I was born in Nova Scotia to teacher parents and grew up on the north shore on 88 acres with horses and cows, a dog and an older brother to keep me company. My brother had a mini-bike, a green Kawasaki 75, and he would drive in and out along our quarter-mile lane. Standing outside the old chicken coop that I thought I was one day going to turn into a highly profitable restaurant, I would stick out my thumb and pretend to be a hitchhiker since it was the most daring thing I could imagine. "Where to?" was my brother's line. (I couldn't talk him into saying, "Where to, baby?") I always said I was going to Montreal.
The first time I remember looking at a photograph and feeling moved was in the early 80s when I was in college and decorated my Toronto freshman dorm room with a huge IKEA poster advertising a Julia Margaret Cameron show. The image was The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, June 1866. I didn't know anything about the photographer or the subject, I just felt like the woman pictured was looking across more than a century at me and that she had something important to say about suffering or all that she had seen.
Another picture I remember arresting me was in the late 80s on the front page of the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. A young, unarmed black man was the victim of a wrongful police shooting in the Toronto area. His mom was standing over his coffin, dressed in black and wearing a church hat, storm clouds behind her, looking outraged. There was a tall man beside her but it was her presence that dominated the photo. She looked so outraged, about to call down heaven and earth. That image planted a seed in me, some notion that photographs might change the world because, looking at that picture, you couldn't help but, at the very least, acknowledge her anger and the injustice of what had happened to her son.
I'm not sure I believe in changing the world anymore, but I still believe in photography's power to wound or, as Roland Barthes might say, "puncture' the viewer, to reach across time and space and circumstance to make us blink.