The Image Journey

Published December 13, 2020 by avardw

Toronto In Colour – my camera sees the darndest things

Toronto In Colour: the 1980s, photographs by Avard Woolaver, photo book,

The photos in my new book, Toronto In Colour: the 1980s, were taken during my time studying at Ryerson and a few years beyond graduation. I was doing street photography, looking for interesting people and scenes. My contact sheets formed a sort of visual diary. I carried my camera everywhere and shot about 800 rolls of film.

These images lay dormant for over thirty years. In 2016, with the encouragement of a friend and former classmate Michael Amo, I began scanning the negatives and posting the images on social media. Seeing images that had lain dormant for thirty-plus years was certainly a voyage of rediscovery! It seems there is a sense of nostalgia in the work. People love to remember their younger days and see a city that in some ways no longer exists. I thought that producing books would be a good way to edit the work and give it some structure. I put a lot of effort into the selection and sequencing of the images.

My intention is to connect with people in a meaningful way. Photography is one way of doing this. Toronto In Colour: the 1980s will be released on December 15, 2020, and will be for sale at Blurb Books.

Here are a few photos from the book. My camera sees the darndest things.

Ontario Place, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Wood Street, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Gerrard East and Boston Avenue, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Parliament Street, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

TTC Streetcar, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Allan Gardens, Toronto, 1981 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Toronto

Blurb Book photo book photography Toronto Toronto In Colour -the 1980s

Published December 2, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Streets in Colour

I thought I’d post some Toronto streets in colour for a change, as most of my output in the 1980s was in black and white. There is another reason, too. Shortly, I’ll be releasing a new book titled, Toronto In Colour: the 1980s that features a collection of colour photographs not seen in the previous three Toronto books; many of these images, in fact, haven’t ever been posted or published at all.

These decades old photos have been saved for the future. At 1/60 of a second per photo, there is only a few seconds worth of time in the entire book. Yet the photographs are so full of history and information, with stories both obvious, and unknown; both real and imagined. For me having the ability to stop time for an instant still seems magical.

Corey Rice writes about Roland Barthes’s analysis of a photograph: “When we look at a photograph, we are confronted with what Barthes labels the “having-been-there” quality of its contents. It is a testament to the existence of a specific thing in a specific place at a specific time. I can paint your portrait from anywhere in the world, but I can photograph you only when you are in front of my camera. Similarly, a photograph offers a view of the world that you will never have access to except through the photo. You can look but you cannot touch. A photograph can only show the past—but it represents it in such a way that it appears in the present. This paradox lends every photograph a touch of nostalgia or longing.”

The older I get, it seems the more my nostalgia grows for those days in my twenties, walking around the streets of Toronto with my camera. I hope you enjoy this small selection from my upcoming book. Stay tuned!

Rio Theatre, Yonge Street, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Toronto

1980s colour street photography Toronto Toronto streets in colour

Published November 6, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Flashback – a selection of colour photos

Toronto Flashback, colour, — Queen Street West, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

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.

Recently blogTO, a popular online Toronto publication, reposted a feature about my Toronto Flashback series. It touches on my motivation for taking the photos, and why I decided to scan and publish them. I’ll include a link here: https://www.blogto.com/city/2016/08/a_flashback_to_the_gritty_toronto_of_the_1980s/

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.

Totonto Flashback, colour, — Wellesley Station, Toronto, 1981 – © Avard Woolaver

Colour Film Photography Photography Toronto

1980s colour photography film photography Toronto Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)

Published October 16, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – Random scenes, random moments

random scenes, random moments, colour, photography, — High Park, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

I enjoy capturing random scenes and random moments–a stream of consciousness approach that is a bit like meditation with a camera. When I used to walk around Toronto with my camera in the 1980s, I usually had nothing special in mind that I wanted to photograph. The same is true today, some forty years later. It could be the right light or interesting patterns, or a sudden silhouette, any number of things that propel me to press the shutter. The capturing of random scenes is both a strength and a weakness. One one hand there is an absolute freedom to it–capturing anything that gets my attention. On the other side, if there is often no project in mind it seems aimless.

I have learned over time to see themes in my photos that may become apparent after years or may be pointed out by viewers online. That’s part of the beauty of the random approach. It’s like letting your mind wander with a camera in hand, then putting a shape to it later on. For me, editing is a more difficult task than taking the photos, but both are rewarding.

The photos I have chosen for this post have been scanned quite recently, so I find a freshness to them even though they were taken decades ago. Probably only 10 percent of my output in the 1980s was in colour, and for this reason I have a special fondness for them.

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.

Downtown Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Colour Photography Toronto

colour photography random scenes Toronto Gone

Published October 10, 2020 by avardw

Recent black and white photos

During the pandemic I have been in relative isolation, and have taken some comfort in returning to black and white photography. It takes me back to the late 1970s when I first learned to process and print black and white film. These days, however, I shoot everything digitally in colour, and do the conversions to monochrome later–it leaves more options.

I’m in my early sixties, which means I grew up with a black-and-white television. When I was young our TV got two channels, both of them snowy. Even shows that had been filmed in colour were, in our household and others like ours, translated into varying shades of grey.

And I loved paging through Life magazine; there, too, reality was shown in black and white. It became my default understanding of what a photo was.

Old family photos in my parents’ and grandparents’ albums, similarly, were in black and white. We had colour film, of course, and I enjoyed my father’s colour slides (shown on a big screen in the living room when we had company or at Christmas). But the basic set of beliefs I had about photos or images was that they were in black and white.

I think there’s some level at which, when I got seriously into photography in my twenties, I was working from that assumption. I still love looking at tonal variation and shades of grey—how a black-and-white photo can contain everything from deepest inky black to a pale, foggy, mist, to white and nearly silver. Black and white isn’t lacking, or second-best; it’s just different. American photographer Robert Frank called it the colours of hope and despair.

And it’s not better. There can be a kind of high-handedness about it, a sort of snooty, superior quality. A whiff of reading Russian novels at breakfast and watching only foreign films, an “I’m better than you” air. That’s an empty pretense, though. There doesn’t need to be any message in using it.

It’s beautiful. Colour is beautiful. Both are great—a pleasure to shoot, a pleasure to look at.