Allan: Just to be clear -- you don't only photograph in this neighbourhood [Commercial Drive].
Rodney: No, no. I go downtown. But the heart of the book is this neighbourhood. But the book goes all over the east side, so there are photos from, like, the PNE, there's photos from Chinatown. I mean, just a handful. There's photos from Mt. Pleasant, there's photos from Hastings Sunrise. Roughly the east side.
Allan: Do you go back to Pittsburgh to take photos of places from your past?
Rodney: No, but I'm wanting to. I'm going to apply for a grant to do some photography and writing. I might even live there for a few months.
Allan: Okay. I was going to ask -- your poetry is often very interior and inward-looking and connected to your past...
Rodney: Mm-hm.
Allan: Whereas your photography is a way of looking out into the world.
Rodney: Yeah. It was a relief, too, a real relief to start looking outside of myself. But, like, my lyrics and my poems are always very imagistic. They have a strong visual component to them. People always say to me, "Wow, that poem" or "that lyric... I can see it." What they don't realize is, I don't actually describe much. I just do a little bit, so people can see it themselves, right? I'm not as descriptive as people think I am. I just give people enough, hopefully. I learned that reading Hemingway, when I was a young guy, or Raymond Carver -- he's very similar: he gives you just enough so you can create the image in your head. Because if you give people too many details, you rob them of the opportunity to create what they're seeing, what they're reading. We're most engaged when reading a poem or a story if we can create, so we're seeing it ourselves as we're reading it.
Allan: Yeah. A song like "Jacob's Well," to me, I have a very clear image of where that's set, but someone else might have a completely different image in their mind.
Rodney: Hopefully! If the poem or the song is doing its job, they should, right? I mean, that's what I love. When anybody listens to one of my songs, seriously listens -- not just as background -- or sits down and reads one of my poems, in that moment, they're kind of co-authoring the piece. They're bringing their whole history, their personal feelings and memories to the piece. It means specific things to them that might have nothing to do with what I intended, and it means specific things to them that it wouldn't mean to anyone else. That's one of the things I love about writing songs and poems and plays, is giving people the opportunity to kind of come into that space. If the work's being engaged with, then there's all these versions of it out there in people...
Allan: But with photography, it's almost the opposite! You're giving them the image.
Rodney: I'm giving them the image. There it is, and do what it as you will.
Allan: Right. So... you talked [in a section that ran in the Montecristo piece] about the guy getting cat food and lunch meat, about capturing the people of this neighbourhood...
Rodney: I'm very interested in people. And I'm very interested in people that... I have a poem called "Ordinary Things," which will be in the book. And it basically talks about me as a kid, starting a fire in a field, y'know? And I just had paper, matches, dried grass. But then the whole field catches fire, and the fire department comes and they're fighting the fire, and there's all the people watching; nobody knows I did it. And they're there, fighting it, and I say, "I conjured dragons with mere paper, matches, and dried grass, and after that, there were no ordinary things."
And that's how I feel about the people I photograph. There's more to everyone; I don't know how to explain it. I'm just captivated by people: "Look at that guy's face over there!" I will wait for a person like that and try to take his photo... [Note: the image below is not the image Rodney is showing me as he says this -- he may even be talking about someone walking by outside the window -- but it's the face I think of when he talks about the guy going to Super Valu for cat food]. I don't know if I'm making sense...
Allan: You are.
Rodney: So I see my work as having a very clear mission statement. I'm interested in people, people who, when you walk down the street, you probably don't see them. But I don't want that to sound bad, because these are real faces in my book, real people, and I don't want it to sound like I'm talking down about them, that I'm photographing "losers."
Allan: I said this last time we talked, but I also like that all the people you photograph are people who have some fight in them, who have some life in them. I've never seen you take photographs of people who look beaten down. I mean, maybe you have, but I haven't seen them; in what I've seen, there's zero element of "poverty porn" [a term that also arose in my conversation with Efrim].
Rodney: Oh... well, I have taken some of those photos. But I've learned not to use them, because that's not my goal. I mean, I'm drawn to people on the street, but I try to be careful. Even if somebody looks like they're living rough, if they have some life to them... I mean, I have a shot of two guys downtown, and they've pulled their wheelchairs kitty-corner to each other, and the one guy is putting a needle in the other guy's hand. I think it's a powerful photo, but I don't use it, because I'm worried that people would see it as exploitative. I try to be careful. I have photos of guys smoking crack and stuff like that, but... It's not my goal to say, "look at this asshole," or "look at the suffering."
Allan: What else is in your "not to be shared" file?
Rodney: It's called "not to be shared" for a reason, Al! It's mostly... I mean, I have some really good photos that I won't share, because I feel like they're depicting people in extremes, people suffering, people in pain. Some of those photos are pretty powerful, but... I feel... like...
Allan: Right.
Rodney: And don't get me wrong, I do have some photos that will be in the book of people who are down and out, who are struggling. There's this weird balancing act that's going on, right now, especially in street photography, where everybody is, like, everything you shoot is exploitative, because you're not asking permission. The worst of it is from 20-somethings. They're always, like, "I didn't say you could take my photo! Did you get my consent?" But consent isn't an issue. Consent is, like, if I wanted to kiss you. Taking your photo on the street, I don't need your consent! This is a right of expression, artistic expression. We do have rights to privacy, but they have to balance those rights. Rights to privacy are respected by my not being allowed to take a shot of you in your home -- in your apartment or in your house. But if you're on the street, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and I can take your photo, and I don't need your permission.
Allan: And publishing it in a book, you don't need it, either.
Rodney: No, because it's artistic expression. If I took your image and I sold it to Coca-Cola, and they were using it for billboard ads to advertise their product, then I would need your consent -- I'd need you to sign a release waiver and they'd need to pay you something. But this isn't that. This is artistic expression. But that said, people are very sensitive these days to how people are portrayed, to race, to gender. And a lot of people are like, "If you're not getting permission from people, you're doing something really wrong." Or, like, taking people with needles in their arm, passed out on Hastings Street is really exploitative, is "poverty porn"...
Allan: Right.
Rodney: And one thing I would like to say, that's not what the term "poverty porn" was originally meant to be. We have all these phrases we throw around and we don't actually know what they fuckin' mean. "Poverty porn" was a phrase that was used to address organizations like UNICEF, when they would show commercials of, like, emaciated babies -- "please donate." So the goal was to take graphic images of suffering to produce a guilt reaction in you so you would give some money. I mean, I'm not saying that you can't draw a parallel between taking and photos and stuff, but... here's the other thing I want to ask, and I haven't answered this for myself. I think, to some degree, street photography is always going to be a bit exploitative. It's the very nature of the act, right, and I guess you better do a good job then. Because because you're making art of people, and you haven't asked them. It should be done with respect and it should be done with grace and compassion...
Rodney: I would probably take a photo of that. There's a lot going on there, right? I think I would take that photo. Now, if he looked really beat up, if he was clearly in a lot of pain, I might take shots where I concealed his face. Or I might not. It's always in the moment. I go with my feelings: "Oh, I'm not going to take that. He's got enough eyes on him, he doesn't need mine, or the eyes that are going to be looking at the photograph." And other times, it's like, "No, I'm taking that photograph." But I never want to be cruel.
Like, I have a photograph of a kid I took at Playland when I was with Lucy, a kid in a shirt that said "Party Animal," and he was eating a hotdog, cramming it into his mouth. And he was really overweight. There was a lot of character, but I thought, "Nah." I'd feel like I was poking fun at him, like the point of the photo was to say, "Look at
this guy," like I was a 16-year-old making fun of him. I'm not saying he feels badly about himself; he might be just fine crammin' hotdogs down with his fuckin' Party Animal shirt with, like, the Tasmanian Devil on it. It's kinda classic. But I felt like I would have been laughing at him... Like, Diane Arbus' photos sometimes feels mean. And that's not my goal.
Allan: Bev Davies has said that she won't take a photo -- or won't publish a photo -- where people are going to get in trouble. where the image could be used against them. Like, I think she was around for a riot on Hastings on the punk scene. Or, like, the hockey riots...
Rodney: That would be my impulse too. Though I'll never say, "No." There might be a moment where someone is doing something really heinous and really hurting somebody. I'll take that photo. And if somebody wants to make something out of that... Like, if it's just a bunch of kids kinda smashing a window, for all the reasons I smashed things when I was growing up, I'm not going to take a photo of that, because I don't want those kids to get arrested, but if I had a photo of two guys who had somebody up against a wall and were beating the shit out of them, I'd take that photo, right? And I'd publish it -- if it was a good photo.
That's the other thing: Is it a good photo? Like, I have shots of some pretty interesting moments, but they're not well-composed, they're not pleasing to look at. So I don't use them.
Allan: Following on the idea of composition -- is it entirely instinctive?
Rodney: Yeah. I have purposefully never read about composition. I'm not interested, just like I avoided creative writing school. Most of the poets I know have degrees in creative writing. That's the industry, that's the way it works. I've purposefully avoided that. I remember Al Purdy told me when I was living just off of 1st... there used to be a McDonald's there; it's a fitness centre now. The irony there that's never lost upon me: they went from giving heart attacks to preventing heart attacks. And there's a little row of apartment buildings -- I lived down there. And that was 1996, I think? I had just finished a book of Al's poetry -- it was Naked With Summer in Your Mouth. I love Purdy, I love Al, but I'm 57; I respond to his poems differently now than when I was a young guy... Anyhow, I knew he lived part of the year in Ameliasberg, Ontario, so I called him up. [For what follows, Rodney does a great imitation of Purdy's gruff, distinctive voice].
"Hello?"
"Is this Al Purdy?"
"Who else would it be?"
"Hi, Al, my name's Rodney, I'm a poet in Vancouver..."
"Of course you are. Who else would fuckin' be calling me -- fuckin' poets!"
And I said, "I just finished reading your book, and I loved it."
"Thank you."
And I said, "I wrote a poem called 'An Open Letter to Al Purdy.' Can I read it to you?"
"Well, I guess. Go ahead. I can't stop you."
So he listened. It was a long poem, too, and it wasn't a very good one. And it was about, 'What am I doing' -- how I was about 30 at that point, and writing poems was all I seemed to want to do. My wife left me, I don't have any money -- I've got 88 cents in the bank, I don't have a career, my friends are all moving to the suburbs, getting married and having kids, and... what the fuck is wrong with me? And Al listened, and he laughed in all the right places, and I finished, and he said, "That was one hell of a poem, Rodney." And I knew it wasn't, but I was very chuffed he said that to me. And he said that you have to do what you have to do, and to make your peace with it. If it makes you any money, or if you win a few awards... He'd won a few awards, and he said it was nice in the moment, but afterwards, you don't even feel it. He said the only thing that mattered to him was writing the next poem. He said, "I would really recommend you try to really take that in. You're a poet, for better or worse, that's what you are."
And we talked a bit more, and I said to him, "Should I go to creative writing school?"
He said, "Rod, I can tell by talking to you, you were not meant for creative writing school. That would be a tragedy if you went to creative writing school, because they're going to try to make you like all the rest of them, and you're not like all the rest of them. You need to go and find your own path, just like I did." And I said, "But wait a second..." Because I had read this other book that was a compilation of young poets from the University of Victoria creative writing program, which was a highly celebrated creative writing program at the time in Canada, because, like, Patrick Lane taught there and Lorna Crozier, and everybody was like, "Oh, Patrick!" "Oh, Lorna!" -- it was like a fucking cult, all worshipping, and all these people flocking to this program; and they had a book,
Breathing Fire or something like that. But Purdy had written one of the intros, and he talked about how good all these poets are, and I called him on it, I said, "What are you talking about? You fuckin' wrote this..." And he said, "Well, Rod, sometimes you gotta do things for your friends..."
So yeah... what was my point with all that?
Allan: We were talking about not going to school...
Rodney: Right. So here's the thing: I joined a photography group online for awhile, and people gave feedback on photos, and it seemed to be a lot of older guys who were retired who had bought fancy cameras and were taking photos, and they were really into the laws of composition, really into it; they were composing the life out of shit, right? And I'm trying to trust my instincts, my intuition, because that's where the art lies, and it seems like intuitively, I have a sense of composition already, so why am I going to try to, like, learn a bunch of Do's and Don'ts? I need my own Do's and Don'ts. Nobody else's.
And I know I can kind of shoot from the hip and sound like I'm being a little belligerent, but here's the thing: I think if you genuinely feel in your body, in your soul, in your heart, that you're supposed to pursue some sort of artistic path, I don't think you should ever do anything in relation to becoming that or doing that because somebody says you "supposed" to. You should only do things that you're really led to do, that you feel in your bones: you feel the excitement, you feel the pull. Then you go there and find out who you are as an artist.
I'm not saying don't study other artists, fucking study the shit out of the artists you love. And when I say "study," I don't mean, "I'm going to deconstruct it and break it down." Have a relationship with it. Be aware of it, and ask yourself, "Wow, why am I so drawn to this?" And just absorb it by osmosis. And then... I really believe that we've institutionalized organic processes that used to exist for artists. Like, a kid who wanted to be an actor would, like, hang around a theatre troupe, and they'd bring him on and let him be an apprentice and, y'know, clean their gear, and then one day, they'd be like, "Hey, you want to try this little scene?" And you'd learn that way. But now we have theatre school for that. And writers who would be in the wilderness, on their own, trying to figure out, "How do I write a poem," and then might meet a poet, and that poet kind of becomes a mentor... but you have to be in the wilderness. People are so afraid of the wilderness! You've got to be in the wilderness, man!
Allan: Speaking as someone who makes a living within the education system, part of it is that there's a whole bunch of people who want to make a living teaching people to do stuff. We insert ourselves between them wanting to do it and their actually doing it, and pretend that first you have to read this book, take this class, learn this principle. No. You have to learn by doing it. If you're going to be any good at something, no matter what class you take, what book you read, no matter what you learn, you have to learn by doing it. And if you haven't done it, it doesn't really matter what you've read about it.
Rodney: Well, the thing I tell people is that all the stuff the experts are there to teach you, that's stuff that was extrapolated from the work that other people were doing instinctively. They boiled it down to "this is how you do it." They deconstructed it and created a set of instructions. And for some people that's great. That will work for them. But I believe you're cheating yourself. Just be yourself. Go where you need to go. Other than the work itself, that's the joy of it, right? Anyhow...
Allan: Amen. But let me ask about one of the more obviously "perfectly composed" photos, the kid eating the ice cream. I would imagine that someone who was operating from a rulebook of Do's and Don'ts would be impressed by it!
Rodney: That's a certain type of photo, and I'm very proud of that photo, but that photo happened in the moment, y'know? I saw the kid, I saw him emerging from the shadows, I saw the angry face and the ice cream, and I just clicked it. And I edited it a bit. In the photo, the Mom was just ahead of him; there was a bit of her in it, so I cut her out so I could focus on the kid. And I love how he's just stepping out of the darkness and some of the shadow is following him.
And with street photography, you don't have time. You can say, "I see how the light is here and I see how the shadow is there, I could capture somebody emerging from the shadow, and I could hang out there." Or I'll see some cool background and wait there for an hour and take photos of people going by, hoping that the magic happens. But you don't have much control over street photography, which is why I love it. Like, when I write a poem, I always tell people -- because I've done the odd mentoring of young poets, and they always go, "How do you write a poem?" And I'm like, "I really don't know!" The only thing I'm an expert in is writing Rodney DeCroo poems. The problem is, I only know enough to get the poem done. I don't know half the time what's going on. Like, a friend of mine is a professor and he teaches creative writing, and he was teaching a Canadian poetry course, and he used one of my books. It was during COVID, so the students were watching videos, so he asked me if I wanted to see his lectures. I thought, "Oh, I don't want to see that," but he's a smart guy and he loves poetry, so I got curious, and I started watching it. At first I was like, "I wasn't fuckin' thinking that!" And then I was like, "Oh shit, he's right! Holy fuck, that is going on there, that did happen to me, I was reading that poem at that time and kinda thinking about it..." It was akin to attending your own funeral, and hearing people talking about you, and wanting to say, "No, that's not what I meant," then stopping and going, "Oh, maybe they're right?!"
That's how I feel about my poetry and my songwriting and even my solo shows. Like, people say to me, "You know in Didn't Hurt, where you come out of massage therapy and you really see the sky for the first time, and you call it 'first time blue,' and then the moment you meet Lucy, the little girl who helps you process more trauma, and you say, 'She had the bluest eyes I'd ever seen,' you obviously were connecting the sky and her eyes!" No, I wasn't! I wasn't aware of that! It takes people to point it out to me. But I trust the process, I trust my intuitions, I trust my impulses, and that's where the art happens! It's not about controlling it.
And so with composition, on the street, you only have a split second, and it's an instinct: I see something and something in me goes, "That's worth taking a photo of." And then I take the photo. Sometimes it will be more obvious -- like the boy with the ice cream. But what I really saw with him, the thing that struck me the most, was the angry face as he was eating the ice cream. And I related to that! That was like me as a little kid. So I took the photo, and then I looked at and it was like, "Oh, there's so much more here." But there's a part of me inside that can work fast enough -- the intuitive side -- and you only develop that by being on the street and taking thousands and thousands of photos. I trust that. I'm really not thinking much when I'm taking photos. I'm reacting.
Allan: So the ice cream kid -- you weren't lying in wait for that?
Rodney: No, I walked around the corner and he was there, with that face!
Allan: So how many shots did you shoot of that?
Rodney: I think I took three of him.
Allan: And then you picked the one. And you cropped it.
Rodney: Yeah... I don't always crop. I used to crop all the time. I crop less now because my sense -- my sense -- of composition, whatever that is, is more developed now. So I don't crop, because I'm more interested in other elements that I would have thought chaotic, like an elbow sticking into the scene where you don't see the rest of the person. But now I realize that those things add energy and life, and I'm very interested in that. I don't like to talk in those terms, but I call it "disrupting the composition," right? I'm interested in photos where, "I want to push this as far as I can before it falls apart, because there's too much happening." If you look at the photos of Gary Winogrand, the New York street photographer, there's a lot happening in his shots. He barely edited at all.
Rodney: But again, I don't really have strict rules. I'll say that to you and then I'll go home and take a photo on the way with a bunch of things happening in it and I'll go, "Eww, I'm going to crop the shit out of that!" It's whatever my instincts are in the moment.
Allan: On the topic of permission, you do ask permission if you're taking photos of kids, right?
Rodney: Sometimes. I don't take a lot of photos of kids, but I didn't ask permission to take the photo of the kid eating ice cream. But I mean, why would anybody object to that photo, unless you've had your own bad experiences...? There's nothing wrong with that photo, I think it's a great photo that captures, for me, a childhood. Another photo I like is called "Spider Man" [Rodney asked me not to print titles for these -- we had a few working ones, for reference purposes, but his work is actually generally un-titled, and no titles are given in the book. But he's called this one "Spider Man" a couple of times now, including at the VIFF Centre event]. It's the young black boy, standing like this, very intensely, with a group of people, and his mother is standing there, smiling. He has a look that's almost fierce -- that kid's face is really intense, when you look at it, but there's this beautiful [quality to it]. And here's his Mom, and she's so much taller than anyone else. She's standing right behind him, beaming. And there's this woman with her umbrella and her shades... That's one of the photos I'm really proud of...
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