Naming of photo laureate a rare flash of civic enlightenment
Even in self-proclaimed Creative City, not everyone agrees with Toronto's decision to pay $10,000 for a Photo Laureate.

thestar.com
March 3, 2016
By Christopher Hume

Every so often, Toronto needs to remind itself that it’s a city. And not just a city, but one that realizes, publicly and privately, that there’s more to civic life than dog poop, parking and property taxes.

The recent appointment of Geoffrey James as Toronto’s first photo laureate is one of those reminders. A respected practitioner of the photographic arts, he can be counted on to produce something of value during his three-year term.

Of course, even here in self-proclaimed Creative City, not everyone is on board with public support for the arts. Indeed, the suggestion that our laureate of the camera should receive an annual honorarium of $10,000 prompted howls of outrage when first raised two years ago.

“If this goes through,” sniggered Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, currently John Tory’s deputy mayor and designated yahoo, “the next thing we’ll have is a Facebook laureate, and then we’ll have an Instagram laureate, and then a Twitter laureate, who’ll have to tweet about Toronto every month in 140 characters or less!”

Poor little old Toronto has better ways to waste its scarce dollars than paying for pictures by fancy-pants artists. Besides, anyone can take a photograph; why do we need to spend money on that when we can’t build even build a subway to Scarborough?

Philistinism is alive and well in Toronto. The yahoos - some highly placed - take unabashed pride in acting out their fear and loathing of culture. They make no effort to hide either their contempt or their ignorance. They say things that leave others cringing in embarrassment both for them and the city that elects them.

The difference is that now we ignore them. Even in its hour of need, the city will manage to reach ever deeper into its shallow and much-picked pockets to find $10,000 for a photographer to record and celebrate the city.

There was a time when a much more impoverished Toronto had staff photographers whose job was to document the city. The first and best known, Arthur Goss, served in that role from 1911 to ’40, during the worst years of the Depression. His pictures of life in Toronto’s most notorious slum, the Ward, helped bring the city into the modern age of public heath. Goss gave poverty a face and made it real.

But in an age when cameras are ubiquitous, the element of exclusivity has disappeared from such a post. Then a photographer like Peter MacCallum comes along and reminds that what separates the men from the boys is not equipment but commitment. MacCallum has devoted years to documenting Toronto, especially its disappearing industrial heritage. Long after the rest of us are dead and buried, his remarkable pictures will be coming into their own.

On the other hand, as James himself made clear, being photo laureate gives him access. It allows him to point and shoot with impunity.

The position is also a way for Toronto to acknowledge officially that it is worth examining as well as celebrating. It assumes that the city adds up to more than the sum of its parts, that there’s something going on here that deserves attention. This is easily forgotten at a time when governments in general and Toronto City Hall in particular are dismissed out of hand for being wasteful and profligate.

In a city that often seems at war with itself, the photo laureate might also be able to help Toronto bridge some of the many gaps that keep us apart. At its best, photography can be revelatory. It can show us things we never noticed before. In Toronto, that’s a lot.