Nov. 15      Photo Contest 1 (Digital) – Judging

Categories are: Movement, Architecture, Patterns or Shapes, The Beaches, Open

Dec. 6    Losing Site

By Jessica Thalmann
Jessica’s photographic practice attempts to unravel conventional understandings of photographic images and their material implications. Her recent series uses her own images and archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss while both disregarding and exalting the irreverence of filmic and photographic objects.   The project is personal in nature, focusing on a shooting that occurred in 1992 at Concordia University where her uncle, Prof. Phoivos Ziogas, was killed during the massacre. To work through the emotional implications of his death and its reverberations throughout the family, the images of cold monolithic Brutalist buildings became distorted, organic and malleable.
In Thalmann’s most recent series, Luminous and Grey, she draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s notions of living and inhabiting a city. Thalmann’s interventions are attempts to leave her own traces.  Benjamin also draws attention to the “delirium, pleasure, delight, wonder” that we experience as the colours of a city come alive at night. This body of work is interested in the ways colour “seeps, spills, bleeds and stains” across these “neutral” surfaces. Thalmann uses stripes of colour within the folds of her photo-objects, to create optical illusions that subtly animate the surfaces of the prints. Images can be manipulated to achieve the same state of ‘object-ness’ as the things they picture.

Dec. 20   Christmas Social ***

At the Beacher Cafe

 Jan.  10    Body to Body

By Steve Kean
Steve Kean’s first cohesive body of work is called Spina Bifida Front to Back. People look down on those with spina bifida – literally and figuratively. People with spina bifida have historically suffered great indignity, even for the sake of medical education. Being the subject of treatment and learning is an experience many of those with spina bifida share. Front to Back is a true collaboration between Kean and those he photographed. These portraits show spina bifida as a beautiful part of how they inhabit their bodies and shape their own lives.
After the deeply personal work of Front to Back, Kean wanted to work on something different. Circumstances presented him with the opportunity to begin working on Moving Landscapes, a body of work created while traveling by train and bus. Using a wheelchair, Kean never thought he would seriously pursue landscape photography. Thankfully, he was wrong.

Jan. 24    Members Night

Members will make presentations on their recent work

Feb. 7     Collations

By Patrick Cummings
For more than 20 years, Patrick Cummings has photographed aspects of Toronto’s built environment, conducting comparative studies in time and space, documenting the transformation and survival of ordinary, utilitarian residential and commercial buildings.  Such structures continuously change, undergoing varying degrees of alteration, in response to changes in building materials, design attitudes, and private/commercial agendas, receiving layer upon layer of new detail.  The structures Cummings has chosen to photograph, and the way he has chosen to combine them into pieces has served to personalize the city for him, giving definition to it, providing him with a personal sense of continuity through the constant flow of transition and change that inevitably occurs in an urban environment.

Feb. 21    Capturing the Story

By Fred Lum
Fred will present examples of work that cover the range of assignments newspaper photographers shoot. He will also be bringing gear to show that people may not realize could/ would be used in the news/photojournalism environment.

Mar. 7    Finding Inspiration

By Darren Rigo
Darren Rigo will open with an artist talk focusing on how he found inspiration for different images as his practice evolved to consider new themes like nature, photography and truth and artistic identity. This will be followed with a series of short group activities designed to stimulate your creativity and inspire new ways of thinking about photography.

Apr 4 note date change    Photo Contest 2 (Digital) – Judging *

Categories are: Water, Landscapes (including
Seascapes and Skyscapes) New and Old (juxtapositio), Open

Mar. 21 note date chande  Studio Work: Building Analogue Images

By Adam Swica
Toronto artist Adam Swica will discuss his recent series, Ellipsis, which involved multiple exposures built in-camera to produce abstract, complex forms. With each work comprising anywhere from thirty to over one hundred exposures captured on a single negative, Swica’s methodology involves memory at the level of cataloguing the sequence of shots, and chance at the level of comingled photographic events. As active yet unpredictable construc-tions, each image in the series emerges as an ethereal, contiguous whole, a volume sculpted by light through time. Swica will touch upon two previous series, also shot analogue, where the contents of the photographic frame were entirely assembled in the studio for capture by the lens. Whether devising constructed scenes or building a field of abstract gestures, the basis for each work first takes shape as an often crudely formed sculptural accumulation, which is then activated by a transforming program of light. Where these earlier projects involved specific calibrations of light in a controlled setting to convey depth, direct views and spatially evoke atmosphere, the works in Ellipsis effectively shift the building of an image to in-camera, as a kind of active drawing. 

Apr. 18   Cyanotype

By Sally Ayre
Sally is a photo based artist and has been working with cyanotype since the late 1980’s. She will give an overview of this “blue print” process invented by Sir John Herschel in 1841 including historical images. She will present images of her work and discuss how her use of this contact process how has evolved from analogue to incorporate current day photo techniques.

May 2    The Beauty of Platinum Printing

By V. Tony Hauser
One of Toronto’s most esteemed portrait photographers is also a proponent of the  richness platinum printing. Tony will describe the process and compare it with digital printing, using his own masterful prints to illustrate.

May 16    Photo Contest 3 (Print) – Judging

Categories are: Monochrome and Colour

June 6    End of Season BBQ Social ***

Past Events 

Sept. 6 Prepared to be inspired

By Rita Godlevskis
New in the role of PhotoED Magazine Editor/ Publisher, Rita has extensive experience in creative media work – specializing in photography, in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Professional assignments of note include Photo Editor roles with magazines such as Toronto Life, Australian Women’s Weekly, Canadian House&Home and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Festival Daily
Rita will share a few of her recent favourite Canadian contemporary photographers – prepare to be inspired by your contemporaries

Sept. 20     Solar Prints

By Margaret Rodgers
Rodgers relates her adventures in solar printing, discussing her technique and motivations for developing her recent exhibitions of heritage-related images. After manipulating and digitally creating negatives from a cache of late 19C-early 20C family photographs, she has printed them on vintage fabrics contemporary to their subject. As an artist attracted to the use of unconventional materials, the discovery of SolarFast dyes and related equipment has allowed for a painterly approach to dealing with the medium of photography. Formally, the work is intended to have a full integration of figure and ground and work toward connecting past and present through medium and meaning. Rodgers is a mixed media visual artist, writer and curator.

Oct. 3 Exploring the vernacular photograph: from the familiar to the found(On Wednesday)

By Sara Angelucci
Photo-based artist Sara Angelucci will present an overview of her twenty year photographic practice. Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video, audio, and installation. Over the years her projects have drawn from a range of personal photographs and films—to anonymous and found images. Pointing to histories outside the image frame, her work draws attention to the ways photographs are constructed to tell particular stories, create histories, and participate in memorialization. In her audio works, the human voice through song, mimicked sounds, or spoken word, inserts an immediate sense of human presence and story telling. Angelucci’s work based in the history of photography – from vernacular snapshots to professional studio portraiture—inform the direction of her research into other natural and social histories. Photography’s material evolution and its shifting social importance provide rich ground for historical interweaving, and inform the range of materials and references that traverse her projects.

Oct. 18 Ritual: the Making of a Book

By Vincenzo Pietropaolo
Ritual chronicles 46 years of the Good Friday procession in Toronto’s Little Italy, an event which takes place annually in the neighbourhood where Pietropaolo grew up, and which he has documented almost every single year from 1969 to 2015.The book has received a nomination for this year’s Toronto Heritage Book Awards. Pietropaolo is a social documentary photographer who has distinguished himself as a photographic bookmaker publishing nine books of photographs with his own original writing. His work on social justice and immigration has been critically acclaimed, and Canadian Geographic Magazine has called him “one of Canada’s pre-eminent documentary photographers”. His works are in the collections of leading Canadian art institutions, and are featured in a permanent exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Nov. 1 Evolving documentary photography projects

By Tobi Asmoucha
Tobi Asmoucha is a freelance photographer based out of Toronto. She has been working as a commercial and editorial photographer for many years, with photo essays appearing in publications such as Canadian Geographic and Toronto Life. Tobi’s documentary images exploring themes of community and the rituals that bind them, have received a Gold National Magazine Award and many nominations, as well as Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Jewish Arts Council grants. Currently she is working on a series about what happens after someone is granted refuge. Tobi will discuss how the past community projects have led her to focus on what homeland and cultural disruption creates.