National Post

Leah Sandals, May 2009

The draw of Johnston's images comes from the fact that they lift a mirror to familiar scenes and settings, allowing us the time and space to consider what usually just flies past car windows or is glimpsed out of the corner of an eye during errands. Take, for example, Johnston's standout wide-angle photograph spanning Union Station's railway tracks, the Air Canada Centre and a condo contruction site. It's a swath often divided into discrete categories by maps and minds, but here possesses the feel of a geological cross-section - a system, however erratic, in process. Also refreshing is the way he strives to photograph Toronto as itself-not as Cartier-Bresson's Paris or Helen Levitt's New York, but as a city with its own flavour.