Salman Khalid

     I’ve been thinking a lot about documentary, especially documentary photography; lately I find myself enamored with that root word – the document. The document is in a position of objective truth; the role of the documentarian then is to distill that truth into revelation.

     We understand ourselves and our modern societies as centrally atheistic - so much so that to be modern is to be atheistic - yet our deepest assumptions and beliefs find their foundations within the archaic; religion despite its obsolescence is ever-present. We place ultimate value on truth; the singular, ever-present, unquestionable, and all-powerful. Truth is the final matter, and the search for truth is the ultimate aim. What then is science but the search for God. The camera, despite its modern multiplicity was - as a mechanism of observation - nothing more than one more tool to advance the project of science.

     Science and religion then are entwined within the camera not as a contradictory dyad but as a set of supporting and linear, necessary assumptions. The photograph - documentation - then is the concluding argument in a series of premises. The camera was the final necessary step to achieve truth. Through objectifying our own observation, we could lay claim to the real. When I call up objectification I intend both meanings: to treat one as a tool, and to make objective. The end purpose of the camera then is suicide. Through the picture-making mechanism we hope to annihilate ourselves - the subjective - and transcend to the plane of the objective.

     It is within this understanding that I seek to apprehend my own city. The multifaceted divisions of the Toronto conjectured by my limited cognition, are sure to give way to a perfect unity within the ultimate wisdom of the document. To reconcile my efforts with what is achievable I have limited the scope of this project to the strip of land ranging from Dundas and university to Yonge and Dundas, a mere ten-minute walk. However, lying on the edge of Chinatown and containing a major commerce center, the fringes of the business district, as well as university infrastructure, it stands as a worthy sampling regardless. Within this territory, in an effort to achieve full understanding I have collected whatever document may cross my way; discarded receipts, pamphlets and loose signage call to me, their former owners’ and passerby’s not privy to the ultimate knowledge they contain; only I the documentarian stand within this zenith. Mundane magazines, and overeager religious pamphlets come to my grasp as though the universe itself demands it. Through the collection of these documents and their transcription into documentation I aim to transcend myself and complete my own vision.