Our fish Dostoyevsky was very sick. We heard that the most humane way to let him go was through freezing, so that is what we did.

So I had a busy few days in Toronto, visiting as many Contact shows as I could. One of the first things I did was go to the Alec Soth talk. Although Soth does not seem to have the most optimistic view of the future of photography, the talk itself was very interesting (Soth will be addressing where he thinks photography might be going in his October 8th talk as part of the Flash Forward Festival in Toronto). Getting insight into the personal motives behind his work was really interesting and made the talk worth it for me. He definitely seems to be a photographer in transition: moving away from his large format perspective and working with digital snapshots, video, and sound, all with the goal of storytelling (there was an interesting question about the difference between storytelling and documentary at the end of the talk). I must say that I am still attached to his older work and the rawness of his slideshows does not yet appeal to me. With his older series of still images we were allowed more room to make up our own stories, now Soth tells us what the story is and leads us on strange and unpredictable adventures.