The second time out with this project I noticed something I had walked past for years. Half the people in the room were working. Not staff, customers. A woman in a blazer running what was clearly an interview from a window booth, two people hunched over a laptop, three men with a stack of paper spread across a high table. Nobody had booked a thing. Inside Tim Hortons, the meeting room is free and the coffee is two dollars.
Inside Tim Hortons, Everybody Is Having a Meeting
The blazer frame is the one that started me thinking about it. She is sitting straight, hands on the table, doing all the talking, and the two people across from her are listening the way you listen when something is at stake. Behind her the window carries a decal saying the restaurant is locally owned by the Ferko family. Whatever is being decided at that table is being decided in somebody’s family business, at eleven in the morning, over a medium regular.
Then there is the pair with the laptop. The blind is half down behind them and the light coming through it turns the whole frame the colour of weak tea, and she has her hand up, mid point, making a case. He has his fist at his mouth, listening. I have sat in enough rooms like that to know exactly where in the conversation they are.
The 1964 Mural and the Men Doing Paperwork
My favourite in the set is shot through a doorway. Three men at a high table with pens out and paper in front of them, and behind them a wall-sized yellow mural of the original 1964 price list. Chocolate dodger, honey glazed, forty to fifty two cents. The mural is the company being sentimental about itself, and the men in front of it are not looking at it at all. They are doing whatever it is they came to do. That gap between the decoration and the actual life going on in front of it is most of why I keep coming back.
I like that one because of the doorway too. Shooting through a frame inside the room puts a bit of distance between me and the table, and distance is the whole trick. Nobody performs for a camera they have not noticed.
The Ones Who Are Just There
Not everybody is working. Two teenagers sat at a window table in the middle of a hot afternoon with a backpack on the chair and the trees outside gone that flat summer green. A young woman came in from a run, still in her shorts, and waited at the counter looking at her phone. Another sat alone in a booth directly under the sign that says Canada’s Favourite Coffee, one hand at her mouth, thinking about something that had nothing to do with me.
The one I waited longest for is a woman in a wide sun hat coming in through the vestibule, framed by the two sets of doors, with the coffee promise sign on the wall beside her. I saw her crossing the lot and had about four seconds. That is usually how it goes.
Same method as the first one. I buy a coffee, I sit down, I put the Leica Q3 on the table and I wait. Available light only, no flash, ever, because a flash would end the whole thing in one burst. These were shot across several visits around Toronto and the GTA over the past year or so. The first set is here, the rest of the work is in the projects, and there will be more of these. Inside Tim Hortons nothing much happens, which is exactly the point.
Thanks for looking!
