Avery Woolworth was just about to start eating his Honey Nut Cheerios TM when he noticed the headless mannequin staring at him. “She was in her birthday suit so I got her a bathrobe”, Woolworth said. It is unclear how this female form gained access to his living room. Local authorities are investigating.
It’s Flashback Friday, a day when social media users post photos and videos from the past. On this Flashback Friday (#FBF), I have chosen photos from my book Toronto Flashback (1980-1986). Looking at these images inevitably brings feelings of nostalgia. I remember being 22, walking the streets with my camera, going out to clubs, hanging out with friends–living life to the fullest. We can’t go back, but photographs can help us remember.
Michael Amo writes in the introduction, “I encountered Avard for the first time in 1980. It was the first class of our foundational year of a four year program “Photographic Arts” at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. Behold a bunch of first year students dressed like the Culture Club version of artists: leggings, scarves, Gitanes. Then there was Avard with his tractor-friendly jeans and Emerson, Lake and Palmer hair all freshly laundered from a recent stint in the railway yards in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Strangely, he was smiling. Living in the city for the first time, I quickly noticed how seldom Torontonians seem to smile or make eye contact. Avard did both and our friendship was born.
We grew up in rural places, Avard and I, which may have contributed to our instant bond. I came from a small Ontario town. Avard came from his family farm in Nova Scotia, a truly beautiful place which has been in the family for many generations. I think that sense of psychic dislocation – tree to stone, stream to street, sky to wire – had a profound effect on both of us. Overnight, our green frame of reference was gone, sending us on a search for something that would reflect our former selves – our identity, our humanity – back at us in the clatter and concrete of the city.
For me, that is the hallmark of Avard’s photography. It started in Toronto in 1980 and it continues to this day: a search for the human element even when there are no humans in sight. It might be the ragged dignity of the regulars in a pawn shop, the soaring majesty of a walkway at City Hall overhanging a single, stout pedestrian or simply the intersection of two unpeopled snow-filled streets, tire tracks tracing the paths of those who’ve come and gone. In every instance, there is a sense that we are in the picture – we being all those souls doing our best to make our way in the world. Somehow Avard’s lens finds us even when we’re not there.
There’s a family story about Avard – how, as a small boy, he was placed in a wooden box at the edge of a field while his father plowed row after row on his tractor. The young Avard would sit and watch for hours.
When Avard arrived in Toronto in 1980, he brought that watchfulness with him, that deep-seated empathy for humans going about their solitary business, a simultaneous loneliness and delight in our ceaseless effort to remake the world in our own image. I don’t know if there’s a word for that singular emotion but I do know it can found in the images in this book.”
Flashback Friday…
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Scale can be deceiving in photographs, and sometimes it intended to be that way. A photograph can be both fact and fiction, both a document and a lie. It may contain numerous narratives that spring from our imagination. It can be staged or manipulated in Photoshop, yet still be a document. These days the line between fact and fiction has become blurred.
My photography has always been rooted in the documentary tradition–I’m not one for manipulation, or post-production. Most everything is achieved by where I stand and when I take the photo. (Light is a crucial component as well.) But sometimes I aim to take photos that are ambiguous. They look like manipulated photos, yet they are not. Using scale is one way to achieve this sense of ambiguity.
The interesting thing about scale (and taking photos in general) is that sometimes elements are unintentional and noticed well after the photo is taken. In my case, it is usually pointed out by someone on social media. French photographer David Farreny has a group on Flickr called Uncertain Scales in which he chooses photos that have a sense of ambiguous scale. Most of the photos in this post were chosen by him for his Flickr group.
Scale is one more element that brings playfulness, mystery, or whimsy into the frame, and thus reminds us that those are all part of our everyday life.
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I worked in Alberta in the summer of 1979–a summer job on the railway gang and a break from my studies at Acadia University. I managed to get into Edmonton a few weekends that summer and was eager to photograph in an urban environment as I had been living in the small town of Wolfville and hadn’t done much city photography.
I would stay at a dive hotel off Jasper Avenue in Edmonton called the Gateway Hotel (now long gone)–$15 a night, or $16 with a small black and white TV. It was the most basic of accommodation but such a feeling of freedom and independence. I was twenty years old and free to explore the city with my camera–my Jack Kerouac days. And being alone was a big part of it. Photography for me, has mostly been a solitary pursuit. I don’t prefer to be with others when I’m wandering with my camera.
I remember the city being really quiet on Sundays. Almost no stores were open, but you could see a movie, go to the library, or to a restaurant. I saw Woody Allen’s Manhattan that summer and heard Blondie’s Heart of Glass for the first time in a department store. Alberta seemed like the wild west in some ways–lots of red necks driving pick-up trucks. But Edmonton is quite a cultural center with a thriving arts scene. I really enjoyed my time there.
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My life was quite different forty years ago in 1979. I remember some of that time, but a lot is forgotten. But photographs have a way of bringing the past into sharp focus in a way that almost nothing else can. A moment in 1979, frozen in time.
In 1979, I was in my second year at Acadia University living in residence at Chipman House. I had bought my first guitar–a used Marlin for $25. (This guitar is a Korean knockoff of the legendary Martin guitar–I still play that guitar to this day.) Although I spent some time on my studies, my real passion was taking photographs. Doing assignments for the school paper The Athenaeum was good training and taught me a lot about getting the shot even under difficult conditions. It also taught me the importance of meeting deadlines. We would often be working frantically in the darkroom right up until the last minute before putting the paper to bed.
In the summer of 1979, I got a job working on a railway gang in Wainwright, Alberta. How I got that job, and ended up there is a long and winding story. It was a summer of physical labour, working in the sun doing track maintenance–a good job for a twenty year old. With my photographs, I tried then as I do now, to capture a mood, or a feeling. I didn’t know much back then, but I could recognize good light and at times could capture a moment. It’s what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart.”
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