Winter comes early here and the light goes at half past four, and that is when this work gets good. A room with the lamps on is a stage with the fourth wall made of glass, and you are standing out on the cold sidewalk looking straight into it. Toronto windows at night give you something a daylight frame never will, a bright warm box full of people with the dark wrapped around it.
Toronto Windows at Night Are Lit From Inside
In daylight the glass mostly throws the street back at you. After dark it flips. The interior is now the brightest thing in the frame, so the glass turns half transparent and you can see all the way in, right to the back wall. The best one in this set is a bar with a cluster of deco lamps hanging over the counter and every square inch of the far wall covered in framed pictures. Twenty people in there, nobody looking out, the whole room glowing like a lantern. Another is a restaurant shot wide and flat, pendant lamps in a row down the ceiling, flowers on every table, a car sliding through the glass on its way past.
You still get reflections, they just stop being the whole story and become an extra layer laid over the top. That is the balance I am after. Enough of the street in the glass to know where I am standing, enough of the room to know what is going on inside.
Yonge Street Lands in the Glass
Two of these were made on Yonge, and the street did most of the work. In one, the Zanzibar sign and a row of buffet and cash-loan signage come down the pane in full neon while a woman walks through the frame with her collar up, and behind all of it, inside, two soft yellow drum lamps hang over an empty room. In the other there is nothing in the room but a single round table waiting, with the whole intersection printed across it.
Those two took a while. I moved a step at a time along the sidewalk until the neon sat where I wanted it against the dark part of the interior, because a reflection laid over a bright wall just disappears. That is the entire technique and it is all footwork.
Nobody in These Rooms Knows I Am There
A man on his phone with a woman in leopard print at the next table, the Winners sign running backwards across them both. A young one in a grey toque laughing at something at dusk with the condo towers and the last of the sunset over the glass. A room full of people at easels on turquoise tablecloths, painting away on a weeknight while a server carries a plate past. None of them looked up. That is not luck, it is distance. I am across a sidewalk or across a road, never up against the pane, which is the one thing I will not do. Push a lens against the glass and you kill the reflection and put yourself in a stranger’s face at the same time.
All of these are Leica Q2 frames from a couple of downtown winters, available light, exposed for the brightest thing in the room and everything else allowed to go where it wants. This is the third set of this work. The first was about the life behind the glass and the second was about the reflections. Toronto windows at night are the version I like best, and there is more of the work in the projects along with what I carry on the gear page.
Thanks for looking!
