Tucked near the end of Main Street, right beside the famous Moose Jaw tunnels, Past Times Photography & Gifts is a must-stop for Moose Jaw locals and visitors alike.

According to its slogan, Past Times has “gifts galore from ceiling to floor” and it’s hardly an exaggeration. One step through the front door will have visitors craning their necks to take in everything the store has on display.

The fullness of the store is entirely part of its charm, and owner Mike Thul has been filling Past Times with giftwares, collectibles and decor for over twenty years. He looks to find the most unique items possible to include in the collection.

From decorative signs to postcards to artwork to mugs with funny sayings, Past Times carries a little something for everyone. Whether your taste runs towards shiny and crystal, or rustic and country, this gift shop likely has what you’re looking for and more.

Decor makes up the largest part of the offering at Past Times, and garden wares are big in the summer, with lots of things like decorative yard spikes and wind-spinners on display. The store also carries several lines of handmade products, stocked by local makers.

One of the store’s most popular features is the refinished furniture it regularly stocks. From dressers to cabinets to repurposed doors, furniture is one of Past Time’s most interesting offers. Each piece is individual and one-of-a-kind, which means customers are unlikely to encounter the same item twice.

Although Past Times has the word “antiques” on its sign outside, the store doesn’t carry as many old collectible items as it used to — but there are some historical gems scattered throughout the shelves for customers to stumble across like a scavenger hunt.

Items like old comic books, serving dishes, luggage sets and even vintage toys are ready to be discovered by the right eyes.

The most “antique” offering at Past Times is its photography service — but only because it allows customers to take a step into the past themselves.

The studio on the left-hand side of the store specializes in old-timey photos, where customers can choose from a variety of costumes and settings to immerse themselves in the past for a unique memento. Past Times Photography is able to do photos set in the Old West era, the roaring ‘20s or the Victorian era, with costumes to fit a range of sizes.

Past Times is also the official supplier of Chocolate Moose candy and fudge, a Moose Jaw staple that makes for a perfect shopping treat. The shop also carries a whole selection of other old-fashioned candies, like Cracker Jacks and Lucky Elephant popcorn.

Thul purposely stocks his store with things people aren’t likely to find in any other gift shops in Moose Jaw, and he hears often that every visit to Past Times is like a whole new experience because there’s always something new to see.

Past Times is a great experience for a first-time visitor, but regular customers also find the store is “surprisingly unexpected” every time they stop by — which is actually the city of Moose Jaw’s logo these days.

The store is located at 26 Main Street North, open from Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and on Sundays from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.

For more information on available products, check out the Past Times Facebook page or visit pasttimesphotos.com.

Social media is an incredible tool for propagating ideas, allowing the potential for mass outreach to anyone with an Internet connection and something to say.

People without a background in advertising or public relations can go viral simply by making the right meme-worthy content and sharing it at the right time, in the right place, without a real penalty for getting it wrong, leading some to treat posting to social media as almost a one-armed bandit, with the built-in reward mechanisms seeming just as addictive for some.

However, it is only really across the last decade or so that this status quo has been balanced, and within that span, the “town square” for photography content has shifted constantly. Flickr, Facebook Groups, Twitter, Reddit, 500px, Instagram, and various other forums and sites that have popped up, claimed to be the next big thing, then vanished without a trace.

Communities have usually migrated towards whoever is offering the most eyes on posts with low barriers to entry, and potential to gather new members. Some remain in the abandoned ruins of groups that have long since moved on, while others try and co-opt sites that aren’t really intended for sharing high-quality imagery (media) and are more concentrated on networking and communication (social).

A Shifting Social Media Landscape

The current landscape of social media seems to be undergoing some pretty significant changes, away from still images (which occupy a tiny fraction of attention as you scroll past) towards video content (spend longer with each morsel of content, including branded deliveries), which means still photography has been cut loose to an extent.

Combine these strategic and deliberate medium-based changes with other decisions, like fundamentally altering the ways communities behave on Reddit, or profile “hierarchies” on Twitter, and the result is a bit of a mess. It is not easy to find firm and confident footing on a path towards a photography-centric space, the digital Promised Land that ticks all boxes of image quality and audience quality.

It’s easy to be blinded by the potential a digital space seems to offer; global reach, unlimited customer base, acclaim, and recognition. But achieving these relies on standing out from the noise because you’re effectively competing for attention against every single other person who is trying to do the same thing as you, and everyone else who is trying to do something different than you.

No one is going to “solve” the algorithm any more than they will solve a roulette wheel. These social media platforms are not “your platform”, they belong to someone else. If tomorrow a company decides to remove all instances of the letter “A,” they will be entirely able to do so. They choose what they want their platform to be a reflection of.

If you have the option to buy an advertising spot and actively market your photographs that way, then people will certainly see the advert – it won’t be “organic reach” or free-range audience, or whatever else people call posting and hoping, but at the same time how many of these people who see the work will actually convert into an audience member, let alone a paying customer?

The Challenge of Getting Seen

When was the last time you bought a print or a book from a photographer you’d never heard of just because you saw their sponsored post on social media? If you haven’t, then why would you expect someone else to purchase your product when you promote it in a way that you haven’t personally responded to?

Some creators, instead of paying to have their work shown to people in the form of an advert, will “buy followers” which inflate the number shown on their profile, as well as view and like counts, sometimes even comments. But you can’t really pay someone to be your customer, for that you need advertising or an equivalent form of marketing. This undermines the accuracy of the assessment of actual popularity, which means potential clients or brands looking for a legitimate audience to harness are dissuaded from using follower counts and other numbers games for a real sense of legitimacy.

Despite all of the shortcomings, that underlying sense of potential remains for the digital space: if I’m not there, where will I be? If I don’t share my message where everyone else seems to be shouting, how will I get heard (even if no one is hearing what anyone else is saying anyway)?

What are the non-digital spaces that don’t cost money to access? What is the equivalent of a work re-sharing hub, boosting their own audience using that very audiences content? Who are the gatekeepers, and what are they gatekeeping if not just an audience you may not have reached yet?

Outside of the digital-but-not-social media options, like blogging or YouTube (which are increasingly populated by social-media-like tools), how does your physical real day-to-day existence differ from the way you behave on social media? How often do you speak to someone you’ve never met or seen before, make a new connection? How often do you involve yourself with your local community, in whatever form that may be? Would these interactions still be focused on photography? Are you showing them your photographs within moments of getting their attention?

Without the boundaries of a digital frame restricting you to one method of interaction, what new potential opens up to you? Without those digital tools would you even call yourself a photographer as an initial introductory label?

With these as a starting point, the real question becomes obvious. Is your goal only to have your work seen? Remembered? Purchased? Is social media really the best path to achieving any of these?

What’s the last image you’ve only seen on social media that you really remember?

What’s the last one you bought?

About the author: Simon King is a London-based photographer and photojournalist, currently working on a number of long-term documentary and street photography projects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can follow his work through his documentary collective, The New Exit Photography Group, and on Instagram.

Image credits: Photographs by Simon King

Agnès Varda, at least in her later years, didn’t make a big deal about being taken seriously. For decades, the film-maker and artist was much respected as the pioneering feminist voice in French cinema and as the “godmother of the Nouvelle Vague” – New Wave – her work beating Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et al to the big screen by several years. But she was also somewhat sidelined, eclipsed by her male peers, and it took until this century for her to be truly revered: last year, her 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 was ranked No 14 in the Sight & Sound greatest films poll.

But by the time she had begun to be deified, Varda was prone to sending herself up. She would appear on her film posters and DVD boxes in cartoon form as a quizzical, rotund Mrs Pepperpot figure; she even appeared at the Venice Biennale dressed as a potato. The latter guise, she once said, was because she loved the circus as a child. “I thought I should do something to get attention.”

The clownish side of Varda, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, helped endear her to a new international public, as did her double self-reinvention this century: first as a digital documentarist with her groundbreaking The Gleaners and I (2000), then with her extraordinary late flourishing as an installation artist. Her installations included Patatutopia, a reverie on tubers at the 2003 Venice Biennale (hence the spud costume); and a remarkable tribute to her beloved island of Noirmoutier in western France (mixed media: photos, video, beach balls, a hut made entirely from celluloid strips of one of her films).

What’s often forgotten is that Varda, before turning to cinema, had already developed her own vision as a photographer. This year her black-and-white work from the early 1950s is celebrated by French photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles with the exhibition La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film. The show (and accompanying book) consists of images shot by Varda in La Pointe Courte, an area of the Mediterranean town of Sète, where she lived as a teenager. Varda returned to the area – then an impoverished fishing community – to take photos in preparation for her first feature, La Pointe Courte, which she shot in 1954, a daring formal experiment alternating documentary footage and fictional love story.

Containing many photos never seen before, the show has been curated in collaboration with the film-maker’s children, Rosalie Varda – who runs the family production company Ciné-Tamaris – and actor-director Mathieu Demy. Since their mother’s death, Rosalie has begun making an inventory of Agnès’s vast archive of negatives. “We’re organising, we’re discovering, we keep finding new things,” she says. The Sète photos are particularly telling, as they show Agnès planning her transition from still to moving images. “When she decided to make La Pointe Courte,” Rosalie says, “she really worked on the photos – it was more than reportage, it was about preparing the film. When she came on set, she had no problem knowing where to put the camera.”

Having moved from Sète to Paris in the late 1940s to study photography and history of art, the Belgian-born Varda had soon established herself as a professional photographer, shooting portraits, working for magazines and documenting the Avignon festival and the Théâtre National Populaire. “That’s how she earned her living, right into the 60s,” says Rosalie. Agnès’s early theatre photos, featuring stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philippe, have long been reproduced in published drama texts: in France, says Rosalie: “All schoolchildren had textbooks with her photos – all the classics of Racine, Molière, Corneille. Everyone grew up seeing her pictures.”

Varda’s La Pointe Courte photos, taken on her Rolleiflex, include a certain amount of folkloric spectacle – notably the gondolier-like figures competing in Sète’s traditional water jousts, in which participants try to push their opponents off boats with long poles. But she also explores the mundane reality of postwar Sète: children huddled in cramped rooms, dogs and drying laundry on the waterfront, along with familiar objects (barrels, stacked logs, carved wood) transformed into bizarre near-abstractions in the surrealist tradition.

Published alongside the La Pointe Courte book is a separate photobook, Expo54. It reproduces an exhibition of Varda’s work that she organised in June 1954 at her home in Rue Daguerre in Paris’s southern 14^th arrondissement, inviting friends and neighbours, among them the photographer Brassaï and artists Alexander Calder and Hans Hartung.

Expo54 features more children, including an eerie masked trio, as well as Varda’s friends: Calder is seen larking around in a bowler hat and sitting solemnly alongside his wife and daughters. There is also a remarkable set of ruthlessly matter-of-fact self-portraits with Varda either smiling cautiously in sensible-looking jumper and skirt, or naked, sometimes shot from behind, head bowed so as to turn her torso into pure sculpture. Even then, she sported the pudding-bowl cut that would be a trademark right through to old age, when she wore it in aubergine and silver in a style she called “mamie punk” (punk granny).

Varda moved to Rue Daguerre – appropriately named after 19^th-century photographic pioneer Louis Daguerre – in 1951 and would live and work there over seven decades, for some of that time with her late husband, Jacques Demy, the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The quartier had changed massively by the time I went to interview Varda there in 2009. The 1954 photos show the sooty, distressed walls of a dilapidated postwar city, but half a century on, Varda’s home vividly evoked the bohemian oasis it must have become during Paris’s cultural boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The courtyard felt like Varda’s private beach, decked with plants and decorated in shades of crimson and purple – very different from the severe site she recalled moving into, with no heating and no bathroom. By the time she and Demy had become star auteurs, the place was better equipped for entertaining, but at that point Varda didn’t photograph their guests: an enduring regret, she told me, was that she never took pictures of the Doors singer Jim Morrison, who would come to dinner.

Rue Daguerre became Varda’s base for an eclectic, globetrotting career, taking in era-defining feminist fictions (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond); numerous documentaries, including studies of the Black Panthers and Los Angeles murals; hybrid works such as Jacquot de Nantes, an imaginative recreation of Demy’s childhood; and photographic studies of China in 1957 and Cuba in 1962.

Varda found renewed attention this century partly through films such as her playful, affecting autobiography The Beaches of Agnès (2008), partly through her impish new delight in self-promotion. But photography always remained a key thread – right at the end of her life, she enthused about becoming an Instagrammer. And one way or another, still images continued to fuel her films. One example is an enigmatic photo from Expo54 showing a dead goat, a child and a naked man on the beach; it would inspire her 1982 film Ulysse, in which Varda pondered the image’s meaning, and she mused on it again in The Beaches of Agnès. “It was a way of showing how a narrative can be born out of a single still moment,” says Rosalie Varda of Ulysse. “The shutter clicks – but before and after, there’s a whole story to tell.”

• La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film is at the Cloître Saint-Trophime, Arles, until 24 September. La Pointe Courte and Expo54 are published by Delpire & Co (€20 each)

Author Micah Cash spent most of 2018 traveling through the southeastern United States visiting and photographing Waffle House restaurants, a project that culminated in the book “Waffle House Vistas” published by The Bitter Southerner. Cash explains:

I did it because I wanted to see through each restaurant’s windows. I wanted to see the surrounding architecture, catalog adjacent businesses, and understand the public and commercial space around each restaurant. I also wanted to ask questions about our society and our social, economic, and political divisions. 

The resulting photography project, “Waffle House Vistas,” collects images that document Southern communities as seen through the windows of Waffle Houses. In each instance, the point of view is the customer’s. Each photograph looks out from booths and chairs, making the viewer a witness to intertwined narratives of poverty, transience, and politics. 

These photographs ask viewers to look up from their hash browns and acknowledge the institutions and structures that create real, yet rarely acknowledged boundaries that feel impossible to break through for much of this country.  And Waffle House is the perfect place to have this conversation — beloved as a Southern cultural icon and scattered throughout our region like hash browns on a grill. But while the Waffle House feels like a “safe space” for such discussions, it has not, it is not without its own controversies.

In fact, Waffle House restaurants have become somewhat notorious for violent, racially-charged incidents. Cash cites three that occurred in Spring 2018 alone. In a more recent article, Brian Kean writes that if you Google “shootings at Waffle House,” you’ll be “shocked.” Kean attempts to explain why Waffle House “is so deadly” and posits that it boils down to the “unpredictability of a late-night crowd, the likelihood that there are guns, and racism.”

Micah Cash, then, couldn’t ignore the sociopolitical and cultural contexts within which Waffle House restaurants exist. Cash explains:

I also began “Waffle House Vistas” against the backdrop of challenging political times: the trauma of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the activism that followed; the rhetoric of the 2018 midterm elections and their consequences; the threat and eventual occurrence of a government shutdown over the holidays. While I did not want the tonality of these photographs altered by those events, in truth, they were.

There was no way around it. These photographs contemplate our volatile political and economic climate and do so explicitly from the vantage point of Waffle House restaurants. My approach had its own rules: I would eat at every Waffle House I entered and make images only from where I was seated. I wanted to have a complete Waffle House experience every time. Not only did it give the photographs the authenticity I wanted, but it also compensated the restaurant for taking up a table, especially during prime dining hours. I ordered a full breakfast at the first restaurant of the day and would order coffee and a side of toast at the remaining stores, as it was customary for me to visit multiple locations in one day while I was traveling.

Waffle House Vistas was published in 2019 by The Bitter Southerner, and a second edition was recently released. According to The Bitter Southerner:

This new edition has an awesome new cover. Inside, there are new locations, new essays, and new vistas. If you loved our original Waffle House Vistas, we know you’re going to double love Waffle House Vistas, second edition. 

The new edition includes 40 new photographs that were made between 2020-2022. The book also includes essays by Beth McKibben, Mike Jordan, Laura Bullard, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Micah Cash.

Read more about the project here, and order a copy of the book here.