This is the location that inspired Mark Gane of Martha and the Muffins to write the 1980 hit song “Echo Beach.” The photo was taken at Sunnyside Beach, Toronto, in 1984.
On a silent summer evening/The sky’s alive with lights/A building in the distance/Surrealistic sight
From Wikipedia: “Echo Beach, as mentioned in the song, does not refer to a real beach, but rather a symbolic notion of somewhere the narrator would rather be, somewhere ‘far away in time.’ The song was created while Gane was working checking wallpaper for printing faults. He found the work rather dull and his mind drifted to times he would like to live over again. One such time was an evening spent at Sunnyside Beach on the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Toronto in summer. It was only the third song that Gane had written.”
When I took the photo, I had no notion of the connection with the song. I did, however, think that the lone building was quite surreal, appearing like a non sequitor on the blank shoreline.
The song that comes to mind when I look at the photo is “You Never Give Me Your Money” and the line “Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.” I had just graduated from Ryerson, and was uncertain about my future in the recession of the 1980s. Little did I know that three years later I’d be living in Japan.
When I reflect on the photo now, that stage of my life does seem “faraway in time.” I was in my twenties then, and I’m in my sixties now. I have a different perspective, looking back at those years. Some may call it wisdom, but I prefer the term “road tested.”
I saw many Toronto faces in the 1980s. Often people were present in my street scenes, but not the main feature. But sometimes the people were front and center. My way of approaching people varied, depending on the situation, but I aimed for the moment. Sometimes it seemed better to take a candid photo, whereas other times it seemed more appropriate to talk to the person and ask if I could take a photo.
Many of these photos were taken at Yonge and Dundas, near the entrance to the Eaton Centre–a hub of activity where people of all stripes mixed and mingled and crossed paths. There were buskers, office workers, students, homeless people, and people out shopping. I mostly used a wide angle lens and tried to blend into the environment rather than call attention to myself. And I usually took only one photo of a particular person or group.
Looking back at these photos, I wonder what the children have done in their lives, if the adults are happy in their old age, and if the older adults are still alive. Forty years have passed since I took many of these photos, and so much has changed in Toronto, yet I don’t believe the people have changed much. They still enjoy the thing that make the city unique–sports, entertainment, restaurants, parks, and vibrant neighborhoods. These Toronto faces remind me that although I live in Nova Scotia now, the city keeps calling me back.
These are some documentary photos taken in New York in 1983. Documentary photography can be defined as style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage. It can be both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life.
For me, documentary photos are ones that are taken without manipulation, or staging. My urban photographs from the 1980s, taken in Toronto, New York, Japan, and Asia are largely street photographs, but are also documentary in that they capture life as it is. And the passage of time makes them more interesting, and valuable, as documents of another era. The above photo, for example, shows a man sitting at the entrance to B. Altman and Company on 5th Avenue. It was the flagship store of a luxury department store chain that opened in 1906 and closed for good in 1989. It’s nice to have a record of this iconic store.
A recent article by Authur Lubow in the New York Times titled, Life As It’s Seen, Not Staged makes the point that documentary photography, which fell out of favor with the rise of manipulated images, is making a comeback. An exhibition at the International Centre of Photography highlights young photographers share “a commitment to portray life as they discover it in the world at large, without staging or manipulation; and by so doing, find and express themselves.” Lubow also makes the point that “nothing is weirder than a straight photograph of an uncanny subject.” In short, truth is stranger than fiction.
In my early sixties, I sill find everyday life endlessly fascinating, and continue to capture it with my documentary photos. They help me make sense of the world we live in, and also help me remember the places I’ve been, and people and things I’ve seen.
Here are some Toronto street photos from the 1980s. They are images that I scanned quite recently, and have not been previously posted or published. There is a certain satisfaction for me in re-discovering these photos that I took so long ago. They tell me a lot about how much the world has changed, and I myself have changed. And, conversely, they also remind me that so many basic things in the world remain unchanged.
As we cannot travel back in time, photographs are a way to come face to face with the past–to reconnect with it without actually going there. Photographs are also a good memory aid. There is so much information crammed into our brains that forty year old information can slip away very easily. It’s funny that I can remember very clearly taking some of these photos, yet others are a complete mystery. I only know that I must have taken it for a reason. A few photos in this post were taken for a school assignment at Ryerson called “Exploration of the frame” – new and novel ways to frame photos. I’m not sure if I succeeded.
These Toronto street photos bring me joy and feelings of nostalgia. It’s hard to separate them from the memories that surround them: good times with friends at school and at parties, endless hours in the darkroom, the joy of being young and alive with a head full of tunes.
Toronto In Colour: the 1980s is my recent collection of Toronto photographs, and is now available at Blurb Books. A recent feature on a popular Toronto site BlogTO has brought my photos to a new audience. I thought I’d post a few of my favourites, as well as some outtakes from the book.
In the years 1980 to 1986, I shot about 800 rolls of film, most of them street photographs. Of the thousands of photos only about 10% were in colour. I tended to look for different scenes when I had colour film in my camera–usually Kodacolor II, but sometimes Ektachrome or Kodachrome. I would think in terms of “light and colour” rather than “tones and the moment.” So, I sought out slightly different subject matter than when shooting in black and white.
Book Introduction to Toronto In Colour: the 1980s
There is a feeling of freedom walking around a city with a camera. At 62, I still have that feeling but it was more pronounced when I was in my mid twenties, studying photography as a student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. I took a lot of photographs in my early years in Toronto, capturing street scenes and ordinary aspects of daily life that happened to catch my eye. American photographer Henry Wessel sums up my approach in this way: “Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.”
I had no way to anticipate how significant these Toronto photos would seem to me 30 years later. They show things that no longer exist, even though it hasn’t been that long. Without necessarily trying to, I caught images of buildings, cars, fashions, gadgets that are no longer part of our world. Toronto’s entire skyline is utterly changed, part of the inevitable growth and evolution.
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 have been reviewed from time to time when I was 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 I’m 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. Ernst Haas was one of the few to exhibit colour photographs. William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Edward Burtynsky and other colour specialists were just emerging, 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. Japanese photographer Shin Noguchi is one of my favourites. Chuck Patch writes, in the introduction to Noguchi’s In Colour in Japan, “He prefers shooting in colour, because he says, black and white distances his audience by interjecting a layer of artifice between the viewer and the ‘Real World.’” And there’s also the psychological component of how the colours make us feel. Toronto In Colour: the 1980s is a collection of colour photos not seen in the three Toronto books I assembled previously; many of these images, in fact, haven’t ever been posted or published at all.
