Capturing What Moves You

by Daniel Lui

More than two million people “ride the rocket” every day in Toronto. For a majority of them it’s a tactile necessity that doesn’t provide a lot of stimulation. But a community of photographers and painters view the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) as artistic. Be it a streetcar’s unique structure caught through a wide angle lens, a subway car altered to produce streaking bright lights, or an untouched picture of a lone women waiting inside a dark bus station corridor; in their eyes, these are images are creative opportunities.

Realizing this, in Fall 2005 Spacing magazine and the Toronto Free Gallery sent a notice out to Toronto’s artists. Their request: send in your best transit-related photographs, paintings, video or audio projects. The finished product was In Transit: an artistic depiction of public transportation. It was displayed in January and February 2006.

The tagline is “a gallery exhibit that captures Toronto on the move,” but at its core, In Transit is a symbol of the experiences and relationships that are collected while living in an urban environment.
Sam Javanrouh is a photoblogger that found commercial success through his photos. He had the most work displayed out of any artist in the exhibit. He says the exhibit lets Torontonians show a fresh and personal view of their environment. “It’s opened an interesting and amazing window to all citizens of the world,” he says. “It’s very rewarding . . . I get emails from people all over the world just to tell me they had no idea Toronto looked like this.”

Javanrouh’s shots are diverse – late-night streetcars altered to produce a glowing futuristic effect, a subway tunnel blurred to give the viewer the impression they are traveling at warp speed, a clean, untouched streetcar decorated in plaid and shot close up to confuse the viewer. The piece he says most expresses his experience with the city is a stationary streetcar atop a frozen winter ground. Javanrouh says this shot captures his frustration when waiting to commute home.

“A lot of the bus shelters aren’t shelters at all,” Javanrouh says. “It really gets frustrating in the winter time and, for a city as cold as Toronto, it really is a problem.” He adds that objectivity is his goal when shooting pictures he wants to trigger personal experiences in viewers. “I don’t try to make a statement usually,” he says, although he has touched on some urban issues like poverty in his past work. “I do have a few images of a homeless man sleeping outside a bank. Although they do have messages, I don’t actually marry it to any statements.”  

The modestly-sized gallery, located on Queen Street East, was adorned with florescent lights and egg-white walls outlined at the bottom with thick yellow contours. The clean decor was reinforced with framed shots lined up uniformly in two rows with a larger frame leading the pack. Even the exhibit’s “guestbook” took up its own space on the wall. A large blackboard listed all the TTC stations in the city and asked one question: “Which stations do you use the most?” The board was bristled with checkmarks, ticks and miscellaneous words like “love” and “ass Jr 06.”

One of the exhibit’s features was by Jon Day-Reiner, an IT manager with a self-professed “camera fetish.” Day-Reiner says he aims to reflect the lighter side of life in his pieces. “I try to find humour in a lot of situations,” he says. “I like to find unusual moments in time.” One of his pieces was a two-part picture showing a red, freshly painted subway bench with an unfortunate rider’s butt print on the far side. “It’s two different perspectives of the same scene and, for me, it represents the importance of being aware of your surroundings.”

Liz Clayton’s brand of comedy, however, was less obvious. Her murky shot of a mime performing in an empty Sheppard Station was an example of some subtler humour. “I think there’s a lot of humour in a lot of the things I look at, but maybe not in the way people think,” she says.
Like many of the photographers featured in the show, Clayton has a full-time job as a proprietor at a freelance writing, editing, and publishing company. One of the shots she is most proud of adds curiosity to the show. The setting is a subway tunnel entrance that stretches as far down as the eye can see. “It’s all about curiosity,” she says. “We all experience a tunnel when we’re in a train but we’re all a little bit curious about what it’s like to be in that non-space.”

Ilene Sova also uses subway stops in her pieces because, she says, “Everyone has this special relationship with their stop.” Because her artistic ability is with a paintbrush and not a camera, the underground level of the In Transit exhibit belongs to Sova. She wants her three “larger than life” portraits of women at their favourite stop to portray them in a modern way. “When I look at the history of female painters, their work hasn’t been celebrated as the males have,” she says. “I want to paint women from a woman’s perspective.”

Sova’s inspiration comes from her “feminist political concerns” as well as her time as an activist. She says she always aims to portray women in a strong and “monumental” way. Her In Transit portraits certainly gave that impression. The west wall in the underground floor of the exhibit was used entirely by her three portraits. It was a unique sight: the portraits of three culturally different women, stern looking, and independent from all the other pieces. Of the 12 portraits she’s painted, she says these three are her favourites.

The In Transit exhibit could be compared to Pavlov’s dog which salivated at the thought of food whenever the ring of a bell occurred. The difference is, the bell is the art and the salivation is the experience or reflection that comes to mind. Heather Haynes, a director at the Free Gallery, acknowledges that not everyone will be able to realize their own experiences with the pieces but says it all starts with noticing the small details and having conversation. “Maybe you’re not going to see that in these photographs, but it starts a connection, a care, and a love to what is happening in the city.”