Essay 2 of Through Our Lens: Jon Blak

“Toronto’s battering its own history, telling its own story,” says Jon Blak, a Jamaican Canadian photographer based in Toronto. “You are a person of colour. You're way down the totem pole of how that story is told,” adds Blak. 

Blak puts it straight, no sugarcoating the damage done to coloured communities with imprints of Toronto’s (and Canada’s) backlogging and negligence. When asked why, as a Black Canadian, it is vital to use your identity as a lens to capture your community around you, Blak says visibility is instrumental. If you don’t see us, how do you know we existed? 

“I just wanted to show where we are,” says Blak. As someone who grew up in housing along Weston and Eglinton Road, attended art school and had a burning interest in documentaries from Gordon Parks, showing “the guys,” as Blak put it, was essential. “Where Papa goes to lime,” says Blak. “Lime” is Caribbean slang for hanging around in a public space with friends and enjoying the scene. “Where your cousin goes to hustle,” says Blak. The movement of Black people is a special activity and buzzes with on-the-spot friendships, bonding over food and finding comfort in listening. Blak captures this.

At the time, a 26-year-old Blak started capturing Little Jamaica, a cultural Caribbean pocket within Toronto, known as Eglinton West, by his second year of art school. Blak refers to school as a transition from “straight-hood trenches living” and says his leaps made him homesick. So, Blak decided to move back to Eglinton.  “I saw the neighbourhood as something that needed to be captured. [It was] changing. [It was] not as vibrant as it was when I was a kid,” says Blak. 

Blak sticks by memories like his nine-year-old self travelling on bus 32 with friends to bag a dish from Mr. Jerk, a Jamaican restaurant serving staple Caribbean dishes worth a stuffy and sardine-packed bus ride. Or, in some cases, ital food, a diet of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, that banks on a vegetarian palette to improve health. 

“As a photographer, they tell you should shoot to what you have access to. So putting myself there was just perfect,” says Blak. 

Over the past decade, Eglinton West has been at the heart of the Eglinton LRT Transit project, and the busyness coated over its streets has done more harm than good. Businesses have been starved of their customers, the city never seems to focus its affordable housing projects in its space, and many have flocked out of residential areas with hesitation. 

Blak says he was told we couldn’t preserve Eglinton West because everything moves on. “It will be a vestige. It will be a vessel of what they allow to exist still.” Blak shares the reality of gentrification and community redevelopment in neglected communities, where immigrants of colour populate the space and bring doses of home into a city big enough to swallow them. But they were successful, and that’s why places like Eglinton West’s Little Jamaica exist and give Blak a reason to shoot the vibrant cultural assets within the space. 

“My brother gave me my first camera,” Blak says before adding that he broke them. Twelve years later, he started borrowing cameras from an equipment rental, The Cage, at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson), where he began taking photos with film. Family played an essential role in his passion for capturing, and Blak references his dad, who loved it as much as Blak did. “If he were still alive, he would say that he’s ten times better,” Blak says before chuckling. 

One of his first projects, The Futures In The Ghetto, exhibited by Ben Gallery, was inspired by Michael K. Williams’ Black Market. The exhibition consisted of 15 to 20 images that told the story of “young people rising above,” says Blak.  Blak describes the images of young Black men not having to carry the “superhard thug” symbol. “He’s not tough. He just is.”

Just is.

To “be” is a big achievement for people who feel like they are drowning in a sea of failures. Not necessarily personal failures, but when society fails you. Over and over again. To take that breath of fresh air requires breaking a threshold that has been constructed to cage you. 

Blak offers a breath of fresh air and asks, “Do you believe that you can tell your stories your way?” It’s almost inevitable to tell our stories our way. Who we are seamlessly translates into our bodies of work. Often, they’re the same. But, it also proves challenging to tell our stories our way because of the blockades that force us to take up narratives foreign to us. 

When asked how he feels about sharing his work with a broader audience, Blak says it feels good. Blak’s work was featured in The Fader, where he documents the economic and social scene of Eglinton West. In the article, Blak marks it as “a major pulse for the Caribbean diaspora,” and his vivid and colour-rich photos are a stellar example of how he plans to keep that pulse alive. 

“People came to me. Textbook writers came to me and said, ‘I want to use your image(s) to start telling the story of Little Jamaica and link it with Hogan’s Alley,’ and I’m just like, whoa, that's crazy. So my daughter's gonna bust open a book and say, ‘my daddy did that.’ That's pretty crazy,” says Blak. 

Blak says that younger Black Canadians are carving out their lane to tell their stories. “Tell it your way. Don’t try to fit into the box; do your thing until the box has to come to try and find you,” encourages Blak. For those who see photography as an extension of what they want to become, Blak says all you need is a camera, perseverance and courage.