by MATTHEW WOODLEY

It used to be that “pound” was a either a place where dogs went, or something one did to nails or heads. Then the ’90s hit, corporations further alienated people with touch-tone technology, and we all learned that the little guy on the lower-right corner of our dial pad had an easier to pronounce name than “#.”

Zev Tiefenbach, known to many as an anti-occupation activist and founder of Concordia’s free vegan collective People’s Potato, left the student-feeding to others three years ago and now works as an CKUT administrator. “And I spend a fuck of a lot time on the phone,” he says. “And I probably spend 50 per cent of the time on automated phone directories.”

So, we can assume, Tiefenbach doesn’t like phone directories (“I hate them!” he confirms) but something has rubbed off, because integral to his exhibition at Zeke’s Gallery is an audio component ultimately accessed by pressing pound, followed by the extension of the photograph you’re looking at. The images are mostly of rundown corners of Toronto, few feature people, and if they do, they’re not the focus.

“We’re so people-centric, so what I’m curious about is the traces and residue of human movements,” he says. “Instead of just saying, ‘Ah, here’s Joe Blow sitting on a bench, in my image you see the remains of Joe Blow: his newspaper and the traces that he’s left behind—garbage, cars left in snow banks and stuff like that.”

Often accompanying the photos are blurry snippets of typewritten text: the internal dialogue of the masses put forth in fragments. “It’s kind of a post-modern love story,” he says, “It’s a multi-voice, omniscient narrative with no fixed reference point. The way I see it is like riding a streetcar through the city and you’re constantly barraged by this stimulus and this expanse of public space—parking lots, buildings—but there’s still this private existence that manifests itself, the small, nitty-gritty, often perverse, certainly confused plethora of existence and movement that’s full of dialogue and discourse.”

It seems at first an introspective turn for such an openly political person, but Tiefenbach says his work has bigger implications. “There’s a guy, Roman Vishniac, who photographed the Warsaw ghetto and Eastern Europe in general in the ’30s,” he explains. “That’s where my grandparents are all from, and that society was destroyed. In a sense that’s a stem for my political activity. So what I do in the grand scheme is I go to different places and I photograph what’s there to try to create a record of the details of our social existence and to create a commentary.”

The phone system also has political undertones. “I feel good about subverting this system, he says. “The world has become digital and I’m constantly frustrated by all kinds of binary divisions like male-female, straight-gay. But now I’m married and I’m doing digital work. In a certain sense, all my life—as a political activist, as a dissident, as a person who questions my identity—I’ve resisted these kinds of binary identities, and now I’m like, ‘Geez, to what extent do I limit my ability function and cope with the world that we live in?’ In my own way I’m now submitting to binary protocol. It’s totally ironic,” he laughs. “Kind of sad.”

BINARY BY SUMBISSION IS AT ZEKE’S GALLERY (3955 ST-LAURENT) UNTIL OCT. 4. PHOTOS CAN BE LISTENED TO ANYWHERE BY CALLING 907-0775