You have walked down the street and heard your name called. You have turned and found that you imagined the wind speaking to you alone. I have been mistaken for others: “ Oh. Sorry. I thought....”. I am constantly hearing whispers. An illness? Perhaps. But still I hear whispers from the past, from the street, from badly written and translated pages, from glittering insomniac screens. Whisperings: the urban is dirty but get over it; the suburban is banal so get out of it; media are corrupt but because of them our lives are not all that boring; the photograph is no longer, art is dead and history is crawling backwards, probably in fear, unable to find any door through which to proceed. Too much polemic!

These photographs, I call them photographs because I have no other descriptor at this point, derive from 1981 film negatives of the streets of Edmonton. I had no motivation other than an image of myself, like others, working, searching streets to find something hidden. Little did I know at the time the project to shed light on the hidden has been more or less universal for every photographer, small or large.

Unluckily, it has been the project of Freud, the Dalai Lama, Marx, McLuhan, Lacan, Barthes, Baudrillard, and, yes, even Lars von Trier; and all those others you have read and heard about in social science and art classes. It is hermeneutics at best: a hunt for clarified meaning, an impossibly flawed undertaking, but fun nonetheless - distracting and consoling at worst.

The images in this book were initially the product of this analytical, deductive culture of ours. Today, however, it is time for me at least, to step past the analysis and avoid the hunt for meaning. These are simply images and the people depicted, their past and current lives and deaths, are no more than fictional characters offered to you as a small kick to your imagination.

My guess is that structural or other assessments are pointless: simply open the book and let that moment of contemplation take you wherever it may. It’s an irresponsible undertaking, I know, but in this world of severe, some might say, hyper-guidance and security take this moment to relax, to forget the polemics, to distance yourself.