The Image Journey

Published September 7, 2020 by avardw

September 7, 1980 – remembering Terry Fox

Elton John, Terry Fox — Elton John ticket stub, Toronto, 1980 – © Avard Woolaver

In 1980 (exactly 40 years ago today), when I’d only been living in Toronto a few days, Elton John played Maple Leaf Gardens, two blocks from my apartment. I bought a scalper’s ticket for $5, thinking that the concert had already started–but I was lucky; it hadn’t. He walked on to the stage and said, “I dedicate this concert to Terry Fox.” The place erupted with a standing ovation. Terry Fox had recently been forced to end his run, near Thunder Bay. We knew the whole country was rooting for him, and Elton John’s words gave us a sense that, indeed, the entire world was. That wasn’t true, of course; Terry’s run was a Canadian event. But it was incredibly powerful for Canada. The musical highlight that night, for me, was his cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I’ll never forget that concert.

Terry Fox is my hero. He had such vision, courage, and stamina to continue running every day, even though he must have been in pain. He had no idea that his plan and vision would touch so many people and raise so much money over the years.

Sadly, on September 1, 1980, 11 kilometres outside Thunder Bay, Terry was forced to stop running because cancer had appeared in his lungs. He passed away on June 28, 1981 at age 22, but not before realizing his dream of raising $1 for every Canadian – $24.17 million.

From Wikipedia:

Terrance Stanley Fox CC OD (July 28, 1958 – June 28, 1981) was a Canadian athlete, humanitarian, and cancer research activist. In 1980, with one leg having been amputated due to cancer, he embarked on an east to west cross-Canada run to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Although the spread of his cancer eventually forced him to end his quest after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 mi), and ultimately cost him his life, his efforts resulted in a lasting, worldwide legacy. The annual Terry Fox Run, first held in 1981, has grown to involve millions of participants in over 60 countries and is now the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research; over C$750 million has been raised in his name, as of January 2018.

Fox was a distance runner and basketball player for his Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, high school and Simon Fraser University. His right leg was amputated in 1977 after he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, though he continued to run using an artificial leg. He also played wheelchair basketball in Vancouver, winning three national championships.

In 1980, he began the Marathon of Hope, a cross-country run to raise money for cancer research. He hoped to raise one dollar from each of Canada’s 24 million people. He began with little fanfare from St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, in April and ran the equivalent of a full marathon every day. Fox had become a national star by the time he reached Ontario; he made numerous public appearances with businessmen, athletes, and politicians in his efforts to raise money. He was forced to end his run outside Thunder Bay when the cancer spread to his lungs. His hopes of overcoming the disease and completing his marathon ended when he died nine months later.

In addition to being the youngest person ever named a Companion of the Order of Canada, Fox won the 1980 Lou Marsh Award as the nation’s top sportsman and was named Canada’s Newsmaker of the Year in both 1980 and 1981. Considered a national hero, he has had many buildings, statues, roads, and parks named in his honour across the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the annual community fundraising runs a no-go. So a virtual version will be held on Sept. 20, with the theme “One Day. Your Way.” You can participate and donate here: https://terryfox.org/

Terry Fox in his Marathon of Hope, 1980

Blogging Photography Toronto

concert Elton John photography September 7 1980 Terry Fox

Published September 4, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – where have all the phone booths gone?

Phone Booths, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Phone booths used to be everywhere in Toronto, but around 15 years or so ago, when cell phones took over, they began to disappear. Rennee Reizman writes in The Atlantic, “At a time when 95 percent of Americans own a mobile phone, the phone booth seems quaint and outdated. People have waxed nostalgic over the loss of this technology in eulogies, public art installations, and documentaries. Since a peak of 2.6 million public pay phones in the mid-1990s, this ubiquitous infrastructure has been on the decline. After the devices stopped turning a profit, AT&T officially announced its exit from the pay phone market in 2007. Verizon followed suit in 2011.”

In the U.S., phone booths were thought to be linked to criminal activity, and were removed. The efforts led to fewer pay phones in impoverished areas, making them inaccessible to their most-likely users. A post on five9.com states “In addition to technological advancements, phone booths have a separate inferiority: they are frequently vandalized. It is not uncommon to see explicit writing in pen or spray paint and the windows practically beg for hooligans to throw rocks. People leaving bars, intoxicated in the middle of the night, are known to use them as restrooms. Even sober pedestrians use them as garbage cans.”

You may remember having to put a dime in the slot and using the rotary dial to dial the number. Later, in the 1980s, as in these photos, the rotary phones were replaced with push button ones. And at some time, the fee went from 10 cents to 25 cents. It was a place to get out of the wind on a winter night, or a place to have a private conversation. I remember getting my first answering machine is the early 1980s and the messages could be accessed remotely from a pay phone with a little beeper. So high tech!

I miss phone booths, but it is good to know that they are being repurposed in certain places. According to five9, “Despite their imminent extinction, telephone booths have proven useful for other purposes. The city of Shanghai, China, has converted 500 former telephone booths into WiFi hotspots. On one hand, this is a positive change because the booth is being used. On the other hand it is somewhat ironic because its new purpose is powering a successor technology. Phone booths are also still useful for advertisers. Just because people no longer enter the booth to make calls, they do pass by. In fact, New York City earns three times as much using its phone booths as ad space than they do using them for their phone services.”

On a recent trip to Japan, I noticed as many phone booths as ever. It means they are still being used, even if just as a space for advertising.

(The title of this post is of course a reference to Pete Seeger’s 1962 folk classic Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – a circular song, that ends where it started, and summarizes the consequences of war.)

The series “Toronto Gone” puts a focus on things that have disappeared–buildings, businesses, parking lots, cars, people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s and 1990s prior to the condo boom, and before the widespread use of computers and cell phones.

Pears Avenue, Ramsden Park, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

Cherry Street, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Yonge Street, Toronto, 1981 – © Avard Woolaver

Wallace Avenue, Toronto, 1981 – © Avard Woolaver

Parliament Street, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Gerrard and Jarvis, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Jarvis Street, Toronto, 1980 – © Avard Woolaver

Yonge and King (looking west), Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Toronto

pay phones phone booths photography Toronto Gone

Published September 2, 2020 by avardw

Wish You Were Here – Monochrome Dreaming

The Junction, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

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 a few early examples from Toronto in the 1980s, and then some more recent examples.

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, “Wish You Were Here – Monochrome Dreaming” shows black and white images that aspire to challenge and entertain the senses.

Dundas Street West, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Danforth Music Hall, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, 2014 – © Avard Woolaver

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2013 – © Avard Woolaver

Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, 2012 – © Avard Woolaver

Windsor, Nova Scotia, 2010 – © Avard Woolaver

Blogging Observation Photography

black and white Monochrome Dreaming photography Wish You Were Here

Published August 31, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – Junction Days

Dundas West and Mavety, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

These are photos taken in a neighborhood of Toronto called, The Junction. I lived in this neighborhood from 1982-1986. For part of that time I was attending Ryerson in the downtown core, and did most of my street photography there. But I also took the time to walk around the Junction with my camera recording everyday scenes. It may have been a little gritty and down-trodden, but the area had a lot of character, a lot of soul.

Today, The Junction is totally revitalized with lots of cafes and bars and a vibrant night life. Back in the 1980s it was a dry area (no alcohol was sold) and it meant a long trek to the liquor on public transit. I miss those carefree days days of my youth.

View of New Image Gallery, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Mavety at Dundas West, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Baird Park, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Blogging Film Photography Photography Toronto

Junction Days photography The Junction Toronto Toronto Gone

Published August 28, 2020 by avardw

This is not a fish – how Rene Magritte inspired my photography

This is not a fish, Nova Scotia, 2013 – © Avard Woolaver

There are various motivations for taking a photo–to capture a moment, to document a place or thing, to record beautiful light, or to fulfill an assignment. One of my interests in photography has been to somehow challenge the viewer so that they do a double take; the image holds their attention because there is something thought provoking about it. The notion of using visual trickery and humour came to me early on after discovering the work of American photographer Lee Friedlander, and also the paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte.

It was in Paris in 1978 that I first saw Magritte’s dream-like, illusionistic images. I could gaze at them for a long time and really never figure them out. But that really didn’t matter, for it was the feeling that they invoked that was special–that little area of my brain, the “Magritte zone,” had been suddenly stimulated. Over time I began using these perceptual tricks in my own photography.

“The Treachery of Images”- Ceci n’est pas une pipe./This is not a pipe, Rene Magritte, 1929

One of Magritte’s most famous works is “The treachery of images” (1929), a painting that challenges the viewer’s notion of art. An image of a pipe has the words “This is not a pipe.” written below it. When Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco. Andrea K. Scott writes in the New Yorker, “It may be art’s most famous one-liner, but it’s a startlingly modernist proposition: this isn’t a pipe, it’s a picture. Magritte’s enduring popularity has edged his once shocking imagery into the realm of cliché. But his radical use of language and his transposition of the banal and the unnerving set a precedent. Would the enigmas of Jasper Johns’s flags or Ed Ruscha’s deadpan pairing of image and text have been conceivable otherwise? Magritte, who dressed like a banker and was known to paint at his dining-room table, saw himself as a “secret agent” in the war on bourgeois values. He once said of his mission, ‘Too often by a twist of thought, we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange’.’’

In my Wish You Were Here series, I aim to challenge the viewers’ attention by in a subtle way by finding everyday scenes with elements of surrealism. Like Magritte, 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, “Wish You Were Here – Monochrome Dreaming” shows black and white images that aspire to challenge and entertain the senses. Is that really a fish, or just a fishy picture?

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of visiting the Magritte Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and found that I was still deeply inspired (and entertained) by his whimsical, dream-like images. I realized that I had never really left the Magritte Zone.