City in Motion Artist’s Statement

We make our way again and again through the monuments and icons of the city. They remain; unchanged, impassive, solid. We move. Most street photography captures instants in time, faces and bodies frozen against the background of the buildings and roads. In this project, I set the city in motion, capturing the unchanging parts of the city with the flow of people as foreground, like water, like blood, like life itself.

I was inspired by others. The impressionists captured life in Paris during the industrial revolution and portrayed people as dots and dashes against the steam engines, train stations and iron bridges of the times. Alexey Titarenko captured life in St. Petersburg as a continuous flow of the proletariat against a background of communist era buildings. These artists shared my vision of movement superimposed on concrete and steel.

My subject is Toronto. It is a relatively modern city, with iconic buildings, mature transit systems and energetic people moving about the city with purpose. My photographs of crowds flowing among the fixtures of the city were taken recently yet could have been taken 30 years ago when I was part of the flow, moving from one meeting to another, my purpose seeming vital at the time, but now forgotten. The flow of people never stops. One generation replaces the next, yet, the buildings, the street cars, the streets themselves are relatively eternal.