OK, enough whining for now, (I just needed to get it off my chest) back to the photographs! Above are some more Habs fans from the spring 2010 playoff season, these ones sporting sun glasses. All of this series was taken outside the Montreal Canadiens arena (the Bell Center) before playoff home games. Hockey is big in this city and when the Habs (what we call The Canadiens, for Habitants, the original French colonizers of Quebec) are in the playoffs everyone gets excited and happy and the city is electric with anticipation. Growing up I was never really connected to this hockey fever. Since my parents are both from Dublin they weren't that interested in hockey and me and my sisters took figure skating lessons. I did play club hockey in University but that wasn't in Montreal. Then Chris and I moved back to Montreal together and in the past few years Chris has had half season's tickets to see the Habs. He gets hockey fever big time, and now I am finally joining in and enjoy watching hockey too (yesterday we went to a local bar to watch the game and ended up chatting with a guy who was scalping tickets before the game, he was giving us the low down on how it works). So that's why I started taking these photos, I finally felt like I was connecting to hockey fever in Montreal, and becoming a real Habs fan and I wanted to show all these different people that are so dedicated to their team.

My hand. Kind of a symbolic image for a subject that I propose for discussion. That is the cost of entering photo competitions. Here are some costly contests that interest me, a few of which I have entered in the past:

Magenta $50
Identities Now $50 for 1-3 images, $100 4-10 images
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 22 Pounds per photograph
Hey Hot Shot! $80
Critical Mass $75 first round, $200 second round

When you hear that the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize had more than 6000 entries, and that they chose an image of a young red headed girl as the winner (a re-occurring theme and somewhat of a fetish of the Portrait Prize), you wonder if there is any use entering, and if the prizes are in fact made for the benefit of the photographers or for the financial gains of the institutions involved. So are we giving them a hand out or are we the photographers too easily tempted by a potential win?

I will make my comments section active again so that you can chime in. Would love to hear what people think!

Cool cars from Cape Cod.

Last night I went to the Sobey Art Awards Gala. Lots of artists, curators, friends, and wine = good times! Congrats to Daniel Barrow.

The dock.

Cloud and Dandelions, intervention images that I made a year or two ago.

Recently I bought Lay Flat 02: Meta. It's a beautiful little book and the images and essays included are both very strong. I would suggest two things though. One: that the essays failed to mention what is often the unmentionable these days, and that is that much of this reflection on the medium of photography recently done by photographers may be brought on by the fact that we are at a crossroads, in that place where film meets digital, and that this change on the ground, and the need to learn new tools, and the transition that photographers are going through in their working process has lead them to reflect back on the materiality of the medium itself. And two: that although the artists included were interesting and quite a good representation of the work out there I would suggest that including these additional artists would have made it stronger: Michael Love's "Self Portrait with Rifle", Michael Flomen, Chris McCaw, John Cyr, and Curtis Mann. Also if you are interested in this kind of thing you may want to check out the Victoria and Albert's exhibit (in London, England) on till February: "Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography".

Montreal's team is doing really well this year so to celebrate here are some more Habs Fans from the 2010 playoff season (+ a ghostly one for Halloween).