Recently on Portraits of Queen West

1144 Queen St W | February 2014

Recently on Portraits of Queen West

655 to 659 Queen St W | April 2013

Spread from April-May 2013 Momentum Magazine

Portraits of Queen West were recently used for a feature in Momentum magazine. I like seeing my pictures being used to paint a picture of a bike friendly urban landscape.

Best Places to see my Queen West pics this fall

Spacing Magazine, Fall 2011

11.08.2011 – Since last year I’ve been posting to a tumblr blog called Portraits of Queen West. At first it paralleled what I posted to Flickr, along with reposting random earlier pictures. For anyone already following my pics, the new photoblog was superfluous.

¶ The blog has evolved and now I think it’s the best place online to look at my Queen West pics. Many posts include juxtapositions of earlier shots, noting transitions of storefronts, styles and seasons: Café Bernaté; Cameron Public House; car wash made into art subsequently whitewashed.

¶ For those who like to hold things in their hands, the current issue of Spacing Magazine features a two page spread of my linear panorama of both sides of Queen West East of Spadina. It's a perfect use for the magazine’s landscape orientation. More info & selected articles. (Cover photo by Tom Ryaboi)

¶ The issue also includes a selection of photos of food trucks by Patrick Cummins. Anyone that likes my work and doesn't know Patrick's work should be checking him out: Collations on Flickr.

984 Queen St W

11.19.2010 — I'm enjoying the renewed interest in GIF animations, especially the careful limited animations like those seen at Tumblr blogs like If We Don’t, Remember Me, so I made this one.

Portraits of Queen West Summer 2010

Queen St W, North Side, Vanauley to Cameron

08.31.2010 – My friend Peter saw this photo and observed that this bit of Queen West is a “surprisingly well balanced block [but] one would never know it looking at it with mere human eyes.”

¶ That’s some of the fun of making these linear panoramas, seeing the shape of a block become clear as I assemble it in Photoshop. This summer I recorded much of Queen West again. So far I’ve assembled almost a dozen city blocks, refining my technique considerably along the way.

¶ By my count there are 74 blocks between Roncesvalles and University Avenues (31 on the south side, 43 on the north side). I still have cataloguing to do before I know how many more blocks I can assemble from the summer’s exposures.

queen west at spadina, both sides now

more city blocks on Flickr

Waiting for the leaves

Recent city block portraits

05.26.2009 – As the leaves come out I have been getting ready to capture block portraits of Queen West for the summer.

¶ I recently grumped on Twitter that parking rules on Queen have changed this year. In previous years there was no parking on the North side in the mornings rush hour, and on the South side during the evening rush hour. Coincidentally these times produced very similar light on the respective sides of the street, rich light with shadows cast at 45° angles from right to left.

¶ This year there is no parking on the South side in the morning, when the sun is a little bit behind the street, and very different from the evening light on the North side. I will have to be both patient and lucky to get pictures to match previous years.

1042 Queen St W

10.06.2008 – Both photos are of 1042 Queen Street West. Top: September 23, 2008. The way it looked in the second picture, from January 2006, is the way this storefront had been frozen in time for decades.

Fire at Queen & Bathurst

02.23.2008 – The morning of February 20 a six alarm fire consumed more than half a block of Queen Street west of Bathurst. No one was harmed but homes and beloved neighbourhood businesses were lost.

¶ The picture above is that block, taken last summer. From 609 to 625 Queen were seriously damaged or destroyed. That’s most of what is to the left of the large tree near the middle of the picture.

¶ I was glad that I was able to share the portrait of the block while it was most relevant to people. Most of the changing Queen Street I document turns over more slowly, usually with warning. We don’t notice the losses so much when they are like small cuts, but this is a big scarring wound.

¶ While I feel for the people who have had their lives uprooted — we survived a home destroying fire when I was a child — this disaster has reinvigorated my commitment to the personal project of recording Queen West, because I know there are times the pictures are relevant to others. People want to remember what has been lost, like the Suspect Video outlet.

¶ East of Spadina, Queen West is now dominated by mammoth storefronts for global brands, with only a few local joints. The big brands have already spread past Spadina. The incursion was launched with the trojan horse of American Apparel. Now a Home Depot is already slated for a parking lot on the block that burned.

¶ As the community decides how the block will be rebuilt, the struggle for the soul of Queen West moves east from the Triangle — already abandoned by the fates to developers — to Bathurst.