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.
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