“Toronto in the 1980s” represents a sort of greatest hits of my 1980s Toronto photos. I’m thankful to Chad Tobin for is valuable assistance in editing this collection. It is available at Blurb Books.
From the introduction:
There is a feeling of freedom walking around a city with a camera. At 66, 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 (now Toronto Metropolitan University.) 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.”
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.
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.
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I had no way to anticipate how significant these Toronto photos would seem to me 40 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. I sometimes think about the children and young adults in these photos who are now in their 50s and 60s. How have their lives been?
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Looking back now at the photos I spent my precious film on back then, so much comes back to me about dropped into a new environment. We use our creative tools as extensions of ourselves; they help us understand and define our place in the world. 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 time and see it, as clearly as we can.
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Product Details
10×8 in, 25×20 cm
Softcover, 62 Pages
59 black and white photographs
Store Window, Yonge Street, 1981
Jarvis Street, 1980
Eaton Centre, 1980
Chess players at Yonge and Gould, 1982
Watching TV in the Junction, 1986
Crazy Joe’s Flea Market, 1983
Pay Phone, Union Station, 1986
Photo Booth, Union Station, 1981
Laundromat, Kensington Market, 1983
Mirrors, Kensington Market, 1983
Beer cases, Gould and Yonge, 1985
Allan Gardens, 1985
Pape Avenue, 1986
Bay Street, 1983
Fish market, Kensington Market, 1983
Queen and Yonge, 1981
Dundas West near Lansdowne, 1984
Lakeshore Road, Etobicoke, 1982
Party scene, 1985
Sandwich shop, Yonge Street, 1983
Apartment on Dundonald Street, 1982
Kensington Market, 1983
Nathan Phillips Square, 1982
Film Premiere, Eglinton Theatre, 1986
U.S. Cruise Missile protest, Yonge Street, 1983
Yonge and Gerrard, 1981
Halloween on Yonge Street, 1981
The Spectrum Nightclub, Danforth Avenue, 1986
TV in store window, Yonge Street, 1981
Funland Arcade, Yonge Street, 1981
Streetcar scene, 1984
Dundonald Street, 1982
St. Clair Station, 1984
View from Yonge and Gerrard, 1989
Grace Street, 1986
Gay Rights Toward Equality, 1980
Santa Claus Parade, Yonge Street, 1981
BMX riders at Bloor W. and Dundas W., 1986
Rock and Roll Forever, Yonge Street, 1981
New Wave fashion, Yonge Street, 1985
Art auction at Sotheby’s, 1983
St. Joseph and St. Nicholas, 1984
Toronto Camera store window, 1984
Man and dog, Dundas Street West, 1983
Bay Street, 1983
Dundas and Yonge, 1983
Jarvis Street, 1981
Outside Global Cheese, Kensington Market, 1983
Bay and Dundas West, 1983
Jesus Is The Way, Kensington Market, 1983
View from Neill-Wycik, Gerrard East and Mutual, 1982
Subway Scene, 1984
Bay Street lobby, 1983
On the College streetcar, 1981
Gas Station, Pape Avenue, 1983
Southdown Road and Clarkson Road, Mississauga, 1985
Nostalgia can be described as a sentimental longing for the past. It comes from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain) and is thought to have been derived from Homer’s The Odyssey.
With baby boomers reaching their senior years, nostalgia seems to be their drug of choice. Advertisers target boomers with Beatles music, retro fashions, and even long dead actors such as Marilyn Munroe selling perfume. While boomers seem to be lapping it up, not everyone is crazy about the nostalgia bug. Heather Havrilesky writes in The Washington Post, “While griping about boomer nostalgia has become a somewhat common art, the cultural impact of that nostalgia transcends mere annoyance. Through sheer repetition and force of will, boomers have so thoroughly indoctrinated us into their worldview that we all now reflexively frame most current affairs through the lens of another generation’s formative experiences.” Abbey Hoffman might say not to trust anyone under 50!
I myself am a baby boomer. Born in 1958, I was six years old when the Beatles came to North America. I sang “A Hard Day’s Night” in my Grade One classroom, watched the moon landing on a fuzzy black and white TV, and took my Diana camera to Expo ’67 in Montreal. While I have nostalgia for those early years, the time I miss most was when I was in my early twenties, studying photography at Ryerson in Toronto.
The photos in this blog post capture the time that I am nostalgic for. They were taken in downtown Toronto in my early years of study. Everything was new and fresh, conversations were stimulating, photography was invigorating. Several of my classmates from that year became lifelong friends. Since returning to those days is impossible, I can make the journey with my retro photographs. It’s the next best thing.
Nathan Phillips Square is a large city square in downtown Toronto (12 acres) that is the home of Toronto City Hall. It is a place of numerous activities–skating rink, farmers’market, concerts, demonstrations. There is often lots going on here, but at other times it is eerily empty.
It is a place that I rarely went to for an event; I was usually just passing through. So my photos are usually just little glimpses of what was happening there. Looking back at my contact sheets from the 1980s it seems that I passed through Nathan Phillips Square a few times a year. It was a good place for photos–lots of open space, interesting architectural details, plenty of concrete, and human activity.
These photos were just random moments at the time, but mean a lot more to me now as I rediscover the past life of my 20s. It reminds me that life is short and we must Carpe diem— “sieze the day.” 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 time and see it, as clearly as we can.
Photos like this contain a lot of information, and I’m glad now I paused a few seconds to take it. The smokestack is the Walton Street steam plant, built in 1971. The Orange Crush sign was a fixture there for a few years. I liked it because it displayed the time and temperature, and also because it seemed to be crushing the building below. I don’t think I was ever in the Health Foods store, Kelly’s Stereo Mart, or Times Square Billiards. But I was often at the World’s Biggest Bookstore, which operated from 1980-2014. I went there many times. It was the kind of place that you never visited for just five minutes. There were so many interesting books, and the prices were good, too. They liked to play up their no frills image with slogans like, “Books priced so low even people who don’t read too good is buying them.” I remember buying Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums there around this time. It was a hot summer afternoon and I walked across the sizzling pavement with the book (and camera) in my hand.
The photo was taken twenty years before this area of Toronto was transformed into Yonge-Dundas Square. It was always a happening place–ideal for the type of photography I was into, and just steps away from Ryerson. I like the figure up on the scaffolding–a man doing his work, but taking a few minutes to survey the scene. I wish I could have been up there with him, where, in the words of Gord Downie, “we get to feel small from high up above.”
