Photo By Joe Gaal.

One of the best photographs I’ve ever seen (at left) was taken by a friend of mine when we worked at a small daily newspaper in Western Canada. It could tell a dozen different stories from a dozen different decades. When I read the piece it ultimately illustrated, all that disappeared; it was a major disappointment because my stories had been snatched away.

His name was Joe Gaal, and I used to kid him about his photos being so good because of the fancy Nikon F2 , lens and motor drive he used. So he gave me exactly the same equipment; stood shoulder to shoulder with me on the sidelines of a football game; and set the same shutter speeds and apertures. We let the motor drives rip at exactly the same instant.

We shot about 12 frames, and two of his were unarguably better – in the way he caught the players’ eyes inside their helmets. It wasn’t about the equipment; it was about instinct. I shut up about photography being pure technology after that.

And I’m more than willing to dissent from those who insist photography is not art because it is something seen by the eye, not the mind. Oh please, that’s like saying only art can change how one sees the world, which photography has done more times than any, except perhaps for the atomic bomb. While there is definitely mind-shifting in that level of destruction, I’m not sure I’d want to argue that its art.

The one point I hear more than any other is that anyone can take good photos if they have the money to buy digital equipment. All I can come back with is: 1) look around you; anyone can make art too – doesn’t make it all good, and 2) that thing about photography not being art because it’s just a technical skill; that came from Ayn Rand, who also said that man only has a right to work, not to expect others to supply the necessities of life – http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/photography.html.

(I wonder if she thought art was a necessity of life?)

The  photography/art argument, while worth pursuing, can never be won. But, anything creative changes people if it breathes passion they can feel. Ottawa columnist Nadine Thornhill lobbies for the art in fashion while the 100 Strangers Project urges photographers to expand their consciousness, and their definitions of risk, by taking pictures of 100 people they’ve never met before.

Kaitlin and Keil, Number 18. Photo by Kimusan, courtesy of LeMien.ca

It’s through the latter that I found my most-recent proof of the existence of art in the photographic mind. And it came from the electronic presence of another Ottawa artist. She uses the name Kimusan on her Le Mien 100-stranger-project site. She’s up to Number 28, and each has been a gem of mind-shifting. The photos are great, but it’s the very short and very lyrical text she writes for each entry that makes her pictures so joyfully open to a viewer’s own interpretation.

I discovered Le Mien by chance, and was thoroughly charmed by the package before I realized it was just pictures of people I was looking at. It reminded me of Joe Gaal’s photo and how that simple image so captivated my imagination that its technological and newspaper-illustration elements were irrelevant. Kimusan’s current labour of love, from a quite the opposite direction, has done exactly the same thing.