"There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected; I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." - Lewis Hine, 1939

Living in St Jamestown, one of the most densely populated urban areas in North America, I have begun to understand one the most diverse communities in Toronto.  Half reserved; central but strangely isolated, the concrete jungle is made beautiful by the experiences written on its collective faces.  This square acre is an example of where the grid system of the city ends.  There is no continuity – it is a community gated by socio-economic factors.

Approximately 17,000 people live in the neighbourhood's 19 looming towers, a community that sits uncomfortably nestled between the upscale, affluent homes of Cabbagetown and Rosedale.  This is not just a question of rent versus own; the disparity is so clearly illustrated as one walks the streets. 

Still, the borders are not rigid. 

One need only cross a bridge to go from a population of 7,000, each making over $200k a year, to one of three times the size surviving on one-tenth the income.  Continue walking across Parliament Street and it is hard to miss the drastic shift from the highest concentration of concrete high rises in Canada to its largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing.  From old money to new poverty; where finance isolates, the lack of it brings people together. 

Here I've found a stronger sense of community.  It was strange watching it on a television screen;  the skewed version of it provided through facts and figures.  Here I have found more to the neighbourhood than the drugs, violence and illegal acts that are supposedly all there is; what the talking heads would have one believe.  Here the people, rich in character and possessing something I have not found in other communities, are on vibrant display.  Everyone talks, hangs outside – they have their own stories and they are on these streets.  

"You walk through Rosedale and no one is outside.  No one says a word to you.  They don't need anyone, they have their bills."  - Anonymous

I began creating photographs of the people I passed each day; struck by the seemingly hyper form of gentrification occurring in Regent Park and to the west.  In the 1930s Berenice Abbott's approach was to capture the “fleeting moments known as the present.”  Over the past two years, I wanted to capture the area before it had changed completely. 

This is a story of stigmatization, of ghettoization, of access and population density; a romanticism of community, showing the connectedness I felt through my own experiences.  This is a story of bedroom poverty, looking out over golden canopied excess.

Aiming to capture what Susan Sontag refers to as the "casual fragments" of the space, I caught people looking like themselves in this corner of our city at this time.  Suit-wearing, tired, energetic souls, burnt out or just beginning, wandering through the paths, the parks - as one of my subjects put it, "some happy for attention, others bitter over their place in life."   These photographs are of my own experience; the beautiful and interesting people, some of whom will continue living here long after I leave, as long as the neighbourhood will have them. This distance, this bridge.

Thanking me graciously, through the looks to kill and polite declines, I collected the willing, the proud, the happy, the comfortable, the broken, confused and excited faces of these streets.  Always searching for the gaze, for what they all share - that this is their home.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing study.