It’s Throwback Thursday (#TBT), and today I’m going back 40 years to a time when many business names had not yet become acronyms. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was not yet CIBC, and Kentucky Fried Chicken was not yet KFC. I spent a lot of time on Carlton street in those days. I lived a little further east near Sherbourne Street, and would see concerts and hockey games at Maple Leaf Gardens, and movies at the Carlton Cinema.
This photo appeals to me in several ways, but most of all because of what the mixed lighting sources do to the colour. The mixture of neon, fluorescent, and daylight really bring the scene alive. Also, I love Laura Secord chocolate!
Hi! If you’re new here, my name is Avard Woolaver, and I’m a photographer based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Many of you have probably found this website from my one of my social media platforms. I’ve recently stopped posting photos on Instagram but hope to spend more time posting on this site. So here’s an introduction to my work!
A lot of the people who follow me are especially interested in my Toronto photos, taken mostly during the 1980s. (The above photo, previously unpublished, is an example.) I did a lot of street photography and urban landscapes during and after my photography studies at Ryerson University. The negatives sat sorted in files on a bookcase for thirty years before I started scanning them in 2016. The photos are very nostalgic for me–a blast from the past.
One of my main interests is New Topographics–the human-altered landscape. With the rapid advance of the climate emergency, our mismanagement of the environment is becoming more central to my work. I want my photos to be visually interesting, but also carry a message.
Another one of my interests deals with visual perception. My Wish You Were Here series aims to challenge the viewers’ attention in a subtle way by finding everyday scenes with elements of whimsy and surrealism. Emulating artists like Rene Magritte and Lee Friedlander, I want to make the familiar seem a little strange, but without Photoshop or image manipulation. These photos come about through observation, using juxtaposition, reflection, typography, and scale.
My travels have taken me various places in the world. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked in Japan, which gave me a chance to visit southeast Asia. Travel photography is exciting because nearly everything is new and interesting, and you may never be in that place again.
Along with photographing the unfamiliar, I do a lot of revisiting familiar scenes during different times and seasons. A familiar scene can seem so changed under different lighting conditions. I pass the scene below on a daily basis and have photographed it numerous times. It never gets old.
Finally, I like doing self-portraits, and also incorporating humour in my photos when I can. I saw some Lee Friedlander self-portraits when I first got a camera, and they made a lasting impression.
It’s winter in Canada–a good time to post a selection of snow photos. It a wonderful sight to see the landscape transformed by a blanket of fresh fallen snow. In the following poem Emily Dickinson makes mention of the snow sifting down, making an even face of mountain and plain.
Taking snow photos is a good way to connect with the season, and enjoy the absolutely unique qualities of winter. On windy days, photographing snow is a good way to photograph the elusive wind. There are amazing shadows cast on sunny days, and an abundance of soft textures. I like to go out around twilight time when the snow is coming down. It’s a good opportunity to use a flash to freeze the snowflakes.
Snow by Emily Dickinson
It sifts from leaden sieves, It powders all the wood, It fills with alabaster wool The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face Of mountain and of plain, — Unbroken forehead from the east Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence, It wraps it, rail by rail, Till it is lost in fleeces; It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and stem, — The summer’s empty room, Acres of seams where harvests were, Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts, As ankles of a queen, — Then stills its artisans like ghosts, Denying they have been.
I have decided to post some recent colour photos. It has been an unusual year with the Covid-19 pandemic, and I have mostly stuck close to home. However, this has not deterred me from taking my usual photos.
When I take a walk with my camera, I’m always on the lookout for the unusual–odd scenes, quirky juxtapositions. To me unusual things are more visually interesting. They demand our attention in different ways than traditional beauty does.
Do you remember those unforgettable Hipgnosis album covers? If you are around my age, you probably spent a lot of time in your teenage years listening to LPs and studying the album covers. You would play side one, then flip over to side two, all the while contemplating the meaning of the prism on the cover. The album art was sometimes humorous, but often it was surreal and enigmatic–very artsy, and unusual.
When I got a camera some years later I remembered those cool Hipgnosis creations (by Storm Thorgerson) and looked for photos with similar moods and juxtapositions. A discarded door on a sidewalk, an odd reflection in a mirror, a blank sign–this lead me to produce a series titled: Wish You Were Here. Thorgerson was good at isolating odd elements in the image, much like the painter René Magritte. It was clear what you were supposed to notice, but an intended meaning was not so clear. This ambiguity can draw you in and keep you looking for a long time.
I take photos for many different reasons, but am always on the lookout for those quirky, off-beat scenes–the ones that make you do a double-take.
Toronto Flashback (1980-1986) was self published in 2016. It came about with the scanning of negatives that had lain dormant for over thirty years. I was surprised by what came out of the scanner, as I had forgotten many of the images. Thirty plus years will do that to one’s memory. And there are so many images in the Toronto work to recall–over 800 rolls of film.
Back in the 1980s I would shoot a roll of film (usually black and white), process it a few days later and make a contact sheet. After that I might make an enlargement of one or two of the strongest shots, and then move on. The contact sheets may be reviewed from time to time when preparing for an exhibition, but basically I didn’t look at them for years and years.
Looking back, I wish I had taken more colour photos, but am thankful for the ones I have. There were reasons for not shooting much colour. First, there was the added cost; second, I didn’t have much access to a colour darkroom to make prints. And in those days black and white was the preferred medium for fine art and documentary photographers. William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Edward Burtynsky and other colour specialists were just emerging in the art world, and colour photography was not yet fully accepted in the art world.
There is a sense of hyper realism in a colour photograph, like looking at a Technicolor movie, that you don’t get with the more abstract black and white view. And there’s also the psychological component of how the colours make us feel. There have been numerous requests that I post and publish more of my Toronto colour work, so my next book will be “Toronto Flashback in Colour.” Stay tuned.
