I have had an almost lifelong love affair with Toronto. I first fell in love with the city in the summer of 1963. I was eleven years old, and I had just moved here with my family from the place where I was born, a small rural town called Maierato in Calabria, southern Italy. This was my second trip to Toronto: my family immigrated in 1959, but two years later, my mother and three of the four children, including me, returned to Maierato, while my father and eldest brother remained in Toronto. Finally, in 1963. the family was reunited. This time, I knew it was for good, and the city mesmerized me with endless iterations of what I thought modern life was all about in the New World. For starters, I didn’t speak English, and the names of things and signs on buildings confounded me. Yonge Street sounded like “young,” and “streetcar” was hardly like an automobile of the street; I even wondered why companies found it necessary to declare “post no bills” along construction site fences, for was it not the wish of everyone to receive posta (mail in Italian) without any bill included?
Spadina Ave & Dundas St, April 2020 (early days of the Covid pandemic), ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
The childlike wonder I experienced in my new surroundings ignited in me a determination to explore the city. I set out every day on foot to walk kilometre after kilometre of the grid of north-south and east-west streets that seemed so orderly and modern in comparison to the tangle of narrow lanes and passages in my ancient hometown. To avoid becoming lost, I ventured at first only on streets that had streetcar tracks; College Street near where I lived, but also Dundas, Queen, and King streets. Should I have become tired of walking, I had the option of simply hopping on a streetcar for the return trip home.
Everything was new to me, and I took it all in: the exotic architecture of Victorian houses with their peaked roofs; the tall apartment towers; the wooden hydro poles with wires that criss-crossed overhead; the shop windows with their beguiling displays of objects that augured a good life in this new, promised land; the play of light and shadow; the canopy of gigantic trees that stretched from one side of the street to the other. And the people, of course. The people who walked the streets were the most exotic sight of all – not only were they racially diverse in a way that was completely new to me because of my upbringing in a mono-ethnic society, but I was also fascinated by their gestures, their accents, and the amalgam of cultures that I witnessed.
Immigrant women going to work in garment factories, King Street and Spadina Ave, 1973, ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
I couldn’t have known it then, but my initial observations of street life were not unlike the observations of the street photographer that I was to become. A few years later, I started walking the city with a camera. I haven’t stopped. My camera became my constant and faithful companion; with it, I felt empowered. I learned to operate the camera quickly and to be ready for any eventuality. Walking with a camera is not a passeggiata, the traditional Italian leisurely stroll; rather, it is like being on a quest, constantly seeking the opportunity to capture moments of the everyday, but that transcend the ordinary and carry meaning beyond that fraction of a second required to take the picture – moments of captured light and time.
On the ferryboat to Centre Island docks, 1969, ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
My camera became a point of entry in encounters with strangers; I learned to discern changing light conditions and to bring together within the frame of the viewfinder fleeting actions or occurrences that might be seemingly unrelated, otherwise lost in the flow of time. One day, in the summer of 1969, I found myself on the Sam McBride, a passenger ferry travelling to Toronto Island. The trip across the harbour was laden with memories from the annual excursions during my years in elementary school. I fondly recalled my beloved grade-six teacher, Mr Aerts, a New Zealander, who led us in the singing of the plaintive “Maori Farewell Song” and accompanied us on his melodious mouth organ: “Now is the time to say goodbye I soon you’ll be sailing across the sea I while you’re away, oh please remember me…” I liked the song because it reminded me of how I, too, had sailed across the sea from Naples to Halifax, and how I had waved goodbye to my grandfather for the last time, me standing on the deck of the ocean liner SS Leonardo da Vinci;, and him standing among hundreds of others on the dock waving his walking cane in the air until the pier, the city, and the mountains beyond dissolved into the mist and horizon.
Spontaneous jubilation in the streets, after Italy won the soccer World Cup, July 11, 1982, ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
My reverie came to a sudden end as the Sam McBride sounded its horn and left the Toronto skyline behind. I furtively gazed at the people on the deck. A young boy was standing nearby with an antique-looking camera at waist level, his hair shiny black with hair cream and parted on one side, his polo shirt buttoned to his neck. He looked neat and proper, and I wondered if, like me, he was on a mission to create a photograph. Suddenly a young couple standing beside him started to kiss tenderly. They were oblivious in their intimacy and were carving a lovely niche for themselves, a private moment in a public space. They were clearly a product of the sixties: he had longish hair, prominent sideburns, and was attempting to grow a Zapata-style moustache; she wore a flowered dress and was looking longingly into his eyes. A middle-aged man just beside them gazed sideways into the distance all-knowingly. The witnessing boy became self-conscious, a little awkward at being so physically dose to this unexpected moment of intimacy. I instinctively raised my camera to my eye, released the shutter, and captured the momentary stillness on the moving boat.
One of the first same sex marriages in Toronto, 2003
The composition was balanced, and three generations were framed together in an improbable moment that was forever seized through my actions. Importantly, I realized that no one seemed to be in the way of anyone else; this is how my newly adopted city presented itself to me. There was space for everyone, without interference. Truly a New World. Photographs made in the moment are the result of a confluence of events that are being perceived in the photographer’s mind as the events unfold before them in real time. “Live” photograph)’ is akin to a suspension of the natural flow of things, or, put another way, an interruption of the passage of time and its subsequent preservation digitally or on physical materials such as paper. As the German painter and critic Willi Baumeister observed in his book The Unknown in Art, “The photographer fundamentally converts the movement of life into the stillness of form. The person viewing the photograph converts the stillness of form back into the movement of life by means of his imagination.'” The public street – or a ferry boat – is the theatre of life where the viewer is both actor and audience. Through my camera, I began to realize that I had a front-row seat from which I could witness the ebb and flow of city life.
Pride parade, Yonge St, 2019, ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
In time, I became a photographer of the city, engaged with my camera not only as a tool of witnessing but as a tool for writing history, having something to say, taking a position on struggles for social justice or the assertion of human rights. That art is political should be neither surprising nor concerning, for art is wedded to life. To witness, to document, to take action with a camera means to recognize the historical moment that I was, and am, traversing, and to understand the context in terms of the overarching social and political dimensions in which I live.
My camera has taken me to countless cities and communities in every province and territory of Canada – and many countries beyond. I have been privileged to photograph collective losses and gains: guest farm workers on Canadian farms and in their home villages in Mexico and Jamaica; individuals who have struggled with disabilities in disparate communities; the world of workers, from fishers in the North Atlantic to immigrant garment workers in Toronto to zinc miners in the bowels of Vancouver Island; the fight against social inequity by the labour movement; the poignant lament for justice denied on lonely picket lines; the cry for help for the homeless; the joys of victory by LGBTQA2S+ communities after their long struggles for human rights; the dignity of quiet resistance to oppression by the Indigenous peoples in Canada and abroad; the exuberance of crowds gathering freely to celebrate their spirituality with a religious leader in Cuba or in the streets of Toronto; the exploration of cities from Lisbon to Rome to Havana; and the exquisite sense of serenity that comes from photographing seven-hundred-year-old olive trees as a respite from street photography.
Homeless encampment during the Covid pandemic, Alexandra Park, December 2020, ©Vincenzo Pietropaolo
Throughout it all, I have returned to my constant – Toronto. Through five decades, the city became the enduring photographic subject of my life. I witnessed its transformation from a quiet, provincial city in the sixties to an international centre of trade, commerce, and culture whose primary strength is arguably represented by one of the most racially diverse populations in the world. This inestimable asset has transformed the city into a living social experiment that is being observed and studied by many at home and abroad. Its old moniker, “city of neighbourhoods,” is well deserved, even today when the greedy forces of globalization threaten the humanity of the city of immigrants.
My father purchased my first camera for me. Either I must have worn him down with my pleas or the old immigrant intuitively understood the importance that such an instrument could have in his son’s life. For a construction worker and recent immigrant like him, an expensive purchase like a camera was a true leap of faith. But then immigrants are used to taking leaps of faith, to being daring, to innovating. When my father arrived in Toronto at age forty-four, with a family in tow, he was penniless. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he helped to build much of Toronto’s infrastructure and many landmark buildings. He carried bricks, mixed cement and mortar, and sweated as the first modern terminal took shape at Toronto International Airport (now Pearson), Highway 401 was asphalted, and dozens of apartment buildings were erected across the city.
After he retired, I would often drive with him around the city on exploratory tours. He enjoyed pointing out the places where he had worked. One day, we paused by New College on the University of Toronto’s campus, and he said with great satisfaction, “I sure carried a lot of bricks here.” That was how he related to the city: by the bricks he had carried and the mortar he had mixed. I began to see my father in a different light, not merely as an immigrant worker but as a builder of my city. But something more was revealed to me: just as he related to the city through bricks and mortar, I related to the city through the pictures I created and the encounters facilitated through my camera, the instrument that he had gifted me in my youth. Over time, that gift has enabled me to create this personal perspective of Toronto, the culmination of walks, encounters, and reflections as a young immigrant, a city planner, and a documentarian.
Excerpt from Toronto As Community : Fifty Years of Photographs by Vincenzo Pietropaolo. Cormorant Books, 2023.
Vincenzo Pietropaolo, whose life’s passion has been to photograph Toronto, its people, and its buildings, has been described by Canadian Geographic as “one of Canada’s pre-eminent documentary photographers.
