Toronto does not whisper. Walk into Yonge-Dundas Square on a grey afternoon and the sky can be the colour of wet concrete while the buildings scream orange and red and electric blue. That contrast is the whole reason I keep coming back for colourful city street photography. The louder the wall of signs gets, the less anyone notices a man standing still with a camera. Everyone is looking up. I am looking at them.
Where the Colourful City Street Photography Lives
It lives at the big intersections. Yonge-Dundas is the obvious one, a bowl of billboards where a Sonic the Hedgehog poster four storeys tall throws orange light down onto the crowd and a storm sky sits on top of it all. The trick is not to get greedy. A wall of fifty signs is just chaos until one human being gives it scale. So I wait there for the moment when a person carries a colour of their own into the frame, a blue puffer jacket, a paper coffee cup, a bright bag, and suddenly the eye has somewhere to land in all that noise.
The Quieter Colour
Not all of it is downtown’s wattage. Some of the best colour in the city is small and deliberate. Two pink Muskoka chairs and a yellow one bolted to a patio rail, facing a storefront lit blood-red behind the glass. A red-brick corner building catching what little warm light there is, while a yellow signal box and a no-right-turn sign do their quiet work in the foreground. Toronto is full of this if you slow down for it, a painted planter, a single bright door in a grey block, a wall someone took the trouble to paint. I shoot these straight on and let the blocks of colour stack up like a painting.
Found Colour, Not Arranged Colour
None of this is set up. The stock car bursting out of the side of the CTV building, all rust and broken concrete with the red C glowing beside it, was just there, hanging off the wall above the hydro wires. I did not move a thing. My job is to stand in the right place and wait, then decide what to leave out, because a colourful frame can hold only so much before it falls apart. I am not adding colour. I am finding where the city already put it, and waiting for a person to walk into the gap.
This is the second set in my colourful city street photography, and it leans harder on the big signs than the first one did. I shot it on the Fuji X100V and the Leica Q3, available light, no flash. The Fuji’s 35mm is good for the tighter corners and the Leica’s 28mm pulls in the whole bowl of Yonge-Dundas at once. Both of them disappear in a crowd, which is the only thing that matters when you are working this close to people. More of this, and the rest of the work, are in the projects.
Thanks for looking!
