Avard Woolaver photo

My new photo zine "Adventures In Monochrome" is now available at Blurb Books:

It covers a span of my black and white photography from 1979-2025. The price is US$20 for the zine and US$10 for the PDF.

From the introduction:

The Beverly Hillbillies; Bugs Bunny; Get Smart; Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The zany antics, chaotic energy, and surreal plots of those shows formed one of the memorable backdrops of my childhood. And I was seeing these in black and white, before my family had a colour TV. (Like so many people my age, I'm inexorably drawn to any photo with a Jetsons sensibility.)

The shows of my childhood often had an eerie quality, as well (The Twilight Zone, for example), and trying to capture that feeling in some of my photos is another challenge I enjoy.

Taking photos is a well that never has to run dry. Funny and mysterious: That's pretty much the whole deal in life, isn't it?

"Toronto in the 1980s" is available at Blurb Books - https://www.blurb.ca/b/12407731-toronto-in-the-1980s

There is a feeling of freedom walking around a city with a camera. At 66, I still have that feeling but it was more pronounced when I was in my mid twenties, studying photography as a student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University.) I took a lot of photographs in my early years in Toronto, capturing street scenes and ordinary aspects of daily life that happened to catch my eye. American photographer Henry Wessel sums up my approach in this way: “Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.” Back in the 1980s I would shoot a roll of film (usually black and white), process it a few days later and make a contact sheet. After that I might make an enlargement of one or two of the strongest shots, and then move on. The contact sheets may have been reviewed from time to time when I was preparing for an exhibition, but basically, I didn’t look at them for years and years. For a long time, my photos were almost all black and white. I paid a great deal of attention to lines and form and the abstract qualities that monochrome provided. My influences had been Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander who were all about documenting the social landscape. It seemed that this type of photography was so much better suited to black and white, or as Frank called it, “the colours of hope and despair.” I had no way to anticipate how significant these Toronto photos would seem to me 40 years later. They show things that no longer exist, even though it hasn’t been that long. Without necessarily trying to, I caught images of buildings, cars, fashions, gadgets that are no longer part of our world. Toronto’s entire skyline is utterly changed, part of the inevitable growth and evolution. I sometimes think about the children and young adults in these photos who are now in their 50s and 60s. How have their lives been? Looking back now at the photos I spent my precious film on back then, so much comes back to me about dropped into a new environment. We use our creative tools as extensions of ourselves; they help us understand and define our place in the world. For me, having a camera in my hand at all times helped me remember, You only get to do this once. We have to take time and see it, as clearly as we can.

I took some photos in Dartmouth in 1978, apparently forgot about them altogether, and rediscovered them 40 years later, tucked into a negative sleeve with the cryptic notation, “Dartmouth — The Enchanted City.” (What a title!) I realized that I have been taking photos in Dartmouth off and on for a long time. My wife Martha worked in Dartmouth for several years, and sometimes I would accompany her…

Old Burying Ground, Cambridge, MA © Avard Woolaver

It's sad, so sad

It's a sad, sad situation

And it's gettin' more and more absurd

It's sad, so sad

Why can't we talk it over?

Oh, it seems to me

That sorry seems to be the hardest word

"Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word"