PhotoSensitive

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Yuri Dojc

Yuri Dojc was in the small spa town of Bardejov, Slovakia, shooting a documentary about holocaust survivors, when the warden of the local Lutheran church approached him. The man took Yuri to a former Jewish boys’ school that had been untouched since the Second World War, after its occupants had been taken away to Auschwitz.

Yuri’s photo of the abandoned library at the school had a profound effect on him, and led him to start a new project, which he calls Last Folio. It features images from former Jewish communities in Slovakia of schools, cemeteries and synagogues abandoned during the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the books left behind. In an era where books are disappearing, this project shows the history of books and the beauty of decay. Some of the books turned to dust when picked up.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Valerie MacGregor-Rempel

In 2011, one year after a horrific earthquake almost destroyed Haiti and killed approximately 220,000 people, Valerie MacGregor-Rempel went to the island to document the positive changes.

“As a photographer and children’s advocate, I jumped at the opportunity,” says Valerie.

Just outside of Jacmel, Valerie and a missionary from Alberta noticed a little girl who looked uncared for and who wasn’t going to school. Since children in the area attend school for free and wear uniforms provided by sponsorship, this was unusual enough to draw their attention. “We learned that the little girl was a restivek (slave),” says Valerie. “The woman who owned her made fun of her and thought my interest in rescuing her—we made six, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts—was funny.”

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: V. Tony Hauser

“Living with Land Mines” Confronted with people who suffer from seemingly overwhelming adversity, V. Tony Hauser describes his first reaction as often a sense of helplessness. “I’m not a medicine man or a priest, capable of mending a body or saving a soul,” says Tony. “I’m a photographer. All I do is observe the world around me, and most often I seek to find beauty in everything at which I point my camera.”

After spending three weeks documenting how people in India and Cambodia cope with HIV/AIDS, Tony took some time to photograph the human accomplishments and beauty of the historic ruins of Angkor Wat. While impressed by the artistry of the ancient temples and uplifted by their magnificence, he found a different kind of beauty in the shadows of the temples, on a side road to Angkor Wat: the dignity of these young victims of land mines.

Even after some twenty years of peace, land mines remain hidden in the landscape of Cambodia and many other countries where past conflicts have ravaged the population.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Tyler Brownbridge

In Summer 2008, Jennifer Darmon was taking a day trip from Windsor, Ontario, to Grand Bend, Ontario, with friends. A minivan hit their car head-on. The accident shredded the nerves extending from Jennifer’s spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed, with little hope of walking again.

Tyler Brownbridge took this photo of Jennifer in February 2011 at the Rehabilitation Institute of Michigan. “She had begun learning to walk with the aid of leg braces,” says Tyler. “The plan, suggested by her fiancé, was that she walk down the aisle and dance once with him at their wedding.”

For several hours each day, Jennifer donned leg braces and a wedding dress donated by one of her physiotherapists. Month after month, she practised walking and dancing, at first with the aid of her physiotherapists and then with her fiancé. She learned to move her legs by shifting her hips and by leaning on her partner for support.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Tony Makepeace

Every year or so, for more than fifteen years, Tony Makepeace has been photographing the residents of a small village in a remote agricultural district in eastern Nepal. The opportunity came through his involvement with a small Canadian volunteer organization that helps to fund and manage a series of development programs in the district. 

Getting to the region takes some effort—a brief domestic flight, a six-hour drive and then an eight-hour walk through the steep Himalayan foothills—and in many ways, it is like stepping 200 years into the past.

Tony’s photographic work in the community is primarily historical and anthropological in nature, recording at given points in time the everyday lives of people who live their lives in a particular place. “If I am successful,” says Tony, “it is an admittedly subjective record of a way of life that I am observing as an outsider to the culture.”

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Tony Bock

These pictures are from a feature photographer Tony Bock who worked at the Toronto Star in April 2008.

Sunny View Public School, operated by the Toronto District School Board, has been educating children with physical and mental disabilities for many years. In 2008 they had started a program to “reverse integrate” some children without disabilities into the school. While Tony was with the kids, he watched—and captured—this little event unfold. One of the new kids, Roberta (right), was feeling left out, but Samira (centre) had made a card to welcome her. The sequence shows Roberta warming to Samira’s gesture and then hugging her.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Tobi Asmoucha

After the war in Afghanistan broke out, Tobi Asmoucha was given an assignment to go to Bluffer’s Park in Toronto to photograph an Afghani family. She felt a little stressed about asking groups of strangers where they were from, but when she got to the park, a man spotted her camera and called her over, saying, “We are from Afghanistan.”

Tobi ended up sharing their afternoon—and kebabs—while discussing their respective lives and cultures (they figured out her Jewish Iraqi heritage before she told them). And the whole setting took Tobi back in time, to her immigrant past and childhood when her family and community gathered for similar picnics in Vancouver.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Thomas Fricke

In Summer 1993, roughly 11,000 people took part in an anti-logging protest in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound; more than 900 people were arrested. These protests succeeded in changing environmental policy to prevent the mass clear-cutting of Clayoquot’s temperate rainforest. Loggers left and ecotourism arrived with entrepreneurs such as John Caton, who established the Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge in 1998.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Ted Grant

“In the Beginning” In sixty years of photographing news, sporting events and important people around the world, Ted Grant has shot hundreds of thousands of images, and yet: “Every time I’ve had the opportunity to photograph the birth of a child, it is a very moving experience,” says Ted. It was especially so when he took this photo.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Steve Simon

Much of photographer Steve Simon’s work has been done in sub-Saharan Africa, and he’d like to think that some of it has made a difference by promoting awareness of social issues and maybe prompting some instances of positive action.

These school kids heading home in a rainstorm, just outside Maseru in Lesotho, inspired Steve and encapsulated feelings about his African experience to that point: “Strong people moving forward in the beautiful, yet uncomfortable, landscape, persevering, optimistic for the future. That’s what I see when I look at this photograph. That’s how I felt when I was there.”

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Steve Russell

After a session with a prosthetic technician at Sunnybrook Hospital, Lewis Wheelan sits on a hospital bed with his prosthetic legs resting against the wall. He was eager to walk again, but the legs never really fit right and were too painful to wear.

Photographer Steve Russell met triple amputee Lewis Wheelan in 2002, when Toronto Star reporter Moira Welsh wrote about what had happened to Lewis.

Nineteen-year-old Lewis had just finished his first year of economics at Wilfred Laurier University and was back home in Sault Ste. Marie working a summer job clearing brush from under hydro lines. It was Lewis’s second day on the job when a nearby tree was cut, striking a power line that landed on him, arced three times and hit him with 7200 volts.

The article focused attention on both employer Great Lakes Power’s and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s handling of the incident and of compensation provisions.

In a tragic twist, Lewis Wheelan passed away during the great blackout of 2003. Because of the many skin grafts, Lewis could not sweat. When the blackout hit, his air conditioning turned off; he wasn’t able to get out of his sweltering apartment.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Stan Behal

More than two decades have passed since Stan Behal captured this poignant image on a cold, damp February afternoon on one of Toronto’s most beautiful boulevards: a caring moment in stark contrast to the busy world passing by, seemingly unaware and unmoved by the plight of the homeless.

This photograph helped launch and showcase PhotoSensitive’s first project, It’s In Their Eyes. Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star, in his review of the photo essay on Toronto’s hungry and homeless, wrote of the photo: “... a group huddles over a warm-air vent on University Avenue. Arranged like a scene from some baroque painting, these lost souls seem almost to hover in mid-air, gathering like a group of angels around the dying hero.”

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Simon Wilson

“The Power of a Portrait” Simon Wilson’s photograph of Nathan Shaw was part of PhotoSensitive’s 2008–2010 Cancer Connections project. The outdoor exhibit was launched in Toronto, expanded as it travelled to Charlottetown, Montreal, Regina, Winnipeg, Saint John, Halifax, St. John’s, Vancouver and Calgary, and culminated in Ottawa with almost 1,000 images.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Sherry Prenevost

“Reciprocity” On her first visit to Sierra Leone, Sherry Prenevost met 14-year-old James who, she learned, had been kidnapped at 7 years of age and forced to become a child soldier in the civil war that brutalized his country for eleven years.

Through a translator, Sherry approached James and offered him her second camera. They spent the next several days together, and eventually, he shared his story with her, something he had never done before. He carried tremendous guilt and remorse for the acts of violence he had been forced to inflict. When Sherry asked if there was anything that might bring him some hope, he said that he believed only God, and possibly education, could lessen his pain. Sherry decided to find a way to pay for his education. In return, she asked one thing of James: an act of kindness toward another.

James chose to challenge the youth of several nearby impoverished villages to do something positive. He guided them in creating a communal cassava farm that generated funds to send their poorest children to school.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Sean White

Hurricane survivor José Francisco, age 5, sits on a chair in the village of San Carlos, Honduras, after landslides caused by Hurricane Mitch destroyed most of his village. The Category 5 hurricane dropped record rainfalls in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua between October 29 and November 3, 1998. The resulting floods and landslides killed more than 11,000 people and left 2.7 million people homeless.

From the 2013 exhibition, Picture Change

Photographer: Sandi Wheaton

Sandi Wheaton came upon the Amboy, California, “Town for Sale (including businesses)” sign on an empty-desert stretch of the old Route 66. She took this photo, little realizing that a few years later it would lead her work and her life in a new direction … that along the way, would inspire others.

During the 2009 automotive crisis, Sandi was downsized from her position as a broadcast producer of training videos at General Motors. Recalling this image, she decided to travel across the United States to discover and detail what happened to the people and businesses along the historic Route 66.