Posts in Category: Photography
St James Town at Night
***your phone will crush and distort these pictures. If you can, try to see this on a bigger screen like a laptop***
A Very Short History of St James Town
St James Town was once a working-class Victorian neighbourhood, housing the poorest of Toronto residents in ratty decaying homes. In the 50s and 60s, city planners and developers decided to rezone and bulldoze most of the neighbourhood. Over the next decade or so, they built nineteen highrise buildings including 4 city owned public housing towers. At the time, developers assumed that fresh young middle-class office workers would quickly move in. Instead, that demographic chose to move to the suburbs of North York and Scarborough and the neighbourhood filled up again with Toronto’s lowest income families. Over the last couple of decades, the demographics have shifted more towards new immigrants to Canada and St James Town remains one of the last affordable neighbourhoods in the downtown area.
For a more detailed account of St James Town history and development have a look at this excellent article at Blog TO.
Bad Reputation?
In the late 90’s, when I first moved to Toronto, St James Town had been in steady decline for 30 years. The buildings were crumbling, the public spaces were trampled and neglected and the residents were some of the poorest in the downtown area.
One day, shortly after moving to this city, I went to visit a friend downtown and missed my subway stop. As a result, I accidentally came above ground at the tiny run-down Glen Road exit of the Sherbourne subway station. Glen Road consists of a single block of some of the last surviving Victorian homes in the area but, at the time, the houses were all boarded up and abandoned. It was like coming up into a ghost town of haunted houses. I was so surprised that I took a bunch of film photos but, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find them now. If you want to see some images from this time, this site has some good ones.
A little later I met my friend and told him about getting lost in St James Town. His advice was to stay away from the neighbourhood, even during the daytime. Apparently the area had a bad reputation for drugs, gangs, violence, prostitution. I had no idea if this was true or not but I took his advice and never came back. Not until over 20 years later when I ended up renting an apartment on this very street.
St James Town Today
With 19 highrise towers in a relatively small area, St James Town is the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada . The “official” population of St James Town today is around 17 000 although it is probably much higher. It is still home to many low income families and is a popular landing place for new immigrants.
Sometime around 2000, the city decided to put some resources towards improving the crumbling neighbourhood. This included plans to clean up and repair the old highrises and renew the parks, playgrounds and public spaces. This is ongoing today.
Eventually, developers started to sniff around one of the last downtown neighbourhoods that had so far escaped gentrification. Condo speculators bought up and fenced off many of the old neglected houses and plots of land. They also gutted and renovated the row of abandoned houses on Glen Road in return for the city’s approval of their development plans. They squeezed in a few new glass and steel towers and tucked little townhouses into the shadows of the old highrises. Since I moved in, no less than 5 new condo buildings have gone up within a 1 minute walk. And many more are on the way.
Living in St James Town
I think that St James Town still has something of a bad reputation today. Reading online, I often see postings where people are nervously asking about safety and crime rates before moving in to the area. And still others (who probably don’t even live here) advise them to be very careful, especially at night.
I have lived here for years and have not had a single incident that would make me feel unsafe. Police, ambulances and fire trucks are a pretty regular sight. But, when you have over 17 000 people living on a few city blocks, this doesn’t seem unusual.
I like that this neighbourhood always has people moving around in it. You are rarely by yourself outside. To me, this feels safe. I used to work at a restaurant directly south of St James Town in Old Toronto. The walk home from there at night felt so unsafe to me during the covid closures that I would carry a police baton with me at all times. Walking on high alert, I wouldn’t feel relaxed until I found myself among the busy highrises of St James Town again.
Maybe the Best Neighbourhood Downtown…
I love living in this neighbourhood . Everything is in walking distance: dentist, doctor, supermarket, subway, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little India, beautiful natural spaces, museums, universities, galleries, live music venues, great restaurants, a fully operating farm, some of the country’s best hospitals…the list goes on. I think this must be one of the most connected neighbourhoods in the city. I haven’t had a car in many years and I never miss it.
The interior of St James Town itself reminds me of the highrise neighbourhood I grew up in when my parents first immigrated to Canada. People are always outside. The parks and public spaces are full even at night. Extended families get together and pass time in the shade of old trees. People who have immigrated from the same place and share language and culture find each other here, in the building hallways and the outdoor playgrounds. They naturally build communities around their shared experiences. If you walk around St James Town, English might be one of the last languages you hear. Tagalog, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Tamil, Russian, Bengali….these are much more common.
St James Town is one of the last places where low income Canadians as well as newly landed immigrants can afford to live connected to the downtown core. And because so many of the residents share a common experience, St James Town has a the feeling of a vibrant community. People know their neighbours and I believe that people look out for each other. The neighbourhood has a strong feeling of family. All kinds of family.
Night Walks Through St James Town
Some would say that the clump of old highrises is ugly but I see real beauty in them…in their multicoloured brick exteriors, angular balconies, weird glowing stairwells, old mature trees and especially in the people who call this neighbourhood home. Hopefully some of that will come through in these photos but, if not, take a walk through here on a nice summer night and you may be surprised by how much you enjoy it.
Convenience Stores
There is a small commercial strip on Howard street with a couple of Filipino restaurants, a fried chicken place, a small pharmacy, an Ethiopian grocery and a Halal butcher. These convenience stores are part of this strip:
I used to buy cigarettes here. The wife’s mom (the 7 year old’s grandma) worked there at the time and I would visit her everyday on my way to work and buy a pack of smokes. She would cheerfully sell them to me while telling me that they were bad for my health and that I should stop. One day, I quit smoking and so, I didn’t go in for a few weeks. When I finally stopped in to buy an ice cream, she asked where I had been. I told her that I quit smoking and so I didn’t need to stop by so often. I couldn’t believe how happy she was to hear that. It was as if I was her own son!
Winter in St James Town
These are a few pictures of a snowy night walk through St James Town last winter. It really is a pretty place.
The Future of St James Town
There is a tremendous amount of demolition and building going on around here. I think the original towers are safe in their big bulky numbers. Hopefully they will continue to see improvements and provide a home for people who can’t afford to move anywhere else.
As for the surviving victorian houses…I am not so sure. Just last year I found out that Concert Realty bought up the whole west side of Glen Road. This is the same developer that is building the 54 story building outside my bedroom window. This means that right now they own a continuous parcel of land that is more than enough to build a second condo tower. They have not submitted plans to the city yet but I think it is only a matter of time. Lately there has been some pull back on new condos so hopefully Glen Road will survive for a few more years…let’s see what happens.
There is so much more…
These pictures just show a little of this neighbourhood. In recent years, the city has put up a brand new community centre complete with sunlit indoor pool, library, indoor basketball courts and community services.
The Rose Avenue Public School right at the centre of St James Town is one of the last original buildings in the area. This brick building with massive old windows was built in 1924 and still operates as a busy public school and day care, surrounded by old trees and brick walkways.
St James Town represents a massive and miscalculated experiment in early city redevelopment. Originally seen as a failure and struggling for decades, I think it has grown into a unique and vital part of the Toronto downtown.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. I am always happy to hear from you.
Thanks for reading! : )
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Losing Focus: Finding Interest in Blurry Photos
***If you are looking at this on your phone you probably won’t see the blur in these photos. Your phone will crush the images to the point where they will probably look in focus. Of all the posts so far, this one needs to be seen on a bigger screen to make sense…
***photographers: this article is not about using diffusion filters to soften focus.
Finding something interesting in “mistakes”
Over the years, I have taken thousands of pictures. Sometimes they turn out great. Often times they don’t. Sometimes the image I was seeing in my mind didn’t translate well with the camera or, other times, the photos are technically flawed. My camera is older and the auto-focus system is not perfect. It struggles with difficult light and reflections, especially at night. So, I tend to get a few photos that are out of focus from time to time. These blurry pictures are impossible to fix and I always delete them first, without any thought, to save space on my computer.
Lately, I have found a few of these pictures that escaped getting deleted. While they are not what I intended, some of them are still kind of interesting. Unfortunately, only a few of these “mistakes” have survived. So, I decided to go out and try to take some out of focus pictures on purpose and see if I could come up with some good shots.
This project turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. My idea was to just go out, find an interesting scene, manually de-focus the camera and shoot away. I shot hundreds of photos and the majority looked terrible…not interesting…just BAD pictures.
But, over a couple of weeks, I managed to figure out which images are more likely to make a good blurred photo. Here are the ones that I think turned out pretty well.
Shooting through moving water
Manually de-focussed still life shots around my apartment
These photos have a dreamy quality about them: you know what they are but all the details are missing. Like…you know there was a person in your dream…you know what you said, you know what you did…but you can’t see their face no matter how hard you try to remember….these pictures have that kind of feeling for me.
Out in the city at night
I thought night shooting might be a little easier but it was just as difficult to get an interesting shot. Here are a few that I did like. In the city at night, there is a lot of hard contrast in the lighting which I found helps to give some structure to de-focussed pictures.
Time Travel
Photos that look like paintings
Scenes with strong texture and clear structure can make good unfocussed images. Because of the large grain and the soft transition between colours, these ones look like oil paintings to me.
Ghosts…
Images with people in them turned out to be some of the most interesting ones. They all look like dream scenes to me. They are clearly people but their limbs are distorted and their faces are obscured. This is how I tend to remember characters from dreams. I don’t think I have ever seen a ghost but, if I did, I imagine that this is what they would look like.
What’s next…?
This was a difficult project and I am kind of glad that I can get back to taking “normal” pictures again. I am really happy with these few good shots that I did come up with. I hope you like them too. Working on a project about shadows…
As always, you are welcome to leave questions or comments below. I am always happy to hear from you. Knowing you have been here motivates me to keep at it. Thanks for looking!
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Tiara Girls in Shibuya Scramble
Smartphones and Social Media: Today’s Popular Photography
These days, everyone everywhere has a camera in their pocket. Smartphone cameras have filters, AI and editing tools that give everyone the ability to take a decent photograph. Publishing photos has also become effortless. Anyone can post their images publicly on social media platforms like Instagram, and image posts get feedback through “likes” and “comments”. This is satisfying and motivating. It is a fun way to share your images with a huge audience.
Social media gives people the motivation to take photographs and smartphone technology makes it easy. The result is that millions of personal documentary style photos are being published everyday. Photo based apps have become a worldwide tool for communication and self expression. But while casual social media snaps are by far the most common type of photography, there are still other types of photographs to consider: images that are able to draw and hold your attention, freezing unique and surprising moments in time. There is a kind of magic in them. They are rare and difficult to capture.
Because these types of photos are so elusive, netting them requires some planning and skill but mostly persistence and luck. Of the thousands of pictures I took on a recent trip to Japan and Korea, I managed to capture only one such image.
The 1/250th of a second miracle
1/250th of a second…that’s how much time is captured here. We are in a huge crowd of people swarming through Shibuya Scramble Crossing in Tokyo. I am quickly walking forward taking pictures from waist level without looking through my camera. The girls are walking quickly towards me headed in the opposite direction. For this fraction of a second, we are facing each other. We are less than 2 metres apart and my finger happens to push the camera shutter. We pass each other and the moment is gone. Forever. One fraction of a second before or after and it would not exist. It is pure luck.
The intimate angle, the fact that the image is in focus and exposed so well and the emotion on display coming together in this tiny moment is almost a miracle. To put it into context, I tried the same technique in the same crosswalk for over two hours and took over 400 pictures. Out of 400 shots, maybe 6 or 7 were usable. Of those few, this was the only one that stood out as something truly special. It made the whole process worthwhile and went beyond all my expectations. It is one of my favourite pictures that I have ever taken.
What sets this image apart?
Emotion.
Photographs that express strong emotion are the ones that draw me in . And, the most captivating images are candid photos, where the emotion is pure and unaffected, where the subject has no sense that they are being photographed.
Tiara Girls in Shibuya Scramble glows with the energy of youth: freedom, rebellion, optimism are all on display. School uniform collars are unbuttoned and ties are pulled loose. Determined eyes are gazing directly and fearlessly into the future.
The princess tiaras, the body language and the smiles on their faces hint at the kind of friendship that can only bloom when you are young and free and open hearted. It makes me think of this short story passage:
“The most important people turned up surprisingly early in life. After a certain point, she found it difficult to turn even the first page of relationships that her younger self would’ve entered with relative ease. People locked their hearts at some point in their lives, as if everyone had agreed to do so. Then they made acquaintances outside those locks, with people who would never hurt them or be hurt by them”. Choi Eunyoung “Sister, My Little Soonae”
Some of our closest and most impactful friendships are forged when we are very young: before we have had our hearts bruised enough times to start hiding them away from others. This photograph captures that time.
Candid photography and telephoto lenses (spy photography)
Are there easier ways to get this kind of picture? Why not just sit up on a staircase above the crossing with a long lens and fire away..like taking bird pictures? The answer is that if you are not down in the crowd using a lens that is close to human vision perspective, you will not capture the kind of emotion that you see here. It just won’t work. The photos will look like spy camera photos, flat and lifeless. Kind of like when they show snaps of cop surveillance photos on tv shows. You need to be inside the image. When you are photographing from a distance, the photo will feel distant.
Check out my original post about Shibuya Scramble Crossing if want to see a few more pictures from this day.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Knowing you have been here gives me the motivation to keep it up. Thanks always for stopping by : )
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