Toronto picked up the nickname somewhere along the way and it stuck, mostly because it is short and it sounds like the place. Nobody says it about Richmond Hill. It means downtown, the core, the part with the streetcars and the cranes and the man in gold paint standing on a milk crate outside the Cineplex. This is a winter walk up in the Six.
What Up in the Six Actually Looks Like
Not the skyline. Everybody photographs the skyline and it tells you nothing about living here. What it actually looks like is a wide grey avenue in February with construction hoarding down one side and a half finished tower going in at the end of it, and one man standing at a shop window reading something in his hands while everybody else keeps moving. That frame is the city as I know it. Permanently half built, cold, and full of people going somewhere.
It also looks like Yonge and Dundas on a wet afternoon, which is the loudest corner in the country. Billboards four storeys high, one of them asking who will save you from yourself, the H and M sign, the Eaton Centre, and thirty people crossing in every direction at once on shining pavement. I stood in the middle of the crossing and let it come to me.
The Streetcar Is the Real Main Character
Two of these are just a streetcar and the people waiting for it, and I make no apology. The red and white is the strongest colour in a Toronto winter, and the machines are enormous, so when one slides into a stop it fills the frame and everybody on the sidewalk arranges themselves around it without being asked.
The better of the two has a woman in a fur trimmed hood standing dead still in the foreground while the whole crowd boards behind her, and above all of it an old brick warehouse catching the last of the gold light with glass towers stacked behind. Old building, new building, a hundred people and a streetcar, all in one rectangle. That is the city in a single frame and I did not arrange one bit of it.
Gold Paint and a Tip Bucket
The busker is my favourite of the set. A man painted head to foot in gold, suit, hat, gloves, shoes, standing perfectly still on a black box with a bucket in front of him and a hand lettered sign reading TIP$, thank you, with a smiley face. Behind him a TTC bus goes past and the condos march off into the distance.
I shot him twice. Once wide with the bus and the tip bucket, which is the honest version, a man doing a hard job in the cold for coins. Then again from further back with two people walking past him without a glance, one in a blue cap, one in a long black coat. That second one is the better photograph. He is holding a pose nobody is watching, and everybody in this city has had a day like that.
All of these are Leica Q2 frames from a couple of February afternoons downtown, available light, 28mm, nothing set up and nobody asked to stand anywhere. There is a lot more of the city up in the Six in the projects, and if you want to know what I carry it is on the gear page.
Thanks for looking!
