In 1967 I visited Montreal with my family to attend Expo ’67. It gave me a love for Montreal that has remained for all these years. What an amazing city! And it looks so good on Kodachrome.
Tag: <span>street photography</span>
When I get older losing my hairMany years from now
– When I’m Sixty Four, by The Beatles
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.
Parade in West Toronto Junction, 1983, featuring the Malta Band Club. The area still has a significant Maltese population.
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.
Toronto Hi-Fi is available through Blurb Books.
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