Picturing a transformed city
Photographers capture Toronto’s changing Port Lands.
We’re already three years into one of the largest civil works projects in Toronto’s history, but local artists Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker just began photographing it last summer.
Last June, they were selected by Waterfront Toronto and awarded $150,000 to document the Port Lands Flood Protection Project (PLFP), a plan to naturalize the mouth of the Don River and provide flood protection to about 290 hectares of southeastern downtown Toronto.
This massive construction project will create a new, kilometre-long river valley in the middle of the Port Lands (between the Ship Channel and the Keating Channel), along with wetlands and spillways, bridges and roads, a new urban island neighbourhood and two new parks.
Construction crews and drones had already been taking photographs and videos since the project broke ground but, with this specific and additional commissioning of professional artists, what is it that Waterfront Toronto wants us to see?
The phrases “revitalization” and “unlock the development potential” give us a clue. They appear repeatedly on their website and in news releases because while this is indeed about flood protection and climate-change mitigation, the PLFP project is in reality the most transformational, city-building undertaking this century.
In one seven-year swoop, the PLFP project is attending to the flood risk and brownfield remediation that have long spoiled the party for the redevelopment of this former industrial area.
Development is a loaded word and experience for many of us in this city, and too often the few with wealth and influence have benefited at the expense of many. This particular bash has already been spectacularly curdled by the Sidewalk Labs debacle, a controversyplagued “smart city” plan that the Google affiliate up and abruptly ditched last week.
Writing about Sidewalk’s sudden departure on Spacing magazine’s website, John Lorinc notes that “Torontonians feel a sense of ownership towards the waterfront that runs far deeper” than either Will Fleissig, the former Waterfront Toronto CEO, or Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff realized, and that “all that lakefront land wasn’t just a bunch of brownfield waiting to be claimed. It wasn’t for sale. And it wasn’t some kind of zone for experiments.”
Lorinc is correct. And that sense of ownership means that we want things done right. We want our waterfront to have more affordable housing, sustainable design, public transit, and parks and public spaces, and we want to understand how we might get there.
In documenting the enormous and complex PLFP project, Ingelevics and Walker are helping us with this understanding by showing us what we cannot see for ourselves.
Going behind the fence is one thing and yes, the two photographers have been granted access to capture the daily, and sometimes hourly, changes happening across the site. Soil is being excavated, buildings are being demolished, roads are being rebuilt.
But what really raises my photo-laureate antennae is the responsibility that Ingelevics and Walker have taken on in artistically interpreting the PLFP project for us. Their creative choices will determine which stories get told and which don’t, and they will shape how we and future Torontonians see this project. Like Arthur Goss before them, Ingelevics and Walker have this critical photographic role to play in Toronto historicizing itself.
Hired in 1911, Goss was the city’s first official photographer, and he is best known for his images of the poverty in the former Ward neighbourhood and for his documentation of an earlier citydefining project, the Bloor Viaduct’s construction, from start to finish.
These photographs were harnessed by the powerful as evidence of the need for liberal reform and expansion, as convincingly argued by Sarah Bassnett in her recent book “Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City.” Whatever else Goss’s intentions might have been, as Bassnett asserts, his pictures were “at the heart of debates about what the city should look like, how it should operate and under what conditions it was appropriate for people to live.”
So, no pressure guys, but 100 years later, I for one am keen to see what themes Ingelevics and Walker will address, whose comfort they will disrupt and what questions they will ask on our behalf.
The photograph above of a former metal-recycling facility at 130 Commissioners St., now an empty field, is part of what would have been our first opportunity to see some of their rumblings in their initial public exhibition, “Framework.”
Curated by Chloe Catan, Waterfront Toronto’s public art program manager, the exhibition features 11 photographs shot through windows and doors of either now-demolished buildings or temporary structures on the site. They were set to be publicly installed for the postponed 2020 Contact festival at the Essroc Cement Silos on Cherry Street and in construction-grade wooden frames along the median on nearby Villiers Street.
The world’s first photo was shot through a window in 1826 or 1827, and photographers have seemingly been preoccupied with windows ever since then. Here, Ingelevics and Walker are using their windows as both a framing device and a conceptual tool reflecting on the passage of time.
By focusing on the provisional and temporary nature of both the structures and the views from within, the photographers seem less concerned with the divisions between “inside and “outside,” and more concerned with the divisions between “before” and “after.”
Of the venues they chose, the recycling facility has been destroyed and the cement silos have been saved, inviting us to consider what is worthy of being left in the “after” in Toronto. Heritage designation and preservation deserve more attention in our city, and these are great first questions to be asking.
And even though so much has been shut down because of COVID-19, construction has not stopped, and Ingelevics and Walker have been taking the necessary precautions to continue to observe and to continue to shoot.
Luckily for us, they have until 2024, so for now we sit, we wash our hands, we wait. Sidewalk Labs is outies and the development dollars are back up for grabs. Keep watching, Toronto.
Go to https://portlandsto.ca/construction/pictures to follow Vid Ingelevics’ and Ryan Walker’s overall project, “Photographs of the Changing Port Lands.” Michèle Pearson Clarke is Toronto’s photo laureate for the next three years. Each month, she takes a different photo and talks about why it’s important to the city and why you should take a look at it. Follow her on Instagram @tophotolaureate.