monochrome Archives - The Image Journey

Published November 28, 2022 by avardw

A Trip To Toronto – 2022_11_28

Toronto, monochrome — Yonge and Gerrard, Toronto, 2022 – © Avard Woolaver

Recently I took a trip to Toronto, a city which I love, and lived in from 1980-1986, and then again from 1993-2005. Nova Scotia is my home now, but I always enjoy visiting the place where I attended university, made friends, got married, had a family, and did a lot of photography.

The purpose of my visit was to deliver photos to The City of Toronto Archives. I’m honoured that there will be a permanent collection of my photos there. It is deeply satisfying that these photos, taken rather randomly in the 1980s and 1990s, will live on and be a part of Toronto’s rich history. (Check out the Ellis Wiley collection if you have a chance.) By randomly, I only mean that at the time I did not intend to document the city in any particular way; only photograph scenes that caught my eye. It will take several months for the photos (700 digital images) to be catalogued, and at the end of it I hope to have an exhibition at the Archives.

During my stay in Toronto, I had a chance to get out and walk around with my camera, just like in the old days. I’m posting black and white photos here because that is what I mainly shot in the 1980s. There have been so many changes in the city over the past several years, yet so many places and aspects of Toronto remain the same. It was a pleasure to explore the city once again with fresh eyes.

Spadina Road, Toronto, 2022 – © Avard Woolaver

Yonge and College, Toronto, 2022 – © Avard Woolaver

AGO, Dundas Street West, Toronto, 2022 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Toronto

2022 monochrome nostalgia roadtrip street photography Toronto

Published July 14, 2021 by avardw

More from the Monochrome Dreaming series

Monochrome, Monochrome Dreaming, photography,

I have always been monochrome dreaming. Since first picking up a camera, I have been interested in recording odd scenes; photos that make you do a double take. In the early days, I didn’t concentrate on it very much. I’d take a photo whenever I came across something unusual. It wasn’t until I got a digital camera in 2006 that I began to actively look for everyday scenes that make the familiar seem a little strange.

With a digital camera, I could experiment more–take many photos of the same scene in order to change the angle of a reflection or align elements perfectly. My image making went from taking a one-off of a particular scene to exploring the scene more fully to get the best possible shot. In this post I show photos taken over the past decade

In my Wish You Were Here series, I aim to challenge the viewers’ attention in a subtle way by finding everyday scenes with elements of whimsy and surrealism. Like Magritte, and Friedlander, I want to make the familiar seem a little strange, but without Photoshop and image manipulation. These photos come about through observation, using juxtaposition, reflection, typography, and scale. My new project, “Monochrome Dreaming” shows black and white images with dream-like qualities that aspire to entertain the senses.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2011 – © Avard Woolaver

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2013 – © Avard Woolaver

Black and White Observation Photography

black and white black and white photography monochrome Monochrome Dreaming

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.

Black and White Photography

black and white monochrome photography

Published March 5, 2019 by avardw

Changing colour into black and white

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, 2019, black and white, — Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, 2019 – © Avard Woolaver

Although I’m not a big fan of digital manipulation and do almost none to my images, I make an exception when I convert colour images to black and white. To my eye, some scenes just look better in monochrome.

I have always thought of black and white photography as an abstract medium and colour photography as a psychological medium. American photographer Elliott Erwitt said, “With colour you describe; with black and white you interpret.” So, there is more left to the imagination and perhaps more attention paid to graphic details.

When I first heard the version of Kodachrome on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Concert in Central Park, I realized that the lyrics had been changed from the original. According to Songfacts Simon sometimes sings the line “Everything looks worse in black and white” as “Everything looks better in black and white.” He changes it a lot, and claims he can’t remember which way he wrote it.” Neither is better, just a different view of the world.

I used to shoot my digital monochrome images using the b&w mode on my camera until I saw a documentary on Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. He was going over images on the computer with his assistant and telling him which ones he wanted to be converted to black and white. I started shooting everything in colour and doing the conversions later–it leaves more options. If it’s good enough for Daido Moriyama, it’s good enough for me!

Here are some recent photos that I have converted.