The Electroblog
Yonge and Queen looking South
Posted by Damon Schreiber (Toronto, Canada) on 11 August 2007 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.
Sakamoto/Schreiber - Toronto 1977-2007 series starts here.
On the importance of capturing the right moment
If you've managed somehow to reproduce the same perspective and angles, and your viewfinder shows the same cityscape as a historical photo, then you're most of the way there. At this point, though, you start thinking about when to click the shutter.
People's opinions vary on this point. For the architectural purist, it would be best to wait until there are no people of vehicles blocking the view of the city or streets. A real people person might enjoy the opposite approach.
It's also a great time to start your propaganda engine and enforce your point of view. For example, there were photos that Sakamoto-san took with many cars in them. I could have waited until bicycles went by in every case to show what a green city Toronto now is. Conversely, I could have waited for SUVs to go by and shown how much we pollute.
Then again, I could have been a spontaneity purist and just clicked once no matter what was were. Presumably though, there were many cases where Sakamoto-san clicked because passing people or vehicles caught his attention. So what I've tried to do is capture the same sort of energy in my photos that he had in his. It isn't always possible, but things like public transportation that run on semi-reliable schedules proved co-operative.
Crowds come and go, and in the night shots, I felt as though I wasn't in the right place at quite the right time to capture the same intensity that he did in 1977. So the question is do fewer people cruise Yonge Street now than 30 years ago? Or should I have been at the intersection an hour or a day earlier. One thing I can tell you, though: you can't make an accurate sociological assessment about the life of a city based only on comparing a series of 20 or so photographs taken 30 years apart. Having said that, it wouldn't stop me from trying, and it probably won't stop you.
Note: I find this set of photos extremely funny, and about as lucky as you can imagine. The 1977 version shows as a background a row of old buildings slated for demolition so that the space could be used for the southern section of the Eaton Centre (seen below). I really only knew where it was because in the Queen and Yonge looking North photo, you can see the same row of buildings on the left.
But of course, the more interesting subject is the horse and carriage used to pull tourists around in 1977. I had no idea they did so then, but they certainly don't do it now. For the last 20 years or so, there have been touristic rickshaws in the downtown core, but to be honest, I don't think they get a huge amount of business especially during the day. They're pretty expensive for one thing. But to see one on this stretch of Yonge Street was not something I even considered.
Believe it or not, even though the architecture is completely different today, I was able to locate the exact spot this photo was taken based on a manhole cover and the painted stripes on the street. Once I had the angles more or less worked out, I staked out the position and waited for something interesting to pass by. Certainly nothing as interesting as the horse-drawn wagon came by. I snapped a young punky guy smoking a pipe, and I thought that might do for something exotic, or else tourists taking each others' pictures in the middle of the street on a Saturday that they closed it to traffic. Or possibly a bicyclist would do if he or she looked interesting enough. These were my thoughts on what to do.
So one day I was attempting to shoot the other photo down the street from this one. And I saw not one but two rickshaws turn the corner carrying a large family. Well let me tell you, I ran lickety-split up the street and got into position just in time to take this picture as they passed by. Luckily I'd already worked out the angles pretty well on this one so in spite of the rush, I wasn't too far off.
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.
[Yonge near Queen, Toronto]
