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Transitlanticism
It took them two days and thirteen hours, but Nancy Situ and her friends have joined the Every Station Club in style—with brilliant photos of themselves posing on the platforms of every one of the city’s sixty-nine subway stations.
The project, Situ wrote when she posted the entire set of shots to the Toronto LiveJournal Community last night, was done “out of curiosity and sheer boredom.” On September 1 last year, Situ, Marcela Slinin, and Zack Kotzer—all Toronto-bred York students—spent six hours travelling along the Yonge-University-Spadina and Sheppard lines. Exhausted and hungry by the time they hit the Sheppard line (“You’ll notice that at Leslie station, we didn’t even bother to get off the train,” she told Torontoist), it took the group until this past Sunday to pick up the trip again and complete the Bloor-Danforth and Scarborough RT lines. With Zac Odger, another friend, they came prepared. “This time around we were veterans at this subway-platform-picture-taking business,” Situ says, “and brought props and came up with more interesting shots. There’s a lot of nerdy humour in there.” Like them all giggling at Coxwell, smoking fake weed at High Park, turning the red bench at Ossington into a pirate ship, or blending into the bright red door at Sherbourne. Or being shocked at, uh, “Rape” Station.
The group managed to pull off two full days of transit tomfoolery without being bugged by TTC staff for taking photos, though they did have some difficulty with framing. Says Situ: “One of the biggest challenges was taking a wide enough shot to incorporate the whole ‘scene.’ Many of the platforms aren’t very wide, so we had to stand on the very, very edge and take them from an angle. I’m glad no one fell over and got electrocuted/hit by a train!” Fellow transit riders, to their credit, were typically demure. “We received a few strange glances from people around us, but the riders were mostly amused and did their best to not interfere.” Sounds like Toronto to us.
All photos by Nancy Situ. Thanks to Pete Forde for the tip.