The Image Journey

Published August 26, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – vivid colours; faded memories of The Junction

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

During the years 1980-1986, I did a lot of street photography in Toronto. For the past four years I have been scanning an archive of this material, and posting it online. Toronto Gone represents the final photos, the ones that have been recently scanned or have not been published in my Toronto books.

My memories of living in The Junction have faded. That’s why I’m so glad I have the photos to help me remember my time there (1982-1986). They bring back the feeling of living there and, for me, the colour photos seem to carry a more emotional and psychological component than the black and white ones. It also reminds me the importance and value of the documentary photograph.

Looking at a photo many years later, you may not know exactly why you took it but still be glad you did. Among other things, photography has been a visual diary for me. It helps me remember the places I’ve been and things I’ve seen. Photos can also become valuable documents of things and places that no longer exist.

We never know the full significance of the photos we take. They’re a picture of a moment, and that moment is gone as soon as you’ve taken the picture. That place–or that person, or cloud, or animal–is already changing before you’ve even walked away. We don’t know until much later whether those changes will accrue quickly or gradually. We don’t know if we’ll ever be there again, ever talk with that person again. The relentlessness of change is masked by its ordinariness.

This has been so evident to me in hearing people’s responses to my Toronto series. Taken in the 1980s, they show a city that many feel no longer exists.

Dundas West and Mavety, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

Dundas West and Keele, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

Dundas West and Medland, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

Keele Street, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Toronto

colour photography photography The Junction Toronto Toronto Gone

Toronto Gone – my days in The Junction

Published August 25, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – my days in The Junction

The Junction is a neighborhood in west Toronto with the main intersection being Dundas and Keele. When I lived there in the 1980s, it was gritty and somewhat run down. It was still a dry area then–no alcohol could be sold or served. That meant there were no good restaurants, no bars, and practically no night life. It didn’t seem dangerous, though; just a working class neighborhood with lots of small Mom&Pop shops. It was known as Little Malta because of the large Maltese-Canadian community.

I used to walk around the neighborhood sometimes with my camera. It had a lot of character, a lot of tarnished charm. Living there for four years gave me the opportunity to feel at home, and relaxed. I remember the characters who hung out at Crazy Joe’s Flea Market and Poor Boy Restaurant, the tasty toasted western sandwiches at Mimmo’s Place, Vesuvio’s Pizzeria, the pungent smell from the stockyards when the wind blew the wrong way, and numerous parties and gallery openings at our studio. All of these are gone now.

The Junction has been completely revitalized. It’s no longer down at the heels. The elimination of prohibition in 2001 has been a positive change; there are now lots of cool bars and pubs along Dundas Street West. The Stock Yards is now a huge area of box stores. And the electric lines have all been buried, giving the streets a neater, cleaner look.

It’s been almost forty years since I lived there; time has a way of smoothing out the bad times and magnifying the good ones in a tide of nostalgia. And memories are notoriously fickle. The photos, however, do not change. They are documents, and tell a story of what it was like to live there.

Dundas West and Keele, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Dundas West and Medland, Toronto, 1985 – © Avard Woolaver

Mimmo’s Place Restaurant, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Crazy Joe’s Flea Market, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Dundas Street West, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Ralph’s Barbershop, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

View from New Image Gallery, Dundas St. West, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Film Photography Photography Social Landscape Toronto

photography The Junction Toronto Toronto Gone

Published August 22, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone – Back when men still wore dapper hats

Near Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

In 1980s Toronto men still wore dapper hats, or “business hats.” I always assumed that it was to hide balding heads, or to protect them from the elements. But it seems, in history, hats were a thing for other reasons. According to Deborah Henderson, a costume designer and the author of four books about men’s headwear, “Throughout history, people wore hats to indicate their social position in the world. Any trade—postman, engineer, pilot—had its own cap. Even lawyers, in the ’50s, all wore fedoras.”

Why did men stop wearing dapper hats? An article from Esquire magazine suggests that nobody has pinpointed one sole reason why men stopped wearing hats. One reason could be the rise in automobile use. “With low roofs meaning you couldn’t wear a hat while driving and generally had no need to cover your head anyway, personal transport often negated the need for headwear.”

Another reason could be the stigma associated with WWII. “Another theory posited suggests that the hat suffered a serious decline after the end of World War II because it was an unwelcome reminder of the time people had spent in uniform. Men who fought did not want to wear hats with civilian clothes after the war.”

Benjamin Leszcz writes in Canadian Business, “A potent social signifier, hats identified a man’s role in society. (Hence the idiom of “putting one’s [insert profession] hat on.”) Little surprise, then, that the individualism of the ’60s and ’70s rejected the rule-bound world of hats, embracing anti-establishment afros, flowing locks and blow-dryer-enabled atrocities. By the late ’80s, the hat stigma faded, and every couple of years since, fashion journalists proclaim the hat’s comeback. Today, hats are runway stalwarts, and classic brands—like Borsalino, Stetson and Biltmore, which until recently was based in Guelph, Ont.—are holding steady. But hats will never entirely come back. The shift is decisive: historically, men wore hats to fit in; today, men wear hats to stand out.”

These days when I visit Toronto the people I see wearing dapper hats are thirty-something hipsters going for that vintage look.

Photos from the series: Toronto Gone – highlighting the buildings, businesses, parking lots, and people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s, that have disappeared, and been replaced by others. It’s part of the inevitable cycle of death and rebirth, of disappearance and reappearance.

Yonge and College, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Queen and Bathurst, Toronto, 1984 – © Avard Woolaver

Allan Gardens, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

Photography Social Landscape Toronto

dapper hats hats photography Toronto Gone

Published August 21, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone 08-21-2020

Bloor West and Parkview Gardens Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

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.

Here is an excerpt from Shawn Micallef’s piece in the Toronto Star about my Toronto Days exhibition in 2018:

“Photographs of Toronto from the recent past are often the most fascinating. Those from recent decades look a lot like images of today, but are just a little different compared to those from a century ago, which can be unrecognizable. Those are great too, but pictures of Toronto from the decades before the now 20-year building boom began particularly fascinate me.

It’s a city that’s still in the living memory of many people, but easy to forget as the pace of change here has been so quick. “Toronto Days” is an exhibition at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts of Avard Woolaver’s photographs of the city taken between 1980 and 1995 and are a compelling look back — but not too far back.

The great genius of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror is that it’s set in the not-too-distant future, where the differences, mostly technological, are subtle. It’s a future we can instantly recognize and relate to, just like Woolaver’s Toronto, a city just before the city we know today caught in a kind of a dreamy haze.

It’s a city of parking lots, rusted cars, “fishbowl” buses with bulging windshields, endless cigarettes and men wearing proper hats. The skyline in Woolaver’s photos is thin too, and empty lots along King and Queen streets seem like photos of a rust-belt city rather than the bustling neighbourhoods we know today.

Woolaver began taking his Toronto photos when he moved here from Nova Scotia to study photography at Ryerson. Influenced by great social landscape photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, taking pictures was a way to get to know his new city.”

I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months, and it may lead to a new book.

Dundas West and Bloor West, Toronto, 1985 – © Avard Woolaver

Bloor West and Keele, Toronto, 1983 – © Avard Woolaver

Blogging Photography Toronto

photography Toronto Gone Toronto Star

Published August 18, 2020 by avardw

Toronto Gone 08-18-2020

Yonge and Dundas, Toronto, 1982 – © Avard Woolaver

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.

I will be posting more from the series: Toronto Gone over the coming months–photos taken in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s. It may lead to a new book.