welcome to the jungle
This is one of my favourite photos. Not because it’s pretty or even well composed.
Because of it’s story.
This was taken in the early days, just around the time I was getting the hang of things with the ol K1000 back in 2001. At the time I was venturing further and further into the more questionable areas of Vancouver to get the more questionable shots of the questionable things I like to shoot. I’d spend entire days walking & shooting. Back then I was limited to 24x how ever many rolls I could afford (26x if I loaded the film just right). It’s still my favourite way to spend solo time… walking with the camera. Though now it’s not unheard of to get home with 300 shots. Sad to me that the frugal patience of the art is lost forever. I’ll write about that another time.
The Downtown East Side was still years away from the attempted gentrification that the Olympics tried to bring. It was as sketchy as your imagination can muster. I spent a lot of time down there. It was wonderful and horrifying. This lovely little number was taken behind ‘The Ho’ on Main Street, six or so blocks south of the infamous Main & Hastings. The name of the bar was The Ivanhoe, but people just called it The Ho. For obvious reasons… there was no way it could have been mistaken for the ‘Classy High-End Escort’ and it wouldn’t have been off the mark to call it ‘The Crack Ho’. I’m very sure that if, for some reason, I had ever needed a gun I could’ve got one there in about 20 minutes. A venereal disease in half the time. It was a sketchy place but by far not the sketchiest in the area at the time.
So I was wandering around a deserted street out back of The Ho one day when I saw this pair of sweat pants hanging in barbed wire. These were the days I taught myself to shoot with one eye open as there was always reason to. [to many today who hold their cameras at arm’s length like a stinky diaper, there was a time when you’d close one eye and look through your camera’s ‘viewfinder’ with the other in order to line up your shot before snapping. It was an act of photographic intimacy that’s long since gone the way of your dad’s pager and Palm Pilot.]. The eye of caution was always necessary as I often felt like I was in a cartoon walking among dogs with a bug juicy steak hanging around my neck. The dogs down in those parts were (thankfully) easily dealt with with a confident stare and a ‘Hi There!’. They were mostly frail things and I was on the top of my confidence game in those days. I always figured that the ones that would be genuinely dangerous were the sellers and they carried a lot more product on them than my measly K1000 could ever be pawned to buy.
Or maybe I was just lucky and naive, but I still have the K1000.
This day, behind The Ho, a relic of a lady made an appearance and wandered with moderate junkie oblivion in my direction. She might have been 35. She might have been 70. It’s really hard to tell sometimes with junkies. I was lining this up (both eyes open) when she ambled past me. She stopped to pull up a sock & light a smoke.
“Nice day, huh?” she said through old smoker’s throat.
“Beautiful day.”
“Yeah…yeah… wuh-wuh-wuh’cha takin a picture’uh?”
“Oh, y’know, a bunch’a garbage hanging in barbed wire.”
“Oh yeah… welcome to the jungle, baby. Welcome to the jungle. Y-y-you be careful, now.”
“I will. You too.”
“Always do!” she cackled a quick one and wandered off to some other important business she had up the street. She was nice. Genuine. Friendly. The only one she ever meant any harm to in the world was herself. There may have been more words between us, but the ‘welcome to the jungle, baby!’ with that cancerous voice just stuck real deep. I have no doubt that now, 12 years later, she’s either clean or dead.
Sad, but… y’know…’welcome to the jungle’.
