BAD BOYS / Broadway Station, East Vancouver. Photo by Rodney DeCroo
Street Photography and Perversity
I’ve always been a weirdo. Not because I dye my hair the colors of the rainbow or speak with an affected accent, but because I’ve always been -as the dictionary defines perverse- “willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired.” When my classmates in elementary school ran around the playground shrieking the choruses of their favorite KISS songs and sticking their tongues out in emulation of Gene Simmons I claimed to love the Bee Gees. Of course this made me an object of ridicule, but I didn’t care. I would practically do anything to not be as they say in AA “a part of”. The truth was I hated the Bee Gees.
In the eighties when everyone was trying to get their inner Gordon Gecko on I was reading Marx. But when local chapters of the International Socialists or Marist-Leninists invited me to join their ranks I refused because of my doctrinal purity. Again, I didn’t really give a shit about Marx, I just loved the way everyone moved to the other side of the jacuzzi when I started talking about the “means of production.”
In the 1990s when my punk rock friends invited me to a DOA concert I was thrown out for throwing elbows in the mosh pit and denouncing the political rebellion of the concert goers as the stuff of middle class crybabies while extolling my genuine white trash credentials. I’m not sure why I’m this way. I’ve always been deathly afraid of herds and mobs.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve softened and I have a niece. She’s my favorite person and I don’t like embarrassing her, so I’ve learned to go along when I’m in public with her and in the process I’ve discovered some of the perks of the path of least resistance. So now my perverse tendencies are more of the order of using cash when everyone else uses debit. And that’s why I’ve decided to use a prose based platform like Medium to display my work as a street photographer. Mind you, no one will probably actually visit my page which is fine. I would hate to be, you know, a part of something.