A pizza place on a cold night, both cooks in white behind the counter, stacks of red boxes going up the wall behind them, and taped to the glass in front a printed sheet saying the dining room is temporarily closed. They were working flat out and there was nobody in the room. I did not plan a set about any of this, I just kept ending up in front of it. Toronto restaurant windows, over a few strange winters.
Toronto Restaurant Windows With Nobody In Them
An empty room reads completely differently from a full one, and it takes about a second to feel it. There is a place here shot through white painted panes, the tables already set, napkins folded, every lamp lit, the whole room ready and not one person in it. Normally that frame would be a disappointment and I would wait for somebody to sit down. In that particular season it was the photograph.
The other one is a cafe layered so heavily in reflection that you have to work to find the room inside it, a chandelier hanging in the top corner, a member of staff at the till, and a board by the door reading welcome, please be seated. Across the same glass the street is going about its business. Two worlds in one pane and neither of them touching.
The Signs Tell You What Year It Is
I did not notice at the time how much of this the glass was recording. Take-out and delivery only. This table reserved to support physical distancing. Our dining room is temporarily closed. Those sheets of paper were the most ordinary thing in the world for a while, and they dated every frame they appeared in more precisely than any timestamp.
That is worth saying to anyone doing this kind of work. Photograph the dull thing. The notice in the window, the arrow on the floor, the sign nobody will remember. It looks like nothing on the night and it is the whole story five years later.
Then the Wreath Goes Up
Not all of it is closed doors. There is a doorway with a wreath strung with warm lights and a stone wall running up beside it, and past the door a dining room with a chandelier and a table laid. A bar with patterned wallpaper and a row of hanging lamps, people down at the far end talking under the neon. Two young ones at a counter at dusk with the towers stacked over them in the glass, and two more at a counter in full daylight with a bicycle going by across the reflection.
Rooms fill up again. That is the point of putting the empty ones and the full ones in the same set. Toronto restaurant windows are worth walking past twice, because the same pane will tell you a completely different thing six months later.
These are mostly Leica Q2 frames from downtown Toronto with one made on the Fuji X100V, all available light, all from across the sidewalk rather than up against the pane. This is the fourth set of this work, after life behind the glass, the reflections and the night rooms. What I carry is on the gear page and the rest is in the projects.
Thanks for looking!
