Toronto
Geoffrey James
introduction by Mark Kingwell
published by Douglas & McIntyre
Acclaimed photographer Geoffrey James has stalked the parks and back streets of Canada's largest metropolis with his tripod and wide-angle panoramic camera, in search of the city's essence. Eschewing the obvious landmarks, he shows us pavilions on the lakeshore, billboards in Dundas Square, back lots in Kensington Market and many other exceptional views. His images are accompanied by a 4,000-word introduction from Mark Kingwell and extensive endnotes from city historians and other experts. Through the lens of Geoffrey James, Toronto becomes a city freshly seen.
Geoffrey James
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Geoffrey James has been a photographer since 1970. He has had solo exhibitions around the world, and his work has been featured in several books. In 2002, he was awarded both the Roloff Beny Prize for photography and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for lifetime achievement in the visual arts. Born in Wales and educated at Oxford, he lives in Toronto, Ontario. |
Excerpt from Toronto: (taken from the introduction by Mark Kingwell)
All cities tack along somewhere between aspiration and reality; Toronto is no exception. In its striving for essence and success, it is no different from a dozen other North American cities that form the backbone of urban infrastructure on a continent where most people now live in conurbations. Toronto's uniqueness seems to lie in coping with a higher than average degree of cliché and stock response when it comes to the question of what kind of city it is. As Canada's largest and most bustling city, and so a microcosm of the nation at large, it is forever afflicted by identity crisis and insecurity. Is it a metropolis or just a loose collection of ethnic neighbourhoods? Is it a place in the deep sense, seamless with its natural setting, or just an artificial bulwark against the weather? Is it a true national capital like New York, London or Paris, or just a resented big brother who rules by means of the mere power to take the ball and go home?
Despite many attempts, no definitive Toronto emerges from the apparently limitless cultural and literary production of its citizens, all those novelists and poets and columnists scribbling away in their respective isolations. Almost every aesthetic or political take on the city, however apparently original or clear-eyed, quickly succumbs to a vaporous logic that makes the city, for all the talk about its identity, a place essentially without essence. That is the first-order paradox of defining the city. The second-order paradox is that this characterization, too, immediately falls prey to relentless discursive assimilation. Offered as an identity, it becomes just one more move in the endless game of identity crisis.
A new city still, for all its decades of unchecked expansion, Toronto is at once overdescribed and undermythologized. Those of us who know it well, or think we do, experience it as a threshold, an almost-being. It is forever on the verge of something — which something usually is a function of some aspiration or rhetorical space of the moment (architectural renaissance, "world-class" status, greatness somehow defined).
There is so much talk about what it might be, how it could rise, when it ought to blossom, that one can easily forget the details of battle with itself. It is a struggle on two fronts, not unlike the one we all fight as individuals: from the inside out as well as from the outside in, defining and being defined. For all its unease, Toronto achieves a certain unstable success in combining its own internal cycles of self-congratulation and self-hatred with an outward love of others who love to hate it.
External approval, when it comes, is resented almost as soon as it is welcomed, interpreted as condescension or a genuine — which is to say, easeful — superiority. The duality of Toronto's identity battle is thus forever rejoined, gathering energy all the while. It cannot settle into a superior position, even as it is constantly condemned for doing just that; then it is condemned again for being so feeble in its superiority. In a twist familiar to psychoanalytic plumbing, even to analyze these depressing rounds of internal/external strife is to risk extending them, for the spiralling conundrums of identity — in individuals as well as in cities — are indiscriminate. Like the friend in crisis who will bend your ear relentlessly about the perfidy of an ex-spouse or a hostile employer, there is no end, and hence no resolution, of this subject. It simply rolls on and on, assimilating new events, new buildings, new policies into its implacable discursive categories.
Identity illness is iatrogenic. At a certain point, the only sane response to such tangles is to walk away: not to run, and thus evade the issue, but simply to leave off. It is the genius of Geoffrey James's photographs that he does not make an attempt at evasion and so is able to offer a view of this place that both records and transforms our experience of it. His achievement may be characterized in this (perhaps peculiar) way: rather than analyzing the city's psyche and so perpetuating a fruitless discourse on its identity, he investigates its dwelling. He looks at what it is like to be here and so reveals the city to itself. Cultural therapy gives way to aesthetic insight, and this contested name "Toronto" effectively disappears, a category discarded, leaving behind — perhaps uncovering for the first time — the deep truths of this place.
From Toronto by Geoffrey James (introduction by Mark Kingwell). Published by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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