Leona is proof that honesty is always the best policy. For the past five years, she’s been using her camera to capture a stunning and realistic view of her life living in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Her humble photo-blogging is not only an inspiration; it’s downright informative. We wanted to know more about her modus operandi, so we just had to ask her. –Mark Oshiro, Community Manager, panasonicyouth

In the nearly 5 years you've been on Buzznet, we've seen nearly every aspect of your life documented through photos and journals (and the occasional video!) Why did you begin sharing your life on Buzznet?



In the beginning, I found Buzznet through StumbleUpon – someone there was blogging about this cool new site and would we all go over there and promote SU a bit. So I came over and checked it out, and in the end my Buzznet addiction totally eclipsed my SU addiction.

The whole appeal of Buzznet for me is the people. Right from my very first post I had friendly comments that made me feel at ease. I was a bit of an Internet n00b at the time and I was afraid that blogging would be a bit like high school, with lots of petty sniping and not enough kindness. Here was me: the fat chick with a cheap-ass used computer and slightly odd lifestyle. For a while there I was pretty mysterious about myself and my real life, but the constant stream of encouragement and interest from fascinating people around the world won me over in the end!

The first Buzznetter whose work I loved was Sezrah (now on Flickr). My first visit to the Buzznet homepage, one of her shots of a beach hike was showing. She shot film. I was so in awe of her talent that I decided then and there to sign up and be like her :D

My Internet experience is limited, so I don't know if it's possible to make so many true friends on any other website as I have on Buzznet. Lots of the folks I know on Buzznet I would happily have crash on my couch. I haven't had that experience anywhere else online. Maybe it's because people do share so much about themselves, you can feel satisfied that you know them fairly well.

How has living in Vancouver affected your form of photojournalism? Has having a camera around allowed you to see your world differently?



There's a real feeling where I live of uncontrolled change, of things disappearing and being replaced with entirely less interesting new things, and this seems to have inspired a lot of people to try and preserve what is here, one way or another. Maybe because Vancouver is such a young city, a frontier town only 150 years old, there's a lingering belief that history hasn't happened here yet, and none of the old stuff here is all that valuable. But I look at things a bit differently.

For example, sometimes on a construction site you'll see a large boulder just sitting there in the mud waiting to be broken up and carried away to a gravel pit somewhere. When I see those, I think, that rock was deposited there by glacial action 10,000 years ago and sat in the same place all that time, until some fucker decided we really needed a new coffee shop here and dug it up. It makes me feel like we are being carried further and further away from a state of nature that we will all miss one day (and some of us are wise enough to miss already). SchvetyBetty commented on one of my shots of such a boulder, saying she wished she could have it to sculpt (http://shapeshifter-dtescommunityplay.buzznet.com/user/photos/giant-primordial-rock/?id=1811634#usersubnav). That's how artists think!

So anyway, the city is full of people who are trying to leave their mark on a rapidly changing landscape, trying to have their story remembered and their history told and their values respected, and I just love to tag along with those folks and take pictures!



You wrote a fascinating paper analyzing voyeurism in both Sunset Boulevard and Watchmen. You've also got a stunning gallery called "The Voyeur's Paradise" where you spy back on those that voyeuristically watch society. Do you ever feel your photography is voyeuristic? Do you think that we, as a society, are watched too much or too little?

It's not being watched too much or too little that is the issue, but the motivations behind the gaze. The kind of photography that I call voyeuristic is :

1) When the TV news crews come down to the ‘hood and take some shots from a distance of homeless drug addicts, then put ‘em up on the 11 o'clock news with a story about how messed up this neighborhood is.

2) Hip bloggers who snap pictures of messed up people doing messed up things so their online friends can have a good laugh

3) celebrity photogs who come and do glossy series featuring local people, give their subjects $10 each, and go on to publish books and films. (http://www.galleries.bc.ca/GRANDFORKS/clarkes05.html).

Types of photography I find not to be voyeuristic would be pictures taken in situations where the power difference between the camera and the subject is minimized as much as possible. For example in the Hope In Shadows project (http://www.hopeinshadows.com/index.html).



It was kind of a slow start for me, getting into blogging while living and working in the Downtown Eastside. I feel drawn to live humbly and go to where all the most vulnerable people are and work with them. I can't claim to be that vulnerable myself; I've never been dirt poor or discriminated against racially; but I have gone through my share of injustice in life. But a large proportion of my neighbours have been through the absolute worst that modern society can offer. It just burns me to see further disrespect heaped on them as they do what they have to [in order] to survive.

The old guard of activists and service providers in the ‘hood (who have been around since the 60s) had this standing policy of discouraging street photography because it has so often been used to show the hood as a den of iniquity requiring immediate revitalization, and I could totally relate to their reasoning. So when I had my first digicam I really limited myself as to where and when I would pull it out.

So at first, while shooting, I would surreptitiously take pictures of inanimate objects (or of myself) in such a way that you couldn't even identify the location. That was the only way I felt ok about posting pics of DTES events online. Then, gradually, as folks got more comfortable with cameras and I got a big pile of awesome shots I wanted to share, I sort of loosened up.

If you could meet three people from Buzznet and spend the day with them tomorrow, who would they be? Why?

ThatMissGrace, Paxgitmo and FriarTuck (and friends). Runners up: The holy trinity that was AXA13, SchvetyBetty and TheQuixoticOne. Because they all know what makes life GOOD!



You've always been very outspoken about social and political issues through your profile. As unrealistic as this is, imagine you can remove a single social ill from the world overnight. What would you choose? Why?

I once read somewhere that evolutionarily speaking, the social inequality of the sexes was the blueprint for all fear of difference, and all other discrimination is based on that mentality, that different people must lead different lives. I also think that most of the ills of the modern world are caused by not listening to women. We're in a place now where people can get into positions of great power while all the time trying to think up the future of humanity in their puny little heads. Dumb dumb dumb. I think the most important thing for people to understand is that we are all more alike than it seems.