I was captivated by maps as a little boy: world maps, atlases, MapArt road maps, Mississauga Transit maps. Geography was always my passion and as a teenager I joined SCC and SSP, and shortly after I started visiting a Toronto-specific forum called UrbanToronto. Seeing the photos posted in these forums inspired me to buy my first camera in 2004, an Olympus C-5060WZ. Even as my interest in skyscrapers waned, I still sporadically photographed different things and experimented with the camera. This was a digital camera too, no film needed, no real cost to photograph anything.
The turning point was when I read an article in one of these forums about Danish tourists visiting Toronto and expressing their "horror" at Canadian car culture, which I thought was funny and I decided to go out and show Toronto's most touristy areas from their point of view as a joke, which resulted in the "Toronto & the Gardiner" thread. It gave me the idea to start using my camera to go out for one day to a specific place with a very specific goal in mind, mostly to criticize urban sprawl and car dependency, views influenced especially by my time on UrbanToronto.
Despite my efforts to make Mississauga look as bleak and soulless and car-dependent as possible, my photos were met with disdain at UrbanToronto. Seeing me as a promoter of Mississauga and sprawl, the community's anger eventually reached the boiling point, decrying my "incessant boosterism", and that forced me to leave. So SSP became the number one site, and I realized how much stronger and more positive the response my photothreads had always got on SSP, some even comparing my photos to Lewis Baltz. Of course, to please others is not on my mind when I go out to photograph these places, but I am still grateful to have one forum where I can dare to post my photos.
I still have a strong concern about urban development, and my interest in photography has only increased. I always bought photography magazines, especially
Black & White, but recently I started collecting those big, expensive, hardcover, coffee-table style photography books. There is a gallery in Toronto asking for submissions of five works from artists to sell as prints, and I have been thinking of submitting five of my photos, which I have never done before, so it will be a new experience.
This is one of the first photos I ever took, on March 4, 2005, with the first camera. I was still a teenager who knew nothing about photography or even how to operate a camera properly. It's the earliest of my photos that I still might consider to be a "keeper" or at least close to being one.
Here is one of the photos I am considering submitting to the gallery, #1 in the series of "Mississauga Mountains". I already posted the entire series somewhere in this forum. They are 12 joke photos I took on February 2, 2019 to criticize the size of the parking lots in Mississauga.