These are photos taken in a neighborhood of Toronto called, The Junction. I lived in this neighborhood from 1982-1986. For part of that time I was attending Ryerson in the downtown core, and did most of my street photography there. But I also took the time to walk around the Junction with my camera recording everyday scenes. It may have been a little gritty and down-trodden, but the area had a lot of character, a lot of soul.
Today, The Junction is totally revitalized with lots of cafes and bars and a vibrant night life. Back in the 1980s it was a dry area (no alcohol was sold) and it meant a long trek to the liquor on public transit. I miss those carefree days days of my youth.
The series “Toronto Gone” puts a focus on things that have disappeared–buildings, businesses, parking lots, cars, people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s and 1990s prior to the condo boom, and before the widespread use of computers and cell phones.
Here is an excerpt from Shawn Micallef’s piece in the Toronto Star about my Toronto Days exhibition in 2018:
“Photographs of Toronto from the recent past are often the most fascinating. Those from recent decades look a lot like images of today, but are just a little different compared to those from a century ago, which can be unrecognizable. Those are great too, but pictures of Toronto from the decades before the now 20-year building boom began particularly fascinate me.
It’s a city that’s still in the living memory of many people, but easy to forget as the pace of change here has been so quick. “Toronto Days” is an exhibition at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts of Avard Woolaver’s photographs of the city taken between 1980 and 1995 and are a compelling look back — but not too far back.
The great genius of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror is that it’s set in the not-too-distant future, where the differences, mostly technological, are subtle. It’s a future we can instantly recognize and relate to, just like Woolaver’s Toronto, a city just before the city we know today caught in a kind of a dreamy haze.
It’s a city of parking lots, rusted cars, “fishbowl” buses with bulging windshields, endless cigarettes and men wearing proper hats. The skyline in Woolaver’s photos is thin too, and empty lots along King and Queen streets seem like photos of a rust-belt city rather than the bustling neighbourhoods we know today.
Woolaver began taking his Toronto photos when he moved here from Nova Scotia to study photography at Ryerson. Influenced by great social landscape photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, taking pictures was a way to get to know his new city.”
I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months, and it may lead to a new book.
Looking back now at the photos I spent my precious film on back then, so much comes back to me about dropped into a new environment. We use our creative tools as extensions of ourselves; they help us understand and define our place in the world. For me, having a camera in my hand at all times helped me remember, You only get to do this once. We have to take time and see it, as clearly as we can.
I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months–photos taken in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s. It may lead to a new book.
Toronto is gone. Or at least parts of it. Buildings, businesses, parking lots, and people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s have disappeared, and been replaced by others. It’s part of the inevitable cycle of death and rebirth, of disappearance and reappearance. There is no way to know exactly what aspects of a place will change. So in some sense the photos are accidental. Their significance now is something I never could have foreseen.
I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months–photos taken in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s. It may lead to a new book.
During the years 1980-1986, I did a lot of street photography in Toronto. For the past four years I have been scanning an archive of this material, and posting it online. Toronto Gone represents the final photos, the ones I have not posted before or published.
That Toronto is gone. Or at least parts of it. Buildings, businesses, parking lots, and people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s have disappeared, and been replaced by others. It’s part of the inevitable cycle of death and rebirth, of disappearance and reappearance. There is no way to know exactly what aspects of a place will change. So in some sense the photos are accidental. Their significance now is something I never could have foreseen.
I still feel the same way about Toronto as I did when I took the photos, thirty-odd years ago. I still love the vibrant neighborhoods, the parks, the restaurants and beaches. And the people are nice, not overly friendly but civil and courteous. I haven’t lived there for 15 years but it still feels comfortable, like home.
There are roughly 25,000 images in my files, with 90 percent of them black and white negatives. There hasn’t been a much of a method to the scanning–just choose the strongest photos. It has made me realize that I was a poor editor when I took the photos, and I’m a bit more proficient today. In the ’80s, I mostly processed the film, made contact sheets, and moved on. Sometimes I took the time to study the contact sheets, and on occasion made work prints or exhibition prints of the best images.
Looking at these images today I have a lot of time to reflect on them. Many of the photos I have no recollection of taking; I just know they were taken for a reason. (And the reason usually had to be good one. I didn’t waste much film then on frivolous photos; film, paper, and chemicals were not cheap on a student budget.) Colour cost more than black-and-white, and my access to a colour darkroom was limited. I usually took only one photo of a person or scene, unless it was an event like a parade. And even then, most of the photo were one-offs. For this reason it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint a location.
I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months, and it may lead to a new book.
