Toronto Parks

This website showcases 24 out of 49 sepia-toned photographs from the Toronto Parks series, which capture 27 parks in the city. When I first arrived in Canada and visited the CN Tower, I was amazed by the abundance of green spaces in Toronto. The city boasts over a thousand named parks, some of which are interconnected, allowing visitors to hike or bike through them for an entire day. While living near Humber River in the mid-1990s and with my dog by my side, I embarked on a photography project that eventually became an exhibition and a book titled “Toronto Parks”. The photographs were taken with a 1950s 4×5 Crown Graphic view Camera, using three different lenses – 105mm, 135mm, and 195mm – all German Tessar designs from the 1910s. Neutral density filters were used to control depth of field and exposure time, which often lasted 30-40 seconds, resulting in some photographs capturing “ghosts” of people who moved in front of the camera. The exhibition was shown in the Colourgenics Gallery in 1999 and later in Mimico Library in Toronto in 2012, with some images now part of the permanent collection of TD Bank and the Parks Department of the City of Toronto.