Toronto Flashback (1980-1986).

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Toronto Flashback (1980-1986) was self-published in 2016 and documents the city of Toronto, Canada, in the 1980s.
I grew up in rural Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto in 1980 to study photography at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. I did a lot of street photography in those years, capturing street scenes with fresh eyes.

Michael Amo writes in the introduction, “I encountered Avard for the first time in 1980. It was the first class of our foundational year of a four year program “Photographic Arts” at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. Behold a bunch of first year students dressed like the Culture Club version of artists: leggings, scarves, Gitanes. Then there was Avard with his tractor-friendly jeans and Emerson, Lake and Palmer hair all freshly laundered from a recent stint in the railway yards in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Strangely, he was smiling. Living in the city for the first time, I quickly noticed how seldom Torontonians seem to smile or make eye contact. Avard did both and our friendship was born.

We grew up in rural places, Avard and I, which may have contributed to our instant bond. I came from a small Ontario town. Avard came from his family farm in Nova Scotia, a truly beautiful place which has been in the family for many generations. I think that sense of psychic dislocation – tree to stone, stream to street, sky to wire – had a profound effect on both of us. Overnight, our green frame of reference was gone, sending us on a search for something that would reflect our former selves – our identity, our humanity – back at us in the clatter and concrete of the city.

For me, that is the hallmark of Avard’s photography. It started in Toronto in 1980 and it continues to this day: a search for the human element even when there are no humans in sight. It might be the ragged dignity of the regulars in a pawn shop, the soaring majesty of a walkway at City Hall overhanging a single, stout pedestrian or simply the intersection of two unpeopled snow-filled streets, tire tracks tracing the paths of those who’ve come and gone. In every instance, there is a sense that we are in the picture – we being all those souls doing our best to make our way in the world. Somehow Avard’s lens finds us even when we’re not there.

There’s a family story about Avard – how, as a small boy, he was placed in a wooden box at the edge of a field while his father plowed row after row on his tractor. The young Avard would sit and watch for hours.

When Avard arrived in Toronto in 1980, he brought that watchfulness with him, that deep-seated empathy for humans going about their solitary business, a simultaneous loneliness and delight in our ceaseless effort to remake the world in our own image. I don’t know if there’s a word for that singular emotion but I do know it can found in the images in this book.”

Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)
photographs by Avard Woolaver
introduction by Michael Amo
Paperback, 100 pages
20 x 25 cm / 8 x 10 in.