Artist Statement:
"Anti-Poverty Protests in Toronto"
"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
-Clarence Darrow
This series is from a larger photojournalistic work about anti-poverty protests in Toronto. The protests I covered were led by OCAP (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) with TDRC (Toronto Disaster Relief Committee). My aim was to show protests as they happen, to photograph the people involved and to show relationships between protesters and their communities. I also intended to tell short stories about the people in the photographs and the issues they face.
With Ontario being recently titled a have-not province and with many job sectors being destroyed by new market trends, the economy is the foremost issue in the media today. As the middle-class ("ordinary people") lose jobs and wealth, where do the already impoverished people go but further down? Where do these lower-income people fit into our minds? More and more people are being forced into poverty as jobs (especially in manufacturing) are being lost. More families are depending on food banks and moving to housing projects. I hope that this work informs my audience about a group of activists they may not have been previously aware of. A group of activists that are dealing with issues that are vital to the city of Toronto.
BACK | NEXT