a state of independence

toronto, march 2003

I live a block north of Queen Street. Every day I take the streetcar to my office downtown. I look out of the window and this is what I see.

Queen Street East is a street that continually re-invents itself. It goes through inversion after inversion as you pass block by block past junk shops, endless cafes, barbers, and establishments whose purpose is completely opaque. Rents are low enough in some places that the most marginal of enterprises can survive: elsewhere a changing microculture forces old businesses to close and new ones to open up.

What makes me love this street so much, however, is that on the whole five mile stretch between my house and my office, there are only three or four chain stores. The rest are all products of a sort of cockeyed Canadian independence which seems more and more to me to be characteristic of this country.

I'm always badgering other people to look before they shoot, and to try to shoot what they see as plainly as possible, without compositional tricks. I've tried to do that here. The sharp eyed will spot the influence of Eggleston, Gursky and Friedlander, but I tried as hard as I could to shake their mannerisms off.