Results tagged “photography”

When Matt Greenwood saw this video on YouTube last year, he didn't just gawk in a rude fashion (as we did). Inspired by people's responses when confronted by a camera sans photographer, Matt sought to expand on an idea previously touched on only by self-timers. And when he happened to come across a disposable camera, idea met material and art was born.

In the two rooms of Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond Street West, you can see planes take off from Chicago’s O’Hare and Tokyo’s International Airport at the same time. The gallery’s current exhibition, entitled "Google Earth"—running from October 23 to November 28—features a handful of the millions of images captured by the aerial photography internet program.

There are two ways of approaching "Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years 1923–1937," the new exhibition opening at the AGO today: as a photography show displaying the work of a recognized hero in the field and as a fascinating bit of cultural anthropology. What we have in the first case is a master class in some of the foundational elements of photography, most especially composition and light. What we have in the second is a glimpse into the world that Steichen photographed and the cultural sensibilities that were prominent at the time.

We can’t seem to get enough of looking at people, and famous faces are a whole other matter. Whether it’s subconsciously analyzing bone structure to gauge attractiveness, or searching for the unspoken in an subtle expression, we are captivated by images of each other, with celebrities the ultimate draw. The ROM is banking on this in their new exhibition, “Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008.” Showcasing 150 photos from the magazine’s archives, it celebrates the act of looking at people, and of looking like you’re famous. The show is half of a joint venture with the AGO, who are presenting the work of Edward Steichen during the fifteen years that he was the principal photographer at Vanity Fair. Steichen forms the link between the two shows, with his work appearing in both.

Often referred to as Canada's first photojournalist, William James spent more than thirty years documenting Toronto and city life in all its varieties. An ever present, silent observer of a changing city, he was there to record the construction of public infrastructure and new buildings. James photographed the first airplane flights over the city and, a few years later, captured the first bird's eye photos (and moving pictures) of Toronto from the back of a biplane. He recorded the changing landscape of the city's outward expansion. But he was far more interested in capturing the city's inhabitants in informal, unposed moments, such as workmen going about their toil and children at play. He entered the drawing rooms of the elite and photographed the city's destitute.

This past Friday, Torontoist took a sweet trip back in time via a quietly spectacular photography exhibit called "Thirty in Twenty: An Exhibition of Photography, Food, and Wine." These evocative and romantic black-and-white photos were taken with a tiny 35mm camera back in 1973 when then newly married Toni and Ria Harting embarked on a life-changing adventure to eat their way through ten three-star Michelin restaurants in just twenty days. Friday being the opening reception, we not only enjoyed the lovely images, but had the pleasure of meeting the Hartings and hearing their stories first-hand.

Lou Turofsky's favourite photograph was a sedate shot of an exhausted newsboy curled up on a building's front steps. It's a compelling choice, yet surprising given the countless sports stars, celebrities, and royalty that Lou and his brother Nat photographed in Toronto over the years. Today many of their photos of sporting events and city life remain recognizable—frequently republished on this site and elsewhere—but the Turofsky name and their story are largely unknown.

The photographs of Adam Krawesky hang from trees, lamp posts, railings, and street signs like prizes in a treasure hunt. Part of the photographic explosion that is CONTACT, Krawesky has installed his work in tiny plastic slide-viewers across the city that he has spent years documenting. There are maps provided to guide you to their locations, leading to a thrill of reward in finding the innocuous and ridiculously humble artworks suspended in places that are so common you barely see them anymore.

       

CONTACT is back with an upheaval—the theme of upheaval, that is. This year’s exhibition, Still Revolution, focuses on the technological innovations of photography as well as its role in creating and documenting historical revolutions. The primary exhibit, Still Revolution: Suspended in Time, showcases the work of eight artists, each reflecting a technological and social revolution in their photographs.

Should you be headily developing plans for CONTACT, Toronto's beloved photo-fest, here's a (news) flash: with a cruel month of waiting still ahead, the festival program went live today. You can read all about it online and plan accordingly, but that seems rather proletarian. Why bother, when a city-cultural blogger can do the highlighting for you? Open your Moleskine to May 1 and mark the pages according to our picks, all laid out after the jump.

"Paris" is not an inspiration: this is our first thought of LGFW's fourth day. We're late to Aime Luxury's runway debut but catch word the collection's called "Paris, Je T'Aime." Merde. When will designers unsubscribe to such glossy, meaningless cliches?

Apart from a few gentlemen captured in mid-conversation, or the occasional horse-cart, the streets are curiously empty in the earliest known photographs of Toronto. Taken by the firm of Armstrong, Beere & Hime from the rooftop of the Rossin Hotel in 1856–1857, these photos provide an almost 360 degree panorama of a colonial town that is at once familiar but unrecognizable. All twenty-five of these photographs, which served as inspiration for Michael Redhill's Consolation (2006), have been reproduced in Toronto's Visual Legacy: Official City Photography from 1856 to the Present (James Lorimer & Company, 2009), which is being launched tomorrow as part of the city's 175th birthday festivities. Put together by Steve MacKinnon, Karen Teeple, and Michele Dale of the City of Toronto Archives, the book beautifully reproduces over a hundred photographs to offer readers fascinating insight into the Toronto's transformation from the fledgling city recorded by Armstrong, Beere & Hime into the contemporary metropolis.

Remember Contact? It was made in 1997 and was adapted from a weird Carl Sagan novel about extraterrestrial life and faith—ergo, starred Jodie Foster, plus a pre-indie fame Jena Malone. She's an outer space–obsessed girl who grows up to be a SETI scientist, receiving alien transmissions while searching for proof they exist, and eventually falling in love with one. It's among the greatest science fiction films ever made, which does not mean that it's good. It's terrible.

If memory serves, high school Canadian history classes always struck us as a little wimpy. How, we felt in our drama-loving teenage hearts, could coureurs des bois and Trudeau hold a candle to Napoleonic exploits and JFK? With age comes wisdom, fortunately, and we now find Canadian sagas as compelling as their flashier counterparts elsewhere. Helping us along are organizations like Heritage Toronto, whose mandate is to get us excited about our fair city’s past. In a first for the organization, it is currently co-hosting a photography exhibit showcasing some of Toronto’s most interesting and vulnerable heritage buildings. It’s one of those ideas which works so well that it's a wonder no one thought of it before: get some of Toronto’s great photographers—in this case, members of the Shadow Collective—and send them for a ramble through a few of our most architecturally compelling landmarks. "Building Storeys" is the result, an exhibit which, in the words of Heritage Toronto historian Gary Miedema, gives us “a unique way of looking at these buildings.” Part history lesson and part artistic adventure, "Building Storeys" had its opening party Tuesday night and early indications are that the show will be a hit.

Several kilometres north-west of the city’s limits, we encountered something we hadn’t been expecting. Families shuffling around in coordinating Gore-Tex jackets, frail-looking couples clutching crumpled museum maps, and a few Pretty Young Things looking…surprised. In fact, everyone looked just a little surprised.

Winter must be a difficult time for construction site voyeurs. Fortunately for them, the Toronto International Film Festival Group has a solution: TIFFG is asking Toronto's photographers to help document the development of their new Bell Lightbox building at King and John streets. It's a neat idea—anybody can take pictures of the construction and upload them to the Lightbox's Flickr pool, and, after the festival in September, five weekly pictures will be displayed on the Lightbox website. Select photos will also be purchased from the photographers and used in publicity for the building as part of the opening ceremonies in 2010.

Finn O'Hara grew up in Inglewood, "the middle of rural Ontario" as he puts it, with a name "as Irish as it gets"—Finn Donal Douglas O'Hara—in a sea of Daves and Jeffs. He wanted to be a hockey player (his name would've looked cool on a jersey), but ended up as a professional photographer instead. Just as well: after a revelatory moment in the shower a week ago, O'Hara has created I Love Your Fucking Name, a project devoted to collecting and photographing the human specimens attached to the most "magnificent," "brawny," "awesome," "unusual," and "offthefuckingwall!" names.

LECTURE: Still have celebratory (or sorrowful) election bubbly coursing through your veins? President of the White House News Photographers Association Dennis Brack will discuss his experiences as a political photographer, having snapped every president since Lyndon B. Johnson to the present day. He's also had a photo in every issue of Time Magazine for the past twenty-two years straight, so go stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Flickr. Check him out at the thirty-third annual Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, tonight. Ted Rogers School of Management (575 Bay Street), 7:30 p.m., FREE.

            

There's been a lot of talk about hope and change in the U.S. presidential race. These buzzwords quickly permeated the North American media, and Obama's opponents have grown increasingly sick of hearing them; they claim he uses them as grandiose, empty ideas without providing any substantive evidence of how they could be used to better American politics. But photographer John Beebe never bought into those attacks; he's heard the references to change and hope and knows that they aren't machinations of the human mind. He sees change in the faces of America.

                

For his latest project, Posterchild (Torontoist fave, and, yeah, Torontoist staffer) bought five dollar-store disposable cameras and stuck them to walls along Queen Street West and College Street inside homemade boxes he'd painted "Take A Photo, Leave A Photo" onto. Torontonians took care of the former half of the instructions by taking photos of themselves and their friends, and, weeks later, Post fulfilled the latter—with the three boxes that hadn't been stolen—by developing the film, framing the photographs, and mounting them on the same walls they were shot from. Genius.

               

World Press Photo is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the support of photojournalism around the world. Their prestigious annual photo contest dates back to 1955; winning photographs from years past include some of journalism’s most famous images: Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, a lone demonstrator confronting tanks in Tiananmen Square, a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in protest of religious persecution. Each year, World Press Photo puts on an exhibition of the top-placing submissions in ten different categories. Culled from more than 80,000 submissions, the exhibition is mounted in several dozen countries and aims to teach us both about the state of our world and the state of photojournalism.

In the epic battle between shark, bear, and wankster, there can be be no winners.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Tonight at Lennox Contemporary, join the Magenta Foundation for the launch of Flash Forward 2008, a photographic anthology showcasing up-and-coming photographers. The photos in the book were chosen from entries in the 2008 Flash Forward competition, the Magenta Foundation's annual adjudication of emerging talent. The launch is complemented by an exhibition showcasing these photos, which will run until October 26. Lennox Contemporary (12 Ossington Avenue), 7 p.m., FREE.

Taking the global hunt for art and design of its blog-daddy, shape+colour, and putting the focus on Toronto, Shape+Colourist is on the lookout for local artists, designers, and events that are breaking ground and pushing boundaries right here at home.

Top: Erica Gosich Rose painting a legal mural. Bottom: a photo by May Karp of that finished mural, for sale at StreetSpeaks. Photos courtesy of Simon Cole.

ART: Tonight at the Steam Whistle Brewing Gallery, "MOMBACHO: A Photo Chronicle of Life in Nicaragua" is having its opening reception. Photographers Elton Clemente and Sean Zaffino are both creative staff members at Steam Whistle Brewing. While they were on a business adventure developing Nicaraguan cigars for export to Canada, the duo snapped a series of shots portraying the stunning scenery and life throughout Grenada, San Juan del Sur, Managua, and Rivas. The series of photos is not meant as a social commentary, but as a reflection of the jaw-dropping scenery and inspiring people of the areas. Steam Whistle Brewing Gallery (255 Bremner Boulevard), 6 p.m., FREE.

If you notice a more concentrated prevalence of Wayfarers and Vans around the College/Spadina area over the next month, it's because that's where Manhattan skate photographer/documentarian Patrick O'Dell is plunking down his first solo photo exhibit starting tomorrow.

The construction hoarding around the perennially under-renovation Bloor and Gladstone Library has been serving as an outdoor gallery for local and visiting artists since last November, when a series of framed photographs by a photographer known only as "P3" appeared. Anyone can add their own work to this wonderfully improvised and growing exhibition—just don't forget your screwdriver.

For the past month as part of CONTACT, Torontoist photographer John Beebe has taken to the streets to capture the faces of Toronto in a temporary mobile studio on the street, shooting, producing, and printing his portraits on location. You can see him today, Saturday, for his last installation at Queen Street West and Strachan, from 1:00–8:00 p.m. To see all 150+ portraits (representing more than 30 countries of birth), visit FacesOf.ca; a selection of shots are after the fold.

Cancer Connections, an exhibition of photographs of people whose lives have been changed by cancer, launches today in Nathan Phillips Square. The exhibition, organized by photographers' group PhotoSensitive in partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society, aims to document the effects of cancer on the lives on Canadians. PhotoSensitive is inviting people to take part in the exhibition as it travels around the country, helping to raise awareness of the growing incidents of cancer in men and women.