Making Eye Statements: Toronto Street Photography #1

Toronto Street Photography #1

“Any photo that prompts a question

leads to greater understanding.”

- Brian Piitz, Photographer

It’s time to switch my camera’s focus back to Canada. For the last three months, my blog posts have feasted on the 9302 photographs I made in Australia and Tasmania. Maybe 100 of these photographs earn their keep. The others? They’re all part of my learning curve!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I love street photography. I can spend hours wandering city streets – especially in Toronto, Sydney, New York, Montréal, Hobart, and Melbourne – and record hundreds of photographs, all of them micro slices of urban life. One of the things I like most about street photography is its randomness. None of the photographs is planned or posed – they’re all spontaneous and filled with the dynamic energy that makes urban life so appealing to me.

You can imagine my delight, therefore, when I learned in February that the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto was offering a street photography course on five successive Wednesday afternoons in May and June of this year. The fact that I was 16,000 km away in Tasmania at the time didn’t deter me from registering immediately!

The course began last Wednesday, May 8, and will continue until June 5. The instructor is the respected Toronto photographer Brain Piitz. (Link Photo by Jennifer Rowsom) And the people taking the course are an eager, engaged group, at least judging by the enthusiastic discussions we had during our first session. Brian gave us an overview of street photography and its development over the years. Our next three sessions will be held at photogenic locations in central Toronto, and our final meeting will be held back at the AGO, when we will be showing a selection of our photos recorded on the field trips.

Although we didn’t do any photography during the first session, I took the opportunity of free time in Toronto to do some street photography on my own. The photos I’m posting today all come from those wanderings, both before and after our class. Over the next four weeks, I plan to keep posting about the course. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the photos.

PS – Above is a picture I made in the AGO’s new Yayoi Kusama room-sized installation, “Infinity Mirrored Room – Let’s Survive Forever.” (link) Viewers get 60 seconds alone in the room before being whisked out so the next person can experience it. Great fun! Thank you to friend Jenny for arranging the visit for me!