TorontoStreet.ca is dedicated to street photography and the cameras, lenses and equipment used to create it. It is focused on Toronto, one of the largest cities in North America (4th, behind Mexico City, New York City and LA) and one of the fastest-growing large cities in the western world. It offers almost unlimited potential to photograph people and structures, day or night. Walk around this city with a camera and you will never see the same person twice, unless you are standing at their place of work.

Beauty in a city will mean different things to different people. For some it is where the city is located geographically, for others it is the architecture of the city, and yet others the history of the place. For me it is about the now. The people who currently make the city go. Are they succeeding? Or are they killing each other? Are they moving forward or backward?

To me, a city is the sum of the people who are there now and what they are building multiplied by how they are doing it. To me a city is beautiful because of what is being done in it now, not what was done in it a century ago, those people are gone. A city can have a rich past yet be an ugly place today. Another city may be built upon a stunning and beautiful landscape but if the landscape is all that makes it beautiful, would not the landscape have been more beautiful without the city?

With the photography of this website I try to capture the people and streets of my city, each of them a story among millions of stories that are building this city every day. Some are images of success, some are images of failure, all of them are images of real life.

Some of the photography will cover street events or street festivals, but most of the time it will just be a day in the life of someone captured in a particular moment that I found interesting on a Toronto street.

Street Photography: Everything on the Street Counts

There is one more thing on the street, and it took an orange car to make me see it. I was on a downtown corner one afternoon, waiting for the light, shooting the ordinary traffic of a Toronto day, when an orange Nissan GT-R pulled up to the red and stopped right beside me. I had the camera up before I’d really decided to. That one grab shot is the reason there are now cars on this site.

A car like that is part of the street the same way the people are. It is something this city actually put in front of me, on a real corner, on a real day. So I started paying attention to the others, the supercars and the classics that turn up in public, on the street, where anyone walking by would see them.

It hasn’t changed what I’m really after. Most of the time I am still photographing people. Even at a car show I am watching the faces, not just the metal, for the second someone forgets themselves and just stares. But when the street hands you a race car parked on Bloor Street, you photograph it. The street is whatever is actually on it that day: the people, the buildings they move through, and the cars they really drive.

You’ll find this work right alongside the traditional street photography. The Yorkville Exotic Car Show on Father’s Day is one source of it; the rest just pull up next to you when you least expect it.