City archives opens Goss photography exhibition through April 2027
«Subseries 58» showcases roadway photos by Toronto's first official photographer, arranged by visual themes to reveal artistic intent.
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The City of Toronto Archives opened a new didactic exhibition in May 2026 during Contact Photography Festival called "Subseries 58: Department of Public Works Roadway photographs," featuring work by city photographers Arthur Goss and his successor Howard MacDonald created between 1910 and 1957. The exhibition runs through April 31, 2027.
Curator Paul Sharkey took a conceptual approach, arranging large numbers of images into repetitive grids based on visual similarities. The stated aim is to "reveal the creativity of the photographers by removing the photos from their original documentary context and arranging them by visual themes, associations, repetitions and typologies." This produces a strong graphic effect that highlights artistic intent often hidden in archival work.
Goss, already an accomplished artist before becoming the city's first official photographer, headed his own department providing photography services to all other city divisions. His successor Howard MacDonald was an uninspired journeyman whose work from 1940 until the position was eliminated in 1957 showed marked deterioration in both artistic and technical quality.
The most interesting photographs come from Goss's early tenure between 1910 and 1939. In Roadway No. 109 from April 1914, looking north on Spadina at Queen Street, he choreographed fifteen moving figures, five vehicles, and a wheelbarrow to balance the composition—nothing seems out of place despite the scene's apparent chaos. The dismal weather creates a powerful mood that transcends the banal subject. In Roadway No. 339 from October 1914, a single workman is placed in the foreground of a deep perspective of steel rails, his cardigan revealing a hole at the elbow. Advertising signs above and beside him—including Old Dutch Cleanser and a pair of pants—add a mildly comical element.
Roadway No. 369 demonstrates how administrative photographs can slip into the uncanny: the camera eye gazes straight ahead from just inches above a perfectly smooth and level sidewalk, with truncated figures standing at the frame's edges and a barely visible figure sitting in a mysterious vehicle in the near distance.
