Photographs of Toronto from the recent past are often the most fascinating. Those from recent decades look a lot like images of today, but are just a little different compared to those from a century ago, which can be unrecognizable. Those are great too, but pictures of Toronto from the decades before the now 20-year building boom began particularly fascinate me.

It’s a city that’s still in the living memory of many people, but easy to forget as the pace of change here has been so quick. “Toronto Days” is an exhibition at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts of Avard Woolaver’s photographs of the city taken between 1980 and 1995 and are a compelling look back — but not too far back.

The great genius of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror is that it’s set in the not-too-distant future, where the differences, mostly technological, are subtle. It’s a future we can instantly recognize and relate to, just like Woolaver’s Toronto, a city just before the city we know today caught in a kind of a dreamy haze.

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It’s a city of parking lots, rusted cars, “fishbowl” buses with bulging windshields, endless cigarettes and men wearing proper hats. The skyline in Woolaver’s photos is thin too, and empty lots along King and Queen streets seem like photos of a rust-belt city rather than the bustling neighbourhoods we know today.

Woolaver began taking his Toronto photos when he moved here from Nova Scotia to study photography at Ryerson. Influenced by great social landscape photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, taking pictures was a way to get to know his new city.

“When I moved to Toronto, I had never lived in a city before,” he says. “I was a bit shy, and I felt quite out of place. Photographing the city was in some sense a way of adapting to a new environment.”

The city he photographed was generally not the one that would appear on the postcards of the day, or one that looked particularly 1980s or 1990s. It seems like a place out of time. The way we remember time periods is interesting. As time passes, we remember the things that stood out: the fashions; the car models; and the architecture evocative of the era. We remember what was new then, just as we’re fascinated by what’s new today.

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What we forget is the slow overlap of time. Woolaver’s photos have a lot of 1970s in them: the clothes people wore; the cars on the street; and the general sensibility of the place. Looking at them had me thinking about our 2018 city and what remnants from the 2000s, the 1990s, or earlier are still around today. It’s hard to see the overlap of time when you’re under and in them, but looking back, as the Toronto Days exhibition lets us do, those layers become apparent.

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Instead of looking for the newest thing, Woolaver says he pointed his lens at graphic elements that caught his eye, good light, human interactions or human isolation and simply interesting places.

“A lot of my early photos in Toronto were from school assignments: reflections; shadows; exploration of the frame; popular culture; and documentary projects,” he says. “I have always felt that interesting photos can be found anywhere; you don’t need to go far. To this day, I carry a camera everywhere and take photos where I happen to be.”

As he was a student at the time, many of the photographs in the exhibition, taken from three books he’s published of his archive, come from in and around the Ryerson campus. Mostly shooting in black and white, some of his vibrant colour photos show Yonge street as a neon blur of excitement, more exciting than today, seemingly. Record stores, sex shops, 24-hour restaurants — it was the Yonge St. strip at full power, more Scorsese Taxi Driver than the relatively sedate place it’s become today.

There are, of course, no mobile devices in everybody’s hands, perhaps one of the starkest differences between then and now, along with all those parking lots. Looking at the photos, I imagined the trajectory of the people in them: places to be at specific times and firm plans made that can’t be altered on the fly as they are today.

“The sentiment I hear most from online viewers is that they miss the old Toronto,” says Woolaver. “There have been many changes in the city, both good and bad, over the past 30 years. One of the biggest changes I see is how differently people interact with one another and with the urban environment. Digital technology has changed so many things.”

My own feeling is there’s still a lot of social interaction in the city, perhaps more than ever before as we can connect with others in a multitude of ways now. But some of it has moved to a digital layer that’s all around us, just not as visible as the social life in Woolaver’s photographs. If you can’t see somebody else’s digital life, it might as well not exist for you. Woolaver’s city is a social city in the flesh.

As for old Toronto, I can’t see why there would be nostalgia for all those parking lots, but perhaps there is for a city that was still affordable to live in for a broader spectrum of people. That’s the old Toronto that we would welcome back, and one Woolaver’s photographs depict well.

“I would like to go back and rephotograph some of the old locations, a before and after,” says Woolaver. “This would certainly bring the changes into sharp focus.”

Toronto Days runs until March 16 in Gallery 310 at the Ryerson School of Image Arts at 122 Bond St. The opening reception is Saturday March 10 from 2 to 5 p.m., with an artist talk at 3 p.m. See more photos at www.avardwoolaver.com/about

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef