Book review: Rodney DeCroo's Night Moves focuses on the passing mysteries of city's sidewalks
With this gritty collection of street photographs, the Vancouver songwriter, poet, and playwright opens a new chapter in his hard-won life as an artist
From Night Moves: The Street Photography of Rodney DeCroo.
“WHEN I BOUGHT MY camera I knew/I’d be disappointed. Failure would be the rule,/the beautiful exceptions few.” Though apparently laced with pessimism, the honesty of these lines from the first poem in Rodney DeCroo’s new book Night Moves points to a profound, self-taught patience with the pains of creativity. It’s an admission of struggle that is ultimately a source of strength, one that has allowed him as an artist to move from medium to medium with a rare fearlessness.
The Vancouver-based DeCroo is, of course, best known as a songwriter and poet, and more recently as a playwright and actor. And Night Moves indeed contains poems displaying all the ruthless self-exploration that defined collections such as Fishing for Leviathan and Allegheny, BC, with their examinations of deep wounds left by abuse he suffered in his early years.
But this latest book, published by Anvil Press, represents yet another extension of DeCroo’s intense artistic curiosity—into street photography.
In page after page of the landscape-format volume, gritty black-and-white images reflect the city’s jumbled profusion and cross paths with its residents—young and old, guarded and open, a few comfortably off, others on the brink of crisis or poverty, each of them inexhaustibly unique. Most of these instants were captured in DeCroo’s home neighbourhood of Commercial Drive, and they hark back to the work of legends like Robert Frank, Vivian Maier, and Garry Winogrand.
By the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station, in Rodney DeCroo’s book Night Moves.
As DeCroo recalls at a table by the window of the Drive’s Continental Coffee House, the long, halting process of tuning his eye had many similarities to his discovery of the healing powers of writing poetry, which came about not long after he moved to Vancouver more than three decades ago.
“It’s no secret I had a fucking hellish childhood, and much of my early adult life was really troubled,” he says. “I struggled with addiction and struggled with alcoholism, and when I was younger I was violent, and I got arrested and went to psych wards. You know, my life was very difficult. And fortunately I found arts—which I found in this neighbourhood, sitting in this café.”
It was here, in conversations with young artists and writers, that DeCroo saw a way out of the circular chaos, not merely by reading poetry, but by taking on the hard, frustrating task of learning to create it.
“Suddenly, this idea that I could engage in making art gave my life some kind of direction and dignity and meaning, and something I could do—and I was terrible at it,” he says with a chuckle. “But then I got better at it. And then I got better at it enough that people got interested, and then opportunities came to share it. And I think I got addicted to that process. So then I went, ‘Okay, I did that with poetry, let’s do that process with music.’ And so I got really into making songs.”
This entailed taking up the guitar at the age of 30 and hammering away at the basics of the instrument until they began to produce the kind of fierce, weathered songs that have since filled eight widely admired albums. DeCroo’s tolerance for sitting with early limitations and then slowly, relentlessly erasing them is extraordinarily high—a trait he attributes to an “obsessive” streak.
“And now I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this,’” he says, referring to his early attempts at turning his smartphone’s camera to the street. “There’s something about starting a new discipline and knowing you suck—like, knowing how bad you are. That turns me on—that excites me. Because it’s like, ‘I’m going to stick with this and then watch the pieces start to slowly come together, and then reach a degree of competency.’ You have to really grind. You have to invest yourself in that. But I’m a fucked-up guy, and so investing myself in something like that is really good for me. Because I’m not having relationships. I’m not having kids. I’m not buying a house. I’m making art—that’s what I do. I wake up in the morning and I make art.”
This full, hard-won fluency with the camera is now clear in the images of Night Moves. Each instant is like a story interrupted, the immediate past and future stretching away in the viewer’s imagination.
And as images made in the public bustle and without formal permission from their subjects, they inevitably raise questions of exploitation that have haunted street photography from the beginning of the form. Again, the first poem in Night Moves confronts the matter directly: “Some days/I’d take a shot and the person would say Hey,/fuck you, don’t take my photo! I’d forget/as they stood with knuckled fists and spit/flying into my face that I owed them an apology,/for I’m a thief of their dance with time.”
In conversation, DeCroo readily admits to experiencing this innate conflict in street photography as a source of energy. “I work off of tension,” he says. “Whenever there’s tension, there’s something dynamic happening….I think you never completely resolve that dilemma that photography presents. But I sort of like that. I hope that doesn’t sound perverse. But I feel it keeps it alive.”
From Night Moves by Rodney DeCroo.
STILL, DECROO’S STANCE has none of the quietly alienated gaze or cool ambivalence about strangers that some of the form’s past masters have been accused of. As with his work in other arts—even when it’s mining the violent traumas of his upbringing in his native Pennsylvania and, later, in the remote backcountry of B.C.—his aim is always a deeply human connection. “Otherwise,” he notes with a laugh, “you’re just sitting in on my therapy session.”
The difference here, with these photographs, is a turn outward to the world again, with an even stronger sense of empathy.
“It feels like finally I’m taking the focus off myself,” DeCroo says of the contrast with his previous work. “You know, it started to feel almost narcissistic. I know it’s not, but it started to feel claustrophobic—like, ‘Enough of me.’”
It’s as if the camera opened a new path out of the distant past and cemented a bond to his adopted hometown and neighbourhood, with all its edges and shadows.
“The funny thing was, I mostly took photos of people I don’t know but I’ve seen around on these streets for years,” he notes. “I don’t want to ever sound like I’m talking down about people, but I’m very drawn to taking photos of the people that we don’t necessarily see, who don’t seem to get seen….People said, ‘You should go down to Britannia and take pictures of all the skateboarders.’ I was like, ‘No, I have no interest in that. There’s tons of people who want to do that.’
“I’m interested in the guy who I’ve seen a million times—he’s always alone, and I see him sitting outside of JJ Bean and reading a book, or I see him smoking outside of SuperValu at 2 in the morning, just standing there,” he continues. “That guy’s an enigma to me, he’s a mystery—I want his photograph. And it’s not like ‘Oh, feel sorry for him.’ It’s like ‘Hey, here’s an interesting person.’”
Late-night bus, in Rodney DeCroo’s Night Moves.
ONE OF THE LATER poems in Night Moves suggests this pursuit is essentially an attempt to “find the face that explains why we’re so alone”. But in building the book’s set of images, DeCroo has tapped into a kind of gratitude that overcomes isolation, a feeling of community that he only half-sensed for decades.
“I have lived in this neighbourhood for over 30 years,” he says. “This is where the bulk of my life has been lived. Pittsburgh—those are ghosts. This is my home.”
Moving along the local sidewalks with his eyes open in this way became a practice of “celebrating that relationship, and that this place saved me”, he says. “This is where I learned to be a fucking human being. Whatever potential I had was very much in question when I showed up here.…Whatever intelligence or gifts I had, they were locked away somewhere.
“This is home,” he reiterates. “This has been home for a long time, and I’ve kind of kept it at a distance, I’ve kept it at bay. And finally I was like, ‘No, I want to close that gap.’”
He scrolls through his phone to find a new image that represents recent changes to his approach. This photograph appears less spontaneous and more formally composed, attached to the surrounding urban architecture, full of plate-glass reflections, railings, and beams, with a small crowd in the distance, gathered on a SkyTrain platform. “You just don’t want to repeat yourself over and over,” he says of this departure in style. “I may have to start thinking about getting more into a camera that can respond to the challenges.”
Then, as if returning to the force behind all of his art, no matter what the medium, he quickly backtracks. “But I don’t want to go too far down that road. I’m not a technical guy at all. It sounds so corny, but I really mean it: I shoot with my heart. And the camera is incidental.” 
Related Articles
