I may have sung this song back in 1985 when I took this self portrait, but never could have imagined the year 2022, or what it is like to be sixty four. Losing my hair, and slowly losing memories. But still feeling happy, alive, and creative.
The future is unknown to everyone, and the best we can do is make good choices in the moment hoping that they will have a positive outcome in the future. In every moment of time we make a choice. Words to live by.
This photo appears in the book: Toronto Days, available at Blurb Books.
Baking Mixes brings to mind recipes. The recipe for this photo comes via Lee Friedlander. That is: organize a large amount of information in a dynamic composition. Friedlander is a master of this approach. For documentary photography, it seems the more information, the better. It tells us a lot about the culture and society of a specific time and place. I shall keep on photographing the social landscape with a few different recipes, and hopefully learn some new ones before I’m done.
I thought I’d post some pages from my recently released photobook Toronto Hi-Fi, and explain my editing process. Putting together a photobook of forty year old material is a challenging procedure–from scanning the negatives to choosing the photos, to sequencing them in logical fashion. It’s a task that I enjoy and hopefully improve upon with each project.
I’m always pondering what to include and what to leave out. With this book, I wanted to use photos that were not in my previous four Toronto books, ones that were strong on their own, without any context or adhering to a specific theme. There were several hundred images to choose from and I had to narrow it down to about ninety. (Print-on-demand books are expensive already, and any more would make it just too pricey.) I tried not to let subjectivity get in the way–just my strongest black and white shots.
The title eluded me. My wife suggested “Hat and Jacket” as I had lots of photos with elderly men wearing hats, which was still a thing in the 1980s. I ended up doing one spread of “men with hats,” but seized on the idea of my love of music being a theme. The Toronto Hi-Fi photo (taken before I even moved to Toronto) seemed appropriate as the cornerstone. I often walk around with songs in my head and thought of the phrase “a camera full of film and a head full of songs.” The book now had a basic form; choosing the images got easier.
I’m happy with the results and get the usual rush of nostalgia when I think about my early days in Toronto. I said this in the afterword: “This book is dedicated to the people who have helped me along the way. To the lovers of music, and those who roam the world with a camera. To those who love Toronto, and those who bathe in the warm glow of nostalgia. And to the folks who follow me on social media and take an interest in my photos. I appreciate your giving new life to this work that was barely seen in the 1980s.”
Toronto Hi-Fi Photographs by Avard Woolaver Hardcover, 42 pages; 89 b&w photos 20 x 25 cm / 8 x 10 in.
These are photos from a folder on my computer titled: Toronto Unseen. They are images of Toronto taken in the 1980s and 1990s that have previously not been posted or published–unseen by the public. I will post them periodically on my blog and talk a little about them.
The photo above was taken in 1982, and I’m unsure of the location. I sometimes look at the contact sheet for clues, and it seems that went to the Danforth Music Hall to see a movie, so it may have been taken on the Danforth. I like this one–people waiting for the bus, or a taxi, life in the big city. I was in my second year of photography studies at Ryerson and taking street photos almost every day, on the lookout for scenes like this one. It was on one of the first rolls taken with my Rollei 35–an amazing little camera with a fixed 40mm Zeiss Sonar lens. Totally manual–you even have to guess the focus. It took a bit of getting used to!
This photo was on the first roll of film after I arrived in Toronto in September 1980. It was across the street from my apartment, literally the first thing I saw when I stepped outside to do my first day of shooting and exploring the city. My camera was still loaded with Kodak Panatomic-X that I was shooting in Nova Scotia. I quickly found out that this 32 ASA fine grain film was unsuitable for street photography and switched to Tri-X after that. These two store fronts were a revelation of sorts. I could never have taken this photo anywhere in Nova Scotia. These type of storefronts just didn’t exist, or at least they weren’t easily seen. Toronto was so foreign, and multicultural that it seemed like a different country. It was exciting and amazing, and I had a camera. It was the start of my love affair with Toronto.
Fast forward fourteen years. I’m back in Toronto after the previous six years teaching English in Japan. Toronto seems smaller and more spacious compared to Japanese cities. I’m still shooting with the Rollei 35, doing less street photography, but trying to refine my approach. I wanted my pictures to be more clever, or at least say something more. With this one I tried to juxtapose the sign “for the human race” with the boy, (racing!) across the bridge with his dog.
These days I’m back living in rural Nova Scotia, where I started out. I have few opportunities to do any kind of street photography, but I’m still refining my vision and trying to take time to observe the world around me.
