blogTO

Chris Hadfield, Pearson International Airport, Toronto, August 2009

THE YEAR I WAS LAID OFF WAS A BAD ONE FOR NEWSPAPERS. The Rocky Mountain News, which had published since 1859, closed for good, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. in business since 1863, ceased print publication and went online only. They were just the big names. According to this story, 105 newspapers closed that year in the U.S. and 10,000 jobs in the industry were lost.

It was a bad time to be looking for a newsroom gig and while freelance opportunities were still available, word rates and assignment fees had either stagnated or declined severely. After the shock of the lay-off subsided, I realized I had to do something - anything - to keep myself writing and shooting, so I contacted the editors of blogTO, a city news and entertainment website that had been started five years earlier.

It was a practitioner of what was being called "hyperlocal journalism," which I'd been vocal about praising in my column at the free daily. Initially Tim and Derek, the editors, were skeptical about why I was approaching them for work - it was usually the sort of venue recent j-school grads and youthful urbanist types would work for to build a resume of work. I was - and would remain - the oldest person on their staff the whole time I worked there.

Building 9, Kodak lands, Toronto, June 2009

It took me a while to get up to speed with my posts. It had been years since I had gone out several nights a week or knew what the best new places to eat or shop were. Working for the free daily and raising two small children, my world had shrunk to a few well-worn routes and a few square blocks of the city I once knew so well, and I had to make an effort to reacquaint myself with my own hometown.

My first really successful post was about Building 9, the last remaining part of the Kodak Canada plant where my family had worked since the '20s. The then-owners had left it unguarded and it was inevitably broken into, wide open for vandals, renegade club and event promoters and urbex types. I made my way in with my camera and recorded the damage, then wrote a post about my own history with Kodak and the neighbourhood. It was probably one of the most popular things I wrote for many years.

Beach Motel, Toronto, April 2011

Beach Motel, Toronto, Nov. 2012

Another ongoing story I attached myself to was the final days of a strip of venerable but run-down motels on Lake Shore Boulevard that was being redeveloped into a thick cluster of condominium towers. I lurked around the area for about a year or two, interviewing the last people trying to make a living there before the inevitable. I was there on the morning the last motel was demolished, my post just one of a bunch of elegaic stories about the city's relentless transformation.

Canary Restaurant, Toronto, 2010.

Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto, 2009.

There were a lot of stories like this, like the closing and gutting of the Canary Restaurant, a worn-out greasy spoon in an old industrial area in the east end that was being turned into an athlete's village for the Pan-Am Games. I also got a look at the Don Valley Brickworks when it was being turned from an abandoned industrial relic into a eco/foodie destination.

Rotman's Hats final sale, Toronto, 2009.

China House neon re-lighting ceremony, Toronto, 2010.

China House contents auction, Toronto, 2011.

Valhalla Inn contents auction, Toronto, 2009.

Sutton Place Hotel contents auction, Toronto, 2014.

And there were more stories about the passing of an older Toronto, like the final sale week at Rotman's Hats, one of the last remnants of Spadina Avenue's Jewish merchant history. I wrote several stories about China House, an old-school Chinese food restaurant that seemed to get a new lease of life for about a year before it was inevitably closed and demolished for more condos.

I also covered the contents sales of two closed Toronto hotels. The Valhalla Inn was one of the first really glamorous airport hotels, opened in 1963 and designed in a style that took Scandinavian contemporary to its roots with a Viking theme. The Sutton Place was another modernist high point, and a hotel I knew intimately from shooting musicians and movie stars there for nearly twenty years. I didn't have much history with the Valhalla Inn, but watching the Sutton Place disappear actually gave me a pang of loss I didn't expect.

Imperial Oil Building, Toronto, 2011.

I also had an opportunity to tour the old Imperial Oil headquarters in midtown - an imposing tower built on the highest point in the city from plans reputedly rejected for Toronto's city hall. I had always wanted to get inside, and blogTO's credentials were enough to allow me a guided tour as workmen stripped out the offices and boardrooms to make way for - yes, big surprise - more condos. I was particularly taken with the gold tiles on the walls of the sky lobby outside one of the big main boardrooms - an unusually luxurious expression of midcentury modernism, I thought.

Looking back, I shot a lot of ruins and wreckage and demolition in my years at blogTO. It's not a surprise - my city was undergoing the latest in a series of radical transformations, with construction cranes all over the horizon and whole districts either being changed utterly or created out of parking lots and abandoned buildings. It's a boom that still hasn't wound up, and I'd be lying if I said I had unmixed feelings about watching - and documenting - the erasure of the city where I grew up.

Portlands, Toronto, 2010.

Corso Italia Festival, Toronto, 2013.

Working for blogTO forced me to concentrate on street photography, a style that I had never explored much in all my years of shooting portraits and news for NOW, eye, the Globe & Mail, the National Post or the free daily. Their posts featured photos as much, if not more, than words, and I had to learn to produce shots that could stand alone on a web page.

Ripley's Aquarium opening, Toronto, 2013.

BlogTO's credentials also got me into events like the media day before the opening of Ripley's Aquarium, a major tourist attraction right next to the CN Tower. I relished these opportunities, not only for the photos they allowed me to take, but for the sense that I was still part of the media, showing up and providing my coverage. Being laid off had felt like a sort of banishment from the profession I'd laboured in for so many years, so I was happy for any chance to hang a press pass around my neck and do my job.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 2009.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 2014.

In many ways, working for blogTO wasn't terribly different from working for a daily newspaper. We'd still cover news events like the opening of the Canadian National Exhibition at the end of every summer, and I was given that assignment for several years running. I had never done those ritual news calls before, so ironically it was working for the all-digital "new media" - which was supposedly speeding the decline of print dailies - that saw me covering stories like the annual Air Show, or interviewing and photographing the mayor at press conferences.

Helio Castroneves, Honda Indy, Toronto, 2012.

Honda Indy, Toronto, 2013.

Pit crew, Honda Indy, Toronto, 2014.

Honda Indy, Toronto, 2015.

One of those annual stories was the Honda Indy - the weekend long summer car race that takes over the CNE grounds. I'm a motorsport fan, but I had never shot a car race until blogTO gave me the credentials and I began spending a whole weekend at the track with my cameras. It was an opportunity I cherished, and a chance to ascend yet another steep learning curve as a photographer, learning to execute all the standard shots required for car race coverage, and perhaps even try something new.

World Cup celebrations, Etobicoke, 2014.

Rob Ford, election nght, 2014.

The funny thing was that blogTO made me more of a straight news photographer than I'd ever been before, assigning me to cover stories like fans reacting to Germany's World Cup win, or the end of the Rob Ford era in city politics. I even got the assignment of writing Ford's obituary for the site - a post that I'm still proud of today as a relatively objective assessment of his legacy in a time and place where nobody (especially in my business) was anything other than rabidly partisan.

Which reminds me of the worst thing about blogTO, at least in the early days: The comments thread on posts was famously vicious, a hangout for trolls and keyboard warriors who obviously thought they could do the job better than you could. I made the mistake of engaging in my first year or two posting there, and it was never a wise or prudent move. On the worst days, it was as ugly as the comments section on a YouTube clip, and eventually they found a way to make commenting less visible or encouraged. So much for the dream of "online communities" and reader engagement.

Hotel bartenders, Toronto, 2010.

Crazy Steve, Kensington, Toronto, 2011.

The one thing I didn't do much of at blogTO was portraiture - my specialty as a professional photographer. I had been forced to strip down and reinvent my style at the free daily, and had just arrived at something intriguing when the lay-off made me drop that thread and, one more time, start all over again.

I ended up doing something more like environmental portraiture, shooting people in a setting or context, like astronaut Chris Hadfield by the tail of the vintage F-86 Sabre he flew in the 2009 Air Show, or "Crazy Steve" Goof of local punk rock legends Bunchofuckingoofs by the entrance of what was once Fort Goof, the band's stronghold in Kensington Market. Or the series of portraits I did for a story on the 12 best hotel bars in Toronto, where I photographed each bartender in the same position behind the bar - a time-consuming assignment that I conceived mostly as a challenge for myself.

The pay at blogTO was ridiculously low, and I'm not sure that the time or effort I put into most of my stories ever made much economic sense. I'm not complaining - I definitely didn't do it for the money as much as a chance to keep working and publishing at a time when nobody seemed interested in hiring me, either in a newsroom or as a steady freelancer.

BlogTO let me test myself and my capabilities as a photographer and journalist, and if what I earned per post was essentially a nominal fee or honorarium - there's no way that the $40 I got for covering a whole weekend at the Honda Indy covered even a fraction of my time - at least I was working, at a time when many of my peers were (quite sensibly) leaving the business.

There was no definitive end to my time at blogTO. I had always felt like mutton dressed as lamb working there, and knew that the particular skill set and enthusiasms of an old journalist would sooner or later be superfluous to their needs. Eventually the assignments got as occasional as my story pitches and a redesign/revamp of the site moved away from long form stories to more lists and short pieces - exactly the sort of work that interested me the least. I knew it was probably time to go the year they said they weren't interested in covering either the auto show or the Honda Indy any more.

I'm not bitter - blogTO was a flag of convenience for me at a time when I just needed to keep working and shooting until whatever next move I needed to make made itself apparent. I'm grateful for the chance to do as much as I did under the banner Tim and Derek provided for me, and for hitching a ride into the world of online media that seems more like the future now than it did when I was jettisoned from the world of newsprint.

The End of Film

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

I BOUGHT MY LAST REAL FILM CAMERA IN 2003. I've bought cameras since then - antiques and curiosities and some Lomography stuff, but they were either used as toys or meant to sit on a bookshelf in my office. The last new film camera I really used was the Canon EOS Elan 7e I purchased in 2003, after my trusty Canon EOS Elan (known in most markets around the world as the EOS 100) stopped working after a solid decade of hard use.

I knew when I bought it that the 7e would be my last film camera. Digital was happening in a big way, but the technology was still pretty hit-and-miss and the camera manufacturers hadn't come up with a single image file as the industry standard. I thought that I'd be using the 7e for at least three or four years when I packed it for my press junket to Peru - the camera's big shake-out cruise.

It's a pretty great piece of gear. Built out of alloys and polycarbonates like most of Canon's lower-priced cameras, it was on the top edge of their prosumer SLR line and included some pretty incredible technology, like an eye-following autofocus that worked really well, though it's never reappeared on any of Canon's subsequent cameras, amateur or professional. It was light and took all my old lenses and by the time I was back from Peru it seemed like we were ready to go.

I rarely ever used it again. The camera companies finally agreed on a common image standard - jpegs for compressed images and RAW files for uncompressed. With that settled, they could really begin competing with each other in the marketplace, which saw prices for cameras start to drop. In 2004 the free daily put me back to work shooting and bought a Canon digital SLR for me to use. The 7e was packed away in a camera bag and I don't think I put another roll of film through it again until last week.

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

Knowing that I was going to be writing a blog post about the end of film photography, I pulled the 7e out of its bag in the basement, put some fresh batteries in the grip and loaded it with an expired roll of Ilford Delta 400 film I'd had sitting around since the camera was new. It only took a minute to decide that the most suitable subject on a warm June day was in my old neighbourhood, just a couple of blocks away from where Kodak Canada's plant used to be - the factory where women in my family worked since the '20s.

The pond on the southeast corner of the Eglinton Flats wasn't called Topham Pond when I was a kid. I don't recall it having a name (though I distinctly remember its stagnant odour in the heat of summer), and the parkland surrounding it was mostly grass and scrub with a few stands of shrubs and a single copse of trees at the bottom of the hill where teenagers went to smoke and make out. It's been landscaped and naturalized since I moved away over thirty years ago, and has become one of the nicest green spaces in the city, as far as I'm concerned.

Topham Pond, Toronto, June 2018

To compare and contrast, I also brought along my current favorite camera - the Fuji X-30 that has been a big part of the revival of my enthusiasm for shooting. There's no denying that the two cameras make me shoot differently, and that the images that come out of them have distinct qualities. Even if I didn't have to push the Ilford a stop to compensate for the lack of sensitivity of expired film, the grain in the film is hard to ignore, and has to be worked with when processing up the final images in Photoshop.

The digital files are very different - smooth and full of resolution when working from RAW files, and far easier to manipulate in editing. The film shots look like lithographs, full of rough analog texture, while the digital photos have a fine, long tonal curve that feels more like graphic art. It's easier to push and shape the digital files into something less realistic, and since the move to digital I've been able to realize effects that I could only imagine in the darkroom.

But the 7e wasn't my only final film camera. A year before I bought it, I walked into the one hour photo lab by the basement food court in the mall next to the free daily's offices and picked up an Olympus Stylus Epic on impulse. With my first steady paycheque in almost fifteen years, I was feeling flush, and I wanted a little camera I could fit in a pocket.

Until the Stylus, most point-and-shoot cameras were pretty dismal, but Olympus had produced a really useful bit of kit that, thanks to its bright, wide lens and an unusually accurate exposure system, had become a hit with professionals who used it to take notes, or even as a backup camera. It was the first small, inexpensive camera that I felt I could trust the way I've since learned to trust almost any recent digital camera - or the cameras in my smartphones, which have effectively killed off the point-and-shoot market.

Lunenberg wharves, Nova Scotia, Summer 2002

Barrington Street looking north from Sackville, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Summer 2002

Fog at Harbourville, Nova Scotia, Summer 2002

The Stylus was as indispensable then as my X-30 is today. I packed it with a Holga plastic camera on the Peru trip, and I actually have to look close to tell the difference between shots taken with the Stylus and the 7e. It was most useful of all on the summer trips we took to visit my wife's family in Nova Scotia, both before and after we had kids. I could use it for family snaps and for artier shots, like a short series I took holding up some of the vintage postcards I was collecting in the spots where they were taken.

If I'm honest, I don't miss film. I never really enjoyed the smell, the cost or the inconvenience of the darkroom, and I don't care if I ever develop another roll of film again. Image editors like Photoshop offer a complexity and ease of manipulation that has the added advantage of working anywhere - preferably in a comfortable chair by a window. But I feel bad that the 7e will never get used as much as its predecessor, and not just because it feels like I never got my money's worth out of its purchase price.

Carrie-Anne Moss

Carrie-Anne Moss, Sept. 7, 2006

ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER FILM FESTIVAL. I'm not complaining - I wasn't then, either - since the film festival has always been pretty much the only week every year where I got to do as much portrait work as I wanted to the rest of the year. 2006 was even more busy than previous years, while the next year would be my busiest ever at the free daily. I wish I'd known at the time the opportunity I was being given.

My first subject was Carrie-Anne Moss, who'd rocketed to stardom with the Matrix films a few years earlier and was at the festival promoting either Fido or Snow Cake, or both. Moss was probably at the zenith of her career at the time - though she's kept working pretty consistently since then, even finding herself a place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe playing a recurring character across the franchise's TV series.

Carrie-Anne Moss, Sept. 7, 2006

I got access to names like Moss thanks to the free daily, and my editor Jodi's decision to make celebrity entertainment coverage a big part of its package. Previously, working for NOW magazine, I might have occasionally been assigned a movie star, but the emphasis was on art films and directors. Today, access to big names is far more restricted; I don't think publicists were ever enamoured with putting their talent in front of a random selection of photographers in the midst of a hectic press day, and with fewer big publications (but a lot more small, internet-based ones) they've rationed access like this to only the biggest.

For her part, Moss was a more than cooperative subject. Once I'd found my spot of light - easier to find now, after a couple of years shooting at the Intercontinental on Bloor - it was simply a matter of framing her up close and letting Moss engage the persona that had made her a star: A mature woman, smart and able to beguile with a direct look that made you feel like you might be allowed into her confidence, provided you proved worthwhile. Another example of a portrait that works mostly because the subject knew how they looked, and met my camera at least halfway.

Carrie-Anne Moss, Sept. 7, 2006

Mom

Agnes McGinnis née Murphy, Mount Dennis, early '40s

MY MOM LOVED BING CROSBY. Sure there might have been other singers, but for her it would always be Bing. When I was learning about jazz - thanks to a Benny Goodman sextet record I used to hear in a vintage clothing store - I asked her what she thought about Billie Holiday. She didn't like her, she told me. She had a lisp.

My mother and father were nearly sixty when they adopted me, so I never knew the woman in this photo, taken twenty years before, probably by my cousin Terry, the family photographer. She was stylish; she liked her clothes. She also liked dancing, and was a regular at places like the Maple Leaf and the Palais Royale, apparently. I would have liked to have met this woman.

Agnes and Marty McGinnis, Mount Dennis, 1946

I love this photo. It's from the trove of negatives I've been slowly scanning for the last few months. Judging from the expression in her eyes it was taken by my father, and like the photo at the top - and so many others - it was taken in the backyard of the house on Grandville. My brother still makes that face today.

My mother was nearly a senior citizen by the time my first real memories begin, so I never knew this woman - the young mother in her late thirties, newly married and finally starting the family that she and her husband had put off for years while they took care of their own ailing mothers. It's such a happy scene, and her pride in her baby and her husband radiates from the picture.

Agnes McGinnis, Mississauga, Christmas 1985

My own mother was ailing for most of my life - a misdiagnosed ailment that, in the end, was probably ALS. This was taken at my sister's house, on the second last Christmas she'd live to see, just a few months after I bought my first camera. A year later she'd be unable to leave her nursing home, and we'd drive from Caledon to visit her there. She was wrapped up in blankets on the couch in her room and barely spoke. A few weeks later she was gone.

I have a lot of regret, still, when I remember my mother. I wish I had been able to cope with the illness that gradually sapped her strength for years. I wish I had been a bit older, and able to see past my own chaotic life. I wish I'd had a chance to see her as the young, energetic woman in the old photos I've been scanning. She has a granddaughter now who carries her name. It was the least I could do.

 

Mount Dennis

'57 Lincoln Premiere, Brownville Ave., Mt. Dennis 2001

IN 2001 I WROTE AND ILLUSTRATED A FEATURE on Mount Dennis, the neighbourhood where I grew up, for Toronto Life magazine. This is the photo that ran on the double page spread that began the article. I spent a week or two walking around the area with my Rollei and a rented Widelux, looking to find a shot that summed up the piece. When it ran, the editors decided to give it the title "Happy Days," which explains why they went with the shot with the Lincoln and its declarative tailfins.

My income as a photographer was dropping steeply by this point, which explains the return to writing under my own name after over a decade. I had hoped that presenting myself as a complete editorial package - writer and photographer - would be a big selling point in my favour. I ended up having to work hard selling both editors and art departments on the concept that it was possible to do both - even for clients who'd hired me to do both in the past.

Nowadays, of course, it's a lot easier since the value of both words and pictures is a fraction of what it was fifteen years ago, now that digital cameras (and phones!) are almost foolproof and copy editing and proofreading are notional at best. You can provide the whole package for almost any client - in fact, they might insist on it. But you won't get paid nearly what it's worth.

Not to sound bitter or anything.

'64 Ford Falcon, Mt. Dennis 2001

Digging out these contacts again, I'm struck by how many cars I shot, and how lovingly I featured them in each frame. This Falcon, made the year I was born, is the star of the shot, and obviously the pride and joy of whoever lives in the shotgun-style house in the back.

In 2001, it would be a decade before I finally allowed my lifelong fascination with cars to have free reign again, sending me out to auto shows and car races with my camera whenever I had a chance. Back then, though, I was obviously having a hard time hiding it.

Honda CRX, Gray Avenue, Mt. Dennis 2001

Both sides of my family moved to Mount Dennis around World War One, and I finally left in the mid-'80s, when my mother was in a nursing home and we sold the family house - a wall of which is caught on the right hand side of the photo above with the hard-used CRX. When you live in a place for a long time, the past lingers in your mind, regardless of the changes. I spend a of time in the old neighbourhood these days, and even now I always feel like the past can be glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, abiding behind the present like a faint layer.

These three photos are like those layers - one from the neighbourhood's past, one from the Mount Dennis of my childhood, and one from the slightly less lovely place that I left, in search of life and adventure.

Mercury Cougar, Gray Ave., Mt. Dennis 2013

Corvette Stingray, Dennis Ave., Mt. Dennis 2014

In the last few years I've rediscovered a fondness for the old neighbourhood, and try to swing through at least a couple times a month, often on assignment. Since I wrote the Toronto Life piece, I've become the area's unofficial biographer, writing about it for whoever will let me as it stands on the verge of some major changes that might make it even more unrecognizable.

Right now, though, it's still the house-proud working class neighbourhood where I grew up, nowhere more so than when I see someone's project car sitting out front, in the elements, rusting and blistering while it waits for the TLC it desperately needs. I try to get a snap of every one, a job made much easier thanks to the increasingly superb cameras in my phones. Damn their black hearts.

But I haven't liked anything I've shot there in the last few years near as much as the work with the Rollei. They were shot just months before 9/11, which is probably why they seem to come from a place not only behind my analog wall but from some historical watershed that divides the contemporary from the historical - at least for me.

Perhaps it's time to go back to Mount Dennis with the Rolleis and see what happens.