeit very well received) issue. It’s unfinished business that I need to get back to, and that’s where I’ll be expending my energy in the future.

See you later, alligator.