Nothing happens on most days. You go out with the camera, you walk for two hours, people go to work and come home and buy something and wait for a bus, and none of it is an event. That is the whole subject. Everyday street photography is not about waiting for something to occur, it is about the fact that the ordinary afternoon is already the thing, and these ten frames are all just days I happened to be carrying a camera on.
Nothing Was Happening, Which Was the Point
The pictures here run from a bus in March of 2020 to a Tim Hortons counter eight days ago, and they are not a series. I did not set out to shoot any of them. They are the leftovers, the frames that did not belong to a project, and when I finally put them in one folder I liked them better together than any of them on their own.
A woman standing against a green construction tarp on a Toronto sidewalk while the traffic goes by behind her. Somebody in a purple jacket reaching for a car door in a plaza lot under a sky full of cloud. A man walking toward me past a Chinese restaurant with the lunch prices on a sandwich board. That is the whole inventory. Not one of those people was doing anything worth reporting, and I would rather look at them than at almost anything staged.
Why Everyday Street Photography Beats Waiting for an Event
If you only shoot when something is happening you will shoot about four times a year, and you will get the same pictures everybody else at the parade got. The other way around is better. Go out on a Tuesday, in flat light, with nothing on, and take what the day gives you.
You also stop being visible. At a festival everyone knows there are cameras and half of them are performing a little. On an ordinary sidewalk on a Tuesday nobody is expecting you and nobody adjusts. I shot the busy corner at Yonge and Elmwood standing still while people came around both sides of me, and not one of them registered that I was there.
It takes patience and it mostly does not work. Most of what I bring home from a day like that is nothing, and I am fine with that, because the days it does work are days I could not have planned. Everyday street photography in Toronto has one enormous advantage too, which is that half the city is from somewhere else and nobody finds a stranger with a camera especially remarkable.
A Bus, a Compact Mirror, and Somebody’s Private Minute
The oldest frame here is from a VIVA bus in March 2020, and it is still the one I keep going back to. A woman has her compact open in one hand and is doing her lipstick with the other, hair pinned up, black sweater, the gas station sliding past the window behind her. The bus is nearly empty. She is doing a completely private thing in a completely public place, which people do all day long and never think about.
That is what I am after more than anything. People are most themselves when they are certain nobody is looking. The two old fellows at the Tim Hortons counter are the same idea, one paying, the other standing back a little watching him, both of them entirely at ease. I have written about that room before, in Inside Tim Hortons, because it is the most honest place in this country.
Two Buildings Getting Fixed and Nobody Watching
Two of these turned out to be the same picture and I did not notice until later. A young woman with her earbuds in walks past a hoarded off site, head down, shopping bag and a hoodie over her arm. Behind the fence, number 296 is being worked on, boards across the ground floor with tags sprayed over them, weeds coming up through the lot, scaffolding standing up the face of the building and a man up there working on it. In the other frame two masons on yellow scaffolding are stripping the stone cladding off the corner of a law office in broad daylight.
Neither of those men has an audience. She never looks up, and why would she, it is just the thing she walks past. Somebody is up a scaffold putting the front of a building back together on an ordinary afternoon and the whole street goes underneath without once raising their head. That is the city getting repaired around people who are thinking about something else.
These were shot on the Leica Q3, except the bus, which is the older Q2. Available light, no flash, nothing arranged, no permission asked and none needed on a public sidewalk. Some are downtown Toronto and some are the plazas and suburbs north of the city, and honestly the suburbs give me more now, because nobody out there is expecting a photographer at all. There are more of these in my street photography projects. Carry the camera. You never know which ordinary Tuesday is going to hand you something. If you stop to look, that is.
Thanks for looking!
