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.
Colourville is a place in my mind where colour lives, the part of my brain where colours meet and mingle. It’s what propels me to record colour scenes with my camera. But it wasn’t always this way.
For a long time, my photos were almost all black and white. I paid a great deal of attention to lines and form and the abstract qualities that monochrome provided. My influences had been Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander who were all about documenting the social landscape. It seemed that this type of photography was so much better suited to black and white, or as Frank called it, “the colours of hope and despair.” The price was another big reason to use black and white. A darkroom could be set up anywhere, and it wasn’t so difficult or expensive to process and print black and white film. I had almost no access to a colour darkroom. It was 90% black and white and 10% colour.
While attending Ryerson in Toronto, I did learn how to process and print colour film. Thanks to a wonderful professor named Don Snyder, I became quite proficient at colour printing but didn’t get use the skill for several years.
In the 1990s, when I co-owned and operated a custom photo lab in Toronto, the hundreds of hours spent balancing prints, dialling in the cyan, magenta, and yellow, taught me so much. I learned more about colour photography doing this, than in the previous decades of photography.
One client was a designer whose understanding of colour astonished me. She created a line of elegant women’s fashion, and our lab printed catalogues for her annual shows. Not only could she identify and choose from among subtle differences in colour on a print, she could even remember shades without looking at them—the way some people have an uncanny gift for recalling the characteristics of a wine they tasted years earlier, or a music performance heard in childhood. Working with clients like her helped me understand colour precision, and relationships between colours. It made me appreciate the photographic potential of the world around me in a new way.
When I began using a digital camera in 2006, I began shooting almost entirely in colour. Living in the country, I became more aware of light temperature and natural colour casts in the sky. And I no longer needed a colour darkroom. The magic that I felt in my early days of photography had returned.
In this book I take a trek across the colour spectrum following the colours on the rainbow flag seen on page 2. Violet to indigo, to blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, and finally gray. I also have included images that serve as a transition between two colours. It is my hope that the photos are interesting on their own, without the colour connections. They are a glimpse into Colourville—a marvellous place.
Sometimes photos resemble paintings–whether it’s the lighting, the subject matter, or the mood. Some photographers recreate paintings as photographs like Laura Hofstadter with her self-portrait series. Also many painters use photographs as a reference when they paint.
I had always thought that this 1982 photograph of Elm Street in Toronto looked like a painting, but no painter came to mind. Then my social media friend Amy Dix suggested that it looked like something by English artist L.S. Lowry. I could immediately see the similarity.
The above photo was taken from the rooftop of Sam the Record Man–the iconic record store. These days it’s the location of The Ryerson Student Centre, an amazing creation of function and design. In 2018, I managed to get a photo of Elm street through a window, maybe on the 4th floor. It’s great to compare the old with the new, and see the changes over the past 36 years.
Elm Street at Yonge (looking west), Toronto, 1982, appears in the book Toronto Flashback (1980-1986) and is available through Blurb Books.
Taken from the rooftop of Sam the Record Man. For me, having a camera in my hand at all times helped me remember: You only get to do this once. We have to take the time to see it as clearly as we can.
from the book: No Money Down – Toronto (1980-1986)
https://goo.gl/Km6dB1
When I was a teenage boy in the mid-Seventies, living in rural Nova Scotia, I spent hours studying the album covers created by Hipgnosis, the London-based design group. This was before I grew interested in photography, but, as LPs like Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or “Ummagumma” played on the turntable, I scrutinized the covers, trying to penetrate the mysteries of the evocative, layered visual compositions. My “Wish You Were Here” is an ongoing photographic project that’s been in the works for several years. I aim to capture images that have a sense of the surreal yet are readily seen in everyday life. Additionally, I try to capture the sense of whimsy and humour that I liked about those album covers. The images come about through observation, rather than with Photoshop or other manipulations. For me, that’s an important aspect of the project–there’s no manipulation of the image. Reflections, juxtaposition, and scale all come into play.
Product Details
10×8 in, 25×20 cm
Hardcover, 44 Pages
42 colour photographs
Available through Blurb Books and can be previewed before purchase.
