Murray Whyte
Visual Art Critic
On April 20, 2008, Jordan Bower was skittering along a dusty road in a remote corner of rural India on a motorcycle, caught in a daydream of Really Big Ideas, when fate intervened.
Out of nowhere, Bower recalls — though he admits his mind was definitely far from the road, and maybe his eye had followed — a pair of stray dogs appeared in his path. Veering hard to avoid them, Bower dodged oncoming traffic and tumbled to the pavement, shearing flesh to blood before coming to rest, battered and in shock, but, not unsurprisingly, alive.
Sitting on TTC streetcar number 4025, rumbling west on College Street earlier this week, Bower — fully healed and happily intact — can look back on that day as a particularly intense round of career counselling. En route to the hospital in the back of a helpful samaritan’s car, he had an epiphany: He would become a photographer.
“It took some time to take the resonance of that moment and figure it out,” said Bower, who has the tireless optimism of a kindergarten teacher and the ever-present smile to match. “But in the months that followed, it sort of emerged — this is what I needed to do with myself.”
“This,” in this case, is an exhibition of photographs from his faraway wanderings, mostly India and Nepal, that Bower has assembled for this year’s Contact Photography Festival. Even with more than 200 exhibitions that run the gamut from celebrated international contemporary artists in museums to amateur snap-shotters tacking up pictures in their local cafes, Bower’s project is unique.
Here, on car 4025, Bower’s photos run the length of the display space above the seats and parallel to the hand rails. This is no gesture of cultural philanthropy by your transit commission: Bower bought the space, like any advertiser, for the duration of the festival, making it his personal, mobile gallery.
There’s something apt about tugging a photography exhibition off the gallery walls and tossing it Out There, into the churn of the world it attempts to capture – even more so, in fact, given photography’s undeniable status as the most democratic, accessible visual medium of all time. As digital cameras get better, cheaper and more user-friendly, that’s more true each day.
But Bower also had a bone to pick with his exhibitor. “On the way down here on the subway, I was just so aware of all these ads, pushing their version of an idealized world down my throat,” said Bower, who speaks with an emphatic, good-natured enthusiasm about everything, even when he disagrees. The car groaned as it navigated a curve on Dundas Street, west of Lansdowne.
“I don’t want to tell people to do anything. Advertising is all about identifying problem and solving it immediately. Creative thinking comes in that gap, where you’re not sure what you’re looking at. As soon as someone delivers a solution, there’s no thinking anymore. Advertising doesn’t leave any room for that gap.”
Bower’s is an educated assessment. He graduated in 2003 with a business degree from the University of Western Ontario and went on to work in the travel industry, but was never comfortable in corporate skin.
“I come from a background where you’re expected to choose to be a doctor or a lawyer,” he shrugs, good-naturedly, the streetcar chugging along Howard Park Avenue. “And I was a bit of a momma’s boy.”
A few years out of school, he took off and spent 18 months in India, wandering in search of a purpose. And then, that day.
“Photographers have such a relationship to their subjects,” he says, wandering the length of the car. A young Khasi girl in bear feet and red dress arches back into her mother, grinning with uncomplicated glee; two boys in a dessicated crop field try to straighten up for the camera.
“In India, all you have to do is pull a camera out and there’s all of a sudden 30 people who want their picture taken. And I want to be in that situation, I want to interact, I want to engage. There’s something about that that’s really cool.”
Bower describes himself as a photographer with hesitation. “It was so easy, I felt guilty,” he said. So he chose another term: “Lovewallah.”
“It’s like slang for ‘dude,’ ” he explained. “The Chaiwallah makes tea, that sort of thing – all these people, offering services to their communities, not expecting to get paid.”
Which brings us back on board. The streetcar curled around its terminus in High Park and pointed itself east for the return trip. Bower paid $1500 for the space, and expects nothing back – none of his pictures are for sale, except as $5 souvenir cards. “I want to make you change how you’re acting,” he says.
“I would love for someone to come on this streetcar, spend 24 hours thinking about it, then quit his job, sell his house, and go work for a non-profit. That’s within all our power to do that.”
Though, patience, perhaps, is wise. “So far, no one’s even looked,” he laughs. “But if I can have that effect on even one person, then it’ll all be worth it.”
