Our friend Ben Pobjoy recently published a raucous daily photography blog called War of Spoils featuring Polaroids taken over 9 years of his teenage life in suburban Ontario wreaking havoc with his punk buddies, setting shit on fire, and whipping their dicks out. We talked to Ben about what it was like taking pictures of dumb shit while bored as hell in the Canadian suburbs, and how shooting boners just isn’t the same when you’re all grown up. 

VICE: How did you come up with the name War of Spoils? 

Ben Pobjoy: Spoils of war are what you gather in war that you take with you. The title is essentially about suburban kids who were spoiled and had the means to be idiots. We were playing in bands so we had vans, we were able to work jobs, we lived on our own quite young. War of Spoils is about spoiled kids at war with everything. 

Do you still shoot Polaroids a lot? 

When I was first getting into the music scene I loved reading Maximum Rock n’ Roll, so I always wanted to get into photography but I was such a hack with an SLR. I went on tour one summer when I was 15 or 16 with this band called Racebannon and the singer had a Polaroid. He was kind-of a kooky dude who’d have little colored gels in his pocket and would shoot the moon and I was like “Holy fuck you just have to shoot photos and be weird with it and you’ll get cool photos!” So then I shot Polaroids at shows for quite a few years but this was at an age when scanning stuff didn’t look good and digital prints looked like shit. Then I started shooting 35mm and got caught up in trying to be serious about it so I put the Polaroid on the side for a long time. You always go through different states of mind as you get older. I thought that stuff was fuckin stupid because it’s so immature and goofy but then this year, turning 30, I thought it was pretty cool. I shot that stuff half a lifetime ago and everyone looks so different. Like this guy can be married and tame now but here he is in this photo, going crazy.

Who is the guy with the poo hat on? 

Shawn, that’s who I work with at my creative services company, Switzerland CS. Yeah, he looks totally different now, so it’s always this interesting kind of touch point.

Your captions go really well with the photos. Is it like a diary of the time? 

I don’t know, it’s kind of weird because I never kept a diary as a kid. I was working at a gas station and I remember it would cost me $20 for a pack of Polaroid which was 10 shots and I was making probably about 6 bucks an hour, so I would have to work like 4 hours–half my work shift–just to buy a stupid Polaroid pack. So since I couldn’t afford to shoot as much as I wanted to, a lot of it was just writing down the anecdotes.

I like the one with the puke on the video game console.

When I first started shooting I was a lot more passive when that dumb shit would be happening, but when I started shooting and collecting the images in a book people were like… “Oh fuck I want to get in that book” and would think up stuff to do. In a strange way it planted a seed in people’s minds. Everyone likes to be remembered in a little weird way, to be part of something. Even if it’s totally fucking perverted and on fire and homo-erotic.

The people in the photos don’t mind being up on the internet doing dumb shit? 

Most of my friends are pieces of shit that didn’t become lawyers or doctors, they became self employed so they didn’t really mind. I don’t know if I could have pulled it off a few years ago when everyone’s careers were just getting started but now these people are 30 and it was a long time ago so it’s not so bad. If it was only three years ago people would be like “Dude you had your dick on fire 3 years ago, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”

So you didn’t have to convince your friends in the photos to become naked? They just sort-of … did? 

Well not to get too serious because the blog is not supposed to be serious but, being naked is something that’s been made vulgar by contemporary society because of religion and this and that, so one of the ways to try and do the most vulgar thing is usually pull your dick out, break something, take a shit, essentially act like an animal. A lot of people say “Oh are you guys gay?” and I always say no. It was about shock factor. Like if your friend was bending over tying their shoes it’d be funny to pull down your pants and act like you were butt fucking them. We had no jock friends who were homophobic so for us it was more just a stupid act, you know?

Who are the bands in the photos?

To date I’ve only posted two band photos, Grade and Daughters. Grade was a really seminal hardcore band from Burlington, Ontario. Unfortunately, as much as I love them, they spawned a terrible second wave of emo, but I thought they were one of the first bands that did it really well. They were really sincere about it, and it was before hardcore became this fuckin’ circus show of kids with bangs. I don’t want to sound like a jaded asshole because every preceding generation is like “Man they’re fuckin’ up punk” but whatever, I think the state of hardcore sucks and they were one of the last really good bands that played melodic hardcore. Daughters were a band from Rhode Island that were a really ripping band that had this San Diego, The Locust kind of sound but they were mixed with really crazy breakdowns. I was touring with bands at that time and I’d go on the road so I have old photos from shows like Rocket from the Crypt, At-the Drive In, Converge, Mastodon, Burnt by the Sun, and then as I got older I started going to Toronto and I started going to see The Deadly Snakes, The Sadies, Royal City… I just always thought it was kind of funny to take a photo of bands up close with a Polaroid. For instance, I have a really stupid photo of me in front of Cradle of Filth, and it’s just really funny to be like here’ s a really shitty photo of me with Cradle of Filth.

Where are most of the photos on the blog taken?

From ’98 until 2001 I was in Mississauga, which is a suburb about half an hour west of Toronto, and I was still in high school, it was a regular suburban high school and at night I would meet up with my friends and go to punk shows. For the rest of the photos, the ages 20- 24 were taken in various places in Toronto and then it’ll link up to the band going on tour in the States and Eastern Canada. If the photos are inside and there’s fire that was when we lived at this infamous house called 148. It was massive and we had the place to ourselves — the fuckin landlord never came. You could ride shit down the stairs and light shit on fire. If a hole got put in the wall you could be like whatever… we’ll fix it.

Do you think these photos are about Canadian kids? Canadian kids with not much to do? 

I think it’s distinctly suburban. It’s like you’re young, you don’t have a lot of money because you’re a fuckin’ teenager, you make 60 bucks a week at your job, and you have to figure out how to make your own fun. And it was usually horseing around at parks and shit like that. I think it came more out of a need to have a scene as opposed to having expensive things to do. The suburbs are boring — you’re walking everywhere, its all fuckin’ strip malls, and you just end up in someone’s basement and one thing leads to another and you’re smoking weed and throwing a brick through a window seems like a good idea and then the cops come, you evade the cops, that’s fuckin wicked, and then the next day you live to tell about it. You just create your own fun, you know? There was no need to throw that fuckin’ brick through the window but it was fuckin’ awesome at the time.

Maybe the difference between Canadian and American teenage fun is in Canada we’re legal a few years sooner so we get over the bars and sink into house parties.  

And you have to deal with winter when it’s fucking freezing you actually have to congregate in basements. From age 14 onwards every summer I would go out on tour and so I would come back to school and people would ask about my summer and I’d tell them I went on tour and people would imagine that I was doing this Rolling Stones tour… and I’m going “No we were in this piece of shit van, you don’t eat for a day and a half.” So I always felt like slightly different from other people. We were touring and I’d be 16 going to bars in the States, so I think just because of that the bar wasn’t like Shangri-La for us. Just fuckin’ causing shit was the true desire and getting away with it and living to tell the story.

You guys are at the Emporium gallery which was an awesome DIY space in Montreal, what’s up with that?

Yeah I just wanted to have a rad space!  Makin your own scene, being DIY has always been important to me because there’s so much shit out there that’s fabricated and fake and consumption driven. I knew none of these people were going to buy art, they can’t even buy a fucking 6 pack when they want to get drunk, so to think they can buy a thousand dollar piece is lunacy! Sure, would I have loved to have sold more work? Absolutely, but in the end of the day to say we put on 30 great exhibitions, it’s something that I’ll always be really proud of. Give me your weirdos, give me your fuckin rejects, give me just crazy motherfuckers, because they create the best art. I mean, I get academic process, I get critique, Mark Rothko, get it, I get all that. But I wanna see something fucking… guys like Dennis Chow ripping out satan-based artwork. I come from a punk rock background and it doesn’t mean that everything needs to be extreme, but I’m fine with saying “I like that art, because I think it’s cool.” That to me is sufficient, instead of making this big fuckin conceptual argument for it. I find that a lot of the people who overly have to explain their art make shit art. You never hear a musician go, “Okay, the theoretical construct behind this rock song is the amplification of chords.” You hear a Zeppelin song and you fuckin head bang, you get it. 

Are you still interested in shooting the same kind of stuff? 

Well no, definitely not. I think you just mature, I remember being a kid and these old punkers would start their new band and it would be country and I’d be like, “What the fuck man?” But you just get sick of doing the same thing. Now that I’m 30 if I was shooting 18 year olds shirtless at a party I’d feel like a fuckin creep, so my tastes have changed. You find something you like and you work backwards. That’s kind of why I veered away from shooting boners. It only gets you so far.