Riverside Quarterly
James Sandham
Built in 1948, Regent Park is Canada's oldest and largest housing project. It is also, according to Toronto-based photographer Scott Johnston, kind of like "an old resort."
That may sound counter intuitive to most. After all, Johnston admits, "most people are (only) familiar with Regent Park's reputation as one of Toronto's poorest neighborhoods." It is often unfairly portrayed as a site of drugs and violence, and even Toronto Community Housing (TCH) concedes that "over time, as the Canadian approach to housing the poor evolved through a series of policy interventions, only the poorest and most disadvantaged households gained access to housing in the (Regent Park South) area," while the north sector came to primarily house the "working poor".
But this, Johnston says, is only half the story of the community located east of Parliament between Gerrard Street East and Shuter Street. His photography of the area, to be exhibited in May at Galerie Bertossini (783 Queen Street East), tells another side, one that is quietly but decidedly more optimistic – much like Regent Park's own origins.
"The aim of the community's original planners was to create a self-contained ‘garden city'," Johnston explains – hence Regent Park's self-contained detachment from the surrounding community – but now "the area is … slated for demolition and rebuilding. (So) this exhibition gives viewers a chance to look inside the neighborhood that only a few have actually seen," and that fewer still may actually ever see again.
But beyond the fact that he thought it "historically significant to document" Regent Park as it currently stands, Johnston explains that his goal was also "to reveal the complexity and the unique environment of a well known, but not so well understood, area of Toronto. It is my feeling that the photographs (like the present development) give off a sense of searching rather than finding, that (my photos) evoke or invoke more than they state or define."
Johnston makes it clear he "had no interest in portraying poverty and deprivation" – nor did he find much. "It's actually quite nice, quieter than most of downtown," he says, "but there is a strange underlying tension."
"Never having gone into the actual project, I wasn't sure what to expect. At first, I saw things on a large scale: the buildings, the vast green space, the landscape and the design. Then I started to focus on certain areas that I found particularly interesting, in visual terms. I attempted to capture its uneasy peace. It's a very open space, considering its downtown location, but somehow claustrophobic at the same time – a place that seems to be almost uncertain of itself, and in the process of disappearing," Johnston says.
Johnston's time spent photographing Regent Park also raised several questions for him. "First of all," he says, "it is an area in transition, an area about to change, supposedly for the better – (but) while the area is about to change physically, what about the people of Regent Park? Will they be pushed out into another housing project? It seems easy enough to tear down the buildings and put up new and better ones, but can the people be ‘revitalized' along with the buildings? So I was interested in the aspect of change, both for the physical surroundings and for the people."
Change has been a common theme in much of Johnston's work. His first exhibition in the context was a collection of photographs portraying dilapidated, empty homes in Toronto's ultra-rich Bridle Path neighborhood.
"The advent of overseas investors purchasing multi-million dollar homes (in the Bridle Path) and then leaving them completely unattended led to the much-unexpected phenomenon of mansions that were totally abandoned and in a state of decay," Johnston says. "I used this backdrop to create series of images that captured their curious desolation, as well as the echoes of the inhabitants who once lived there.
"Then I photographed several churches being torn down, to clear the prime downtown land for new condos and town homes. The images were unsettling, catching the final vulnerable moments of these once proud sacred buildings. The religious symbols and settings amongst all the wreckage had a disquieting effect," he says.
"Space can have an enormous effect on people, on how they view themselves and their place in the world," Johnston affirms. And his photography, in a way, is an exercise in the re-presentation of space – familiar places seen anew from an unfamiliar perspective. He is, however, unsure if this new perspective will actually translate into some kind of concrete social change.
"I'm not sure if art can change a community," he says. "But I'm interested in finding out what is behind the veil of Regent Park, if there is anything there to find out. I believe we create our own veil, not necessary to hide behind, but we definitely see the world through it. The hard part is to try to see the world through a new lens, or at least a better one. Even when we know the lens we are looking through is foggy and distorted, unfortunately we seem doomed to continue in the same habitual way. However, when we see situations clearly and with critical self-reflection," Johnston concludes, "we perhaps gain some control."
