There’s no doubt that two-plus years of a pandemic has taken its toll on Toronto’s live-music community, but it is by no means a broken social scene. New artists are emerging, venues are open and the city’s resilience is on display once more. It is this spirit that art photographer Mikki Simeunovich has been capturing in her ongoing Instagram photo series, “How it Started, How it’s Going.”
Capitalizing on the popular Twitter trend in which users post two sequential images showing jarring or ironic progress, Simeunovich juxtaposes concert shots of performers she took 30 years ago for Performer magazine with those taken in the last few years.
The idea came to her well before venues were forced to shut down for months. “One night in October 2017 I was at the Regent Theater in Oshawa shooting Northern Pikes for a local blog and I thought, ‘I’ve done this before,’” Simeunovich recalls. “I looked in my files and I saw that I took pics of Northern Pikes back in the ’90s at the Danforth Music Hall.” She then started to pay more attention when bands she shot decades before, like Tea Party, Blue Rodeo and Sven Gali, came to town.
In the late ’90s Simeunovich left her photography career and became a postal worker. But as she neared retirement she began thinking about her de ella next step de ella. It turned out, it would be her previous step of her: photographing bands, this time posting them on social media, instead of in a magazine.
But with venues shuttered, Simeunovich had to photograph musicians away from the stage. In summer 2020, that project became an exhibition, “Playgrounded,” at the Station Gallery in Whitby.
“’Playgrounded’ showed that people who are creative will find a way to create,” Simeunovich says. “Some people are blessed with being able to do what they love for decade, like Blue Rodeo and the Tragically Hip. Some artists never make a dent and move on. And some work at other endeavors to give them the freedom they need to come back to what they were meant to do if the stars had lined up.”
The stars indeed aligned for Simeunovich, who came back to what she loves: being in a dark, packed venue, camera raised, waiting for the perfect shot.
“People who are still playing should be proud. For those of us in our 50s, these bands were the background to our youth,” she says. “It is our music community’s history and Toronto’s history.”
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