A Crash Course On the Anatomy of Robots by Kent Evans

The photographs don’t moralize they blame everyone and no one at once. This work, in other words, is evidence of our progress and our backsliding, a material record of social change. One woman was killed and three injured when two motor cars collided at one of Toronto’s most dangerous corners, Barton Street and Manning Avenue. They were “proof” that life was increasingly mechanical and dangerous, and therefore moving beyond our control. (Traffic in Toronto doesn’t seem to have improved.) There are multiple pictures of car crashes from the 1920s to the 1960s because, along with fires, those were the most common free spectacles of their day. There are lots of cars, because cars have changed the way we live, then as now. There are happy pictures of diversions (agricultural fairs and hockey games and beauty contests and ballets, among others) and war pictures of pain and destruction and death. There are pictures of cities going up (railway tunnels are bored, streetcar tracks are laid, buildings are erected) as that rural country becomes more connected and urban.

It was not so long ago that crowds were an unusual sight in a mostly rural country, and the pictures reflect that excitement. There are a lot of pictures of crowds in this selection, which has been culled from the millions of images Globe photojournalists have taken over the past 100 years. If you string them together and look at them long enough, patterns start to emerge. An archive like this – a century, as of this month, of photographs taken by Globe and Mail staff photographers – thereby becomes a succession of stopped moments.

They freeze a moment of the present so that the moment can be examined more closely in the future.

A Crash Course On the Anatomy of Robots by Kent Evans