Welcome

In 2009, when I moved into my spot on the DTES, this corner became a quiet, almost hidden part of my daily life. It was a shortcut, a side-step around the VPD and (fingers crossed) a safe path to what came next. Ten blocks away from the chaos and noise of Hastings and Main, she was a calm, consistent presence, neither fancy nor out of place, just very ordinary and very there. She would smile, watch the world go by, with a quiet attentiveness that drew me in. She always seemed more intrigued by the lives of the people passing by than we were of hers. Over time, the corner began to change. This image, taken in 2012, captures one of the few moments I interacted with her. As I was shooting, she watched me, amused in a perfectly civil manner, perhaps finding the scene a bit odd, but still approachable. It was like talking over the fence to a neighbor. In our brief conversation, she told me she wasn’t a drug user, never touched the stuff, and had raised four kids while doing the work she did. It wasn’t until I started building this site and found an old Google image of the very same corner that I truly felt the weight of how photography preserves stories. In that old image, there she was, standing in the same spot, quietly part of the scene. I think she had made that corner her own for at least a decade. Back then, when I was first taking the photos, I knew that her presence on this corner was part of a larger, unfolding story. The neighborhood was changing, and I could feel those stories unfolding rapidly, right before my eyes. This is how my camera began focusing on people, places, and viewpoints that seemed ordinary, yet also held the potential to become lasting parts of a narrative I could revisit and study for years. Fifteen years have passed, and these galleries are filled with images that have stayed with me. Looking back, I see how each moment has been captured and frozen in time, a testament to photography’s power to preserve stories. It’s not just about what I’ve seen, but how these stories continue to live through the images I’ve taken. And I hope that, in some way, they will endure, carrying these moments forward for years to come.