How has urban life changed over 150 years? The AGO is going into their photo archive to find out

The Art Gallery of Ontario's photo vault is a collection of over 70,000 physical images, spanning the birth of the medium into the digital age. Most of these have never been shown on the gallery's walls. 

Cities in Flux — a new photo exhibit at the AGO — uses 100 photos from the collection to tell the story of how cities have grown and changed over the last 150 years.

"It was actually quite difficult to narrow it down to 100 photos," says curatorial fellow Marina Dumont-Gauthier, who was motivated first and foremost to show off the gallery's photography collection. Her second motivation was to create an exhibit focused on how people live in cities. 

Art about cities is so often about streetscapes and architecture, but she wanted an exhibition at a human level.

"I wanted to go beyond talking about the architecture of cities and really talking about the urban experience," she says. "Because whether we want [them] to or not, cities change all the time."

She adds that she wanted to not just include the cities that we think of as mainstays of urban street photography — New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo — but also other, less documented places like Kingston, Jamaica, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire and Lodz, Poland. The oldest photo in the exhibit is a daguerreotype from the 1860s. The most recent was shot during the pandemic.

Photographer Jeff Thomas has several pieces in the show. Thomas is Onondaga, a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, but he's spent the vast majority of his life in cities: first in his hometown of Buffalo, NY, and then later in Toronto, Winnipeg, and now Ottawa, where he's currently based. He says he grew up fascinated by street photographers of the early 20th century but, over time, noticed that Indigenous perspectives on urban life were almost completely absent.

"There wasn't really a tradition of Indigenous photographers or even looking at Indigenous people in cities," he says. 

Thomas says that the "sense of invisibility" he felt as an urban Indigenous person was part of what drove him to start documenting his experience. He says he's trying to create "urban Indigenous stories," that will allow people like him and his family to feel rooted in both their culture and the cities where they live.

"I didn't want to just vanish into mainstream society and lose all connection with my own culture and my own history," he says. "Photography offered me a way to begin to have a conversation [about that] and talk about the things that are being photographed. It keeps the idea of who I am and where I come from alive, while you're trying to figure out ways to survive in the urban landscape."

Montreal-based photographer Emmanuelle Léonard shot the most recent picture in the show. "La livreur et sa client, 22:53" is a thermal photograph that was shot in early 2022, when Montreal still had a COVID-related curfew. It shows a delivery person looking at his phone, and, two doors down, a person waiting for a delivery.

"In Quebec we had, twice, the curfew," she says. "So no one could go out after eight o'clock. I was very curious about what Montreal would look like with no one in it. So my gallerist asked for me to get the authorization to be in the street. And I was very surprised; there were policemen, and the homeless trying to reach the places where they could sleep, and a lot, a lot, a lot of delivery men."

Léonard has been interested in documenting work and public space for a lot of her career, and she was especially intrigued by this hidden class of workers who were among the few people allowed out during the curfew.

"There are a lot of people who work for Uber Eats or Skip the Dishes, but we don't usually show them," she says. 

She also wanted to show just how quickly a city can change, how quickly it could be rendered still and lifeless.

"It's something you can imagine in your dystopic view of the future," she says. "And then I was like 'Oh, wow. It's so easy to [create].'" 

Dumont-Gauthier says that putting together the show together has made her think about how much the way we live in cities has changed even in the past 10 or 15 years. 

"Ten years ago, you'd still see people walking around with maps," she says. "You'd see people walking around with a newspaper and that's how you'd know the news of the day. Now everybody looks at their phones, so even the way we orient ourselves in cities is quite different."

Cities in Flux runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas St. W.) in Toronto until Dec. 3.