Posted by Damon Schreiber (Toronto, Canada) on 29 July 2007 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.
Sakamoto/Schreiber - Toronto 1977-2007 series starts here.
There's a long story, and this will be a long series, so I'll tell it slowly over the coming days.
Back in early 2004 I was doing a Google search for images of Toronto City Hall. There were hundreds, but one in particular stood out. There was something different about it. City Hall itself, one of Toronto's architectural landmarks along with Casa Loma and the CN Tower, hasn't changed much in appearance since it was built in 1965.
But there was something about this picture. Even though it was a familiar site, it looked somehow ... old. So with my curiosity piqued, I followed that image back to its page of origin and found myself in an Internet time capsule: a large series of images of Toronto taken in what looked like the 1970s.
(continued tomorrow)
Top image copyright Shige Sakamoto - 坂本政恵
High-res here (my image) and here (1977 image). The entire 1977 series can be viewed in context starting here.
[City Hall (Queen near Bay), Toronto]
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Very interesting comparison of the new and the old!
29 Jul 2007 6:02am
Lovely investigation! How big these trees are now..
29 Jul 2007 6:44am
well done ,Damon !
29 Jul 2007 10:15am
Amazing what you found. Great comparison type images. I'm inclined to do the same. Keep shootin'...
29 Jul 2007 6:26pm
i'm really liking this project.. looking forward to the rest of the series
29 Jul 2007 7:24pm
Fantastic. I like how its only really through nature that we can see the passing of time via these two.
30 Jul 2007 9:50am
@Duncan Galbraith: I think I'll add more commentary about each individual photo in this series, but for now, this'll do for this one: Believe it or not, this was devilishly difficult for me to take.
In the first place because the original picture was probably taken from a bus or streetcar - but I got pretty much the same angle of view. But mostly because all during the day, 7 days a week, tour buses park exactly in front of this sidewalk. Sometimes they leave, but it's hard to predict. So to take this photo with nearly as few obstructions as in the original, I had to take it at 7:30 am - not my favourite time of day to be out and about...
Fantastic!
30 Jul 2007 10:02am
I took this shot from the chartered bus window so that the shot is slightly higher angle than the shot below. I'm very surprised to see the growth of trees with thick branches that obstruct most of the views of the photogenic buildings .
31 Jul 2007 3:15am
PREVIEW ONLY
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