I’ve always been interested in what I think of as “surrealism in everyday life.” (My “Wish You Were Here” series has dealt with this in the past.) Two years ago, I visited Belgium for the first time. My family stayed in Walonia, the francophone southern region, in Liège. We also visited Brussels and took in the wonderful Magritte Museum.
My impression of the country was that Rene Magritte’s surrealist perspective was somehow typical of Belgium. I only spent a week there, but everyday, and literally everywhere, I saw details that screamed surrealism. As Magritte said, “Everyday objects shriek aloud.” There was so much photographic potential for juxtaposition; ambiguity, fantasy, and humour.
Rosetti Rivera writes in Belgium Express: “Belgian surrealism does not only show itself in bold and garish ways. More often than not, it hides within the subtleties of everyday life. If you don’t look hard enough, you may easily overlook those quiet expressions of delightful absurdity that could add a ton of humor and spice to your day.” She recommends paying attention to the architectural mismash, lamp posts, sidewalks, and windows.
I’m hoping to go back to Belgium and explore more of this fascinating and culturally rich country, and “be on the lookout for what has never been.”
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 (The above photo, previously unpublished, is an example.)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.
I spent a few days in Moscow in late June, 1993. My journey began in Kobe, Japan and a ferry ride to Shanghai, China. After that I made my way to Beijing where I caught the Trans-Siberian to Moscow. I had been working in Japan and decided to return to Canada heading westward across Asia and Europe, rather than the usual flight to Toronto.
My impressions of post-Soviet Russia were that it was generally run down and in disrepair. People in Moscow were quite friendly and welcoming, though some of them were suspicious of my picture taking. Shelves at the supermarkets were quite bare and my morning breakfast was lard on bread. I felt sorry for the women selling dogs and cats outside the train station, trying to earn a living. The economy was in rough shape and American dollars were preferred over Rubles. I got a drive across the city in an ambulance; the driver was earning extra money using it as a taxi. It seemed that the free enterprise system had yet to catch on. It also seemed to me like the wild west.
At the same time there was a great sense of art and history everywhere–amazing architecture and museums. The Moscow metro has some extravagantly designed stations such as Electrozavodskaya that resembles a museum rather than a subway station. In 1993 a metro fare was the equivalent of one cent. There were lots of buskers and street performers on the tourist filled Arbat Street. Some young people were playing American blues songs–a sense of the pervasiveness of American pop culture. I did some street photography there, as well as around the Kremlin.
1993 was the year of the Russian constitutional crisis— a political stand-off between the Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament that was resolved by military force. This took place in early October. The ten-day conflict became the deadliest single event of street fighting in Moscow’s history since the Russian Revolution–147 people were killed and 437 wounded. The country was in a state of drastic change.
Perhaps my photos don’t capture this sense of unrest and transition, but they serve as a document of life in Moscow a few years after the the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
More photos this series are in the Moscow 1993 menu. I will be posting colour photos from this series at a later date.
Here are my favourite photos of 2020. What a long, strange trip this year has been–one of isolation, uncertainty, and sadness as the pandemic spread around the world and took so many lives. It’s also been a year of hope– people have been brought together in unexpected ways, and a vaccines have been developed in record time. We can only wish for a better year in 2021.
The photo above seems to symbolize my year. It shows a twisted web of grape vines in the fog, illuminated by a flash. It has been a foggy year, but not without it’s moments of brightness. My year started out in Nagoya, Japan. My family was on a big trip through Europe and Japan–the trip of a lifetime for us. We started out in France in November and finished in Budapest, Hungary, in early March. We had to cut our trip short by three weeks in order to get back to Canada before the pandemic. The trip was fantastic in every way, and has provided a wealth of memories for my family.
I have continued to work on my photography–selling prints from my website Shop, and putting together photo books. The most recent is Toronto In Colour: the 1980s.
This was taken on the Tokyo Sakura Tram in late January, 2020. It is the only streetcar left in Tokyo, running between Minowabashi Station and Waseda Station (12.2 kilometers; 30 stations). The slow pace of the streetcar seemed out of step with the bustle of the city and reminded me of what Tokyo must have been like in the old days.
Taken along the Meuse River in Liege, Belgium, where I went jogging everyday (sometimes I did more photography than jogging!) It’s a juxtaposition of the new and the old, a thing I noticed a lot in Europe.
The metro in Prague was beautifully designed, with wonderful colours. I waited for the train to start so that the door was framed in the center of the entrance.
A train station in Budapest, Hungary. I remember having to hold my phone high over my head to get this photo. I just realized that all the travel photos so far include some means of transportation. Interesting!
Back in Canada in March to a pandemic lockdown, and snow. We saw almost no snow on our four month trip, but weren’t surprised to see it in Nova Scotia in March.
I really missed visiting my mother while I was away. She has dementia and is almost deaf, so communicating through glass with a cell phone proved to be challenging. But it was much better than not seeing her at all.
I arrived in Nagoya, Japan in January 1987–met at the station by Mike and Richard, my friends from Ryerson. Mike had said in a voice tape sent to me in Toronto, that living in Japan was like “putting your brain in a tin can and launching it into space.” And he was right. I had studied some Japanese at U of T, but nothing could have prepared me for life in Japan. Everything was so different.
The culture shock wore off as the months passed. I learned the language, got accustomed to teaching English and learned how to get around. Perhaps the most rewarding thing was a chance encounter with some locals that lead to a life-long friendship. From them I learned that people are basically the same everywhere.
And I continued to take photos with my Rollei 35. These photos were taken in the first few months when everything seemed fresh and new. I wish I had taken more, but living and working in Nagoya was so all-consuming that there wasn’t much room left for creative endeavors.
I look back on my six years in Nagoya, Japan with great fondness. The experience had such a great impact on my life. I plan to go back there next year with my family. I can hardly wait.
