

If I could tell you why I am compelled to take pictures I don’t think there’d be any point in me doing it. Sometimes there is no rational or thought for me to articulate only a need to shoot. Between steps I look and listen to everything going on around me subtly analyzing the world on a day to day basis. I read the big stories at home and step outside the door to experience their trickle down in the bubble of my own existence.

Maybe photography for me then is as much about making art as it is about reaching out and finding ways to make connections with the world; to understand the goings-on outside my own periphery.
Andrew Macartney is a student of photographic arts based in Ottawa, Canada. He brings to his practice an assortment of film cameras of various formats from full frame to large format giving him an ability to slow down and make an honest attempt to consciously choose worthwhile places and moments. Andrew covers a range of subjects for reasons he is only beginning to understand outside a mere ‘love of photography.’ Andrew has shown at SPAO’s Exhibition No.11, Contact Photography Festival and the Ottawa Art Gallery.




Imagine, for a moment, you are on a first date. You are at a café with another student from your university, the one who has been sitting next to you quite frequently in classes. After you wait in line to buy both of your coffees, all while making awkward idle chatter, you are finally able to sit down and engage in insightful, yet flirtatious, conversation. Now your date asks you, in order to break the ice, to introduce yourself as a person. How do you proceed?
I can deduce of three of the categories of answers you may have selected to describe yourself.
The (1) first could be your occupation, your capacity in producing wealth. In relation to Marx’s dialectical materialism, this would mean that your concept of self-identity is primarily based on your position within the means of production – where you fit within the economic hierarchy.
The (2) second option of answers could have been related to what you own, therefore simultaneously communicated physically as well as verbally. This would include attributes such as what kind of clothes you wear, your choice in toothpaste, what type of vehicle(s) you drive, where you have travelled. These concepts would represent your self-identity’s strong reliance on material private property.
The (3) final category would have involved the opposite: immaterial private property, which would include such attributes as your taste in art, cooking, friends, politics. This option tends to be the most common.
“That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money.” From Marx & Engels, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Within a society that encourages individualism, people tend to express their identity through their consumption patterns. Little do they know that their choices have been fashioned in order to ensure profitability and predictability: the illusion of customization. Consumers may select the colour of the car they drive, which bands they support, or which brands of clothing they purchase in order to express their unique human tastes. I believe these choices have been predetermined by dominant market forces.
Through exposure to commercial and social media, we often develop romantic, fantastical notions of life that we then attempt to replicate in our own realities. In this sense, we may yearn to escape personal struggles through living the vicarious experiences of fictional characters and lifestyles. The result is the fabrication of unrealistic expectations of material life; pseudo-bourgeois consumption patterns which we adopt in order to develop our social identity. We don’t like the product itself, we like the idea it represents.
Instead of determining our own choices, we buy into a widely-shared behaviour of consumption. The socially constructed concept of self-identity becomes an intended result of the capitalist system in order to feed on the prescribed tastes of the proletariat.
So, how does one construct their identity, free from capitalist forces? Who really knows? Commercial influence is omnipresent; to be unaffected by it is an impossible task. That being said, start asking yourself this question before any purchases: “Do I need this, or do I want this?” To strive for true individuality means to strive for innovation, not uniformity.
There are those who deem it impertinent to map a population from one person or group, the same as a waterway from the currents that dwell within it. A Capital city is especially prone to heterogeneity, where seemingly insignificant products create a vast, creeping networks of influential routes and channels, the greater sums of which meddle and muddy the waters.
For instance, roughly 100, 000 people work as government employees and are expected to conform to a certain dress code, with only 59 dedicated tailors to service them; from where does fashion arise? While amok with culinary expositions and 2, 100 restaurants, only 1.3% of residents work in the foodservice industry themselves; why do so few go hungry? We are a university city with a high level of disillusioned young adults, catered to introductory activities, yet over half of that student population leaves every year; what is our attraction?
Hosting literally hundreds of concert venues each year, from sold-out stadiums to backwater bars and open-mic nights, there are yet still critics who call our music scene “sleepy” and “below surface”. Worse still are the people who believe it. We receive condemnation from the nation for poor misrepresentation, yet the country itself is quick to thumbnail their personal conceptions as legitimate.
Dozens of dog parks, 600 km of cycling paths, and parades, protests and demonstrations every single day, our Ottawa is (in a word) crowded. To speak of only one aspect risks an annotation in an arena where brevity counters complexion. There is so much to do in Ottawa, and ultimately, so much to be. As many of us have come to know, our daily experiences are only as unique as they are quiet, and an urbanity as regulated as Ottawa requires that only a certain amount of groups be shouting at once.
People have forever been categorizing themselves into parties of similarities to cement their own identities and represent themselves to a community. These groups may be porous or hegemonic, but to reduce individual personalities to sobriquets of an area code is more than simplistic; it is incomplete.
Ottawa has the advantage of a stabilized employment industry, whereas the lives and experiences of those employed (and not) are pel-mel. Steadfast structuring of these long-lasting titans of business are upheld by interchangeable occupational positions filled by new wares of the many to form the whole. In a way, this rapid current of a fresh workforce is what sustains the firmness of production. We have created a culture of amateur orientation expected to understand an apeiron system impossible to comprehend.
To keep the machine running smoothly, several methodologies have been developed to evaluate, strip and reform “outsiders” into qualified personage. Whether it is the interview process, training for a job, or the buzzword reward system for room rentals, personality traits need to be reduced to pre-portioned nomenclature, so as to better interlock with the existing systems. Yet in the creation of this strict categorization, it has empowered commonly marginalized hobbies, interests and identities.
What elsewhere is a temporary leisure to be casually developed, is here so sternly corralled and thrust upon the practitioner as paramount to their ipseity. One comes to realize there is no pride in exploratory passions, and no shame in embracing the titles of “artist”, “musician”, “coordinator” or “connoisseur” of any sort.
Where there can be no curiosities of fugacity, there can only stand masoned intent. The people who are seen as well-adjusted are really well-ingrained. And why not? For all of Ottawa’s persona as a lumbering giant, it allows for hardened, if eccentric, constitutions. It is here that arises the synth-prog-punk, the crossfit runner, the abstract graffiti artist and the city councillor who rides their bike to work each day at 30 km/hour.
The amateur is outpaced by our city’s drive for professionalism, and when surrounded by crowds so contentedly sure of themselves, the natural way is to ascend or be alienated. So full are we of groups and their bridging networks, one voice, in one medium, can never be enough.
Consider this a call to action. Our city is flooded with the above communities and countless more, but none will be as intricately fabricated as the other. If you have a life connected to the culture of Ottawa city, the question we would like to ask, is; What’s going on?
