FOTOTOURMONTREAL an >FI3200/ bLOG: Love your slums

Slums and back alleys (series 2) - When the city speaks

Not all back alleys are nice ; not all slums are disgusting. Certainly we are attracted to back alleys. As artists we find in them more than meets the eye.

Eric : I can't remember not being attracted by slums, alleys and rundown city blocks. I never knew why I was, I just was. Even at a very young age, I would always take different routes to pass through the rundown areas of town for the heck of it.

As a photographer, this passion for graffiti and trashy urban environments has become a subject. The passion is the same ; the documentation and the recording is digital photography.

I often times amplify the slum side of the subject by framing accordingly, like in the image above. This area of town is not half as bad as it looks like on this shot. It looks this bad because of how I have composed the image. The car on the right is a damaged car parked next to a body shop waiting to be repaired. And the tagged wall in the background is the side of the body shop garage that is basically situated in an alley street next to a railway yard. Just outside of the frame, normal cars and town houses are present. Isolating the rundown infrastructures in the frame will create drama and it will make the place look like hell. I could have made things that much more worse by photo-shopping out the city recuperation bin.

Putting people in the rundown scene frame will add drama and a significant dose of meaning to the image. Humans and their society's footprint on cities is always a powerful message.

Alleys and slums will speak of the past. They will speak of the present too. They carry meaning and messages to onlookers, to citizens, to the documentary artist, to us, the street photographers.

The alleys and dumps will let you in on whatever makes the city live or fear. They reveal success or failure, art and messages of despair. They expose realities and passed events, warnings, political and social outcries. They can even reveal love.

These places yield a wealth of information on the citizens and on the society they have created and that can't be seen from the clean and arranged front street facades. You can get a peak on how we really live; vulnerable and subject to catastrophes ; or simply poor... Just like us, the city is preoccupied with showing its good face and keeping secret its intimate vulnerability.

Like us, it will sometimes leak its secret garden out for everyone to see on the street, visible through abandoned or burned down buildings and neglected proprieties. These signs of weakness, quickly masked by city officials, are a window into a city's most delicate equilibrium and its worse failures. Like in the image above : Sainte-Catherine Street eyesore.

Alleys will link hope and future to sufferance as if to remind us that failure is a street corner away. We want to make our lives on the street, where the hope lies, where the future is possible.