Many years after taking these photos, rock photographer returns to recapture a few of her favorite bands

There’s little question that two-plus years of a pandemic has taken its toll on Toronto’s live-music neighborhood, however it’s on no account a damaged social scene. New artists are rising, venues are open and the town’s resilience is on show as soon as extra. It’s this spirit that artwork photographer Mikki Simeunovich has been capturing in her ongoing Instagram photo series, “How it Started, How it’s Going.”

Capitalizing on the favored Twitter development through which customers submit two sequential pictures displaying jarring or ironic progress, Simeunovich juxtaposes live performance photographs of performers she took 30 years in the past for Performer journal with these taken in the previous few years.

The concept got here to her properly earlier than venues had been pressured to close down for months. “One night time in October 2017 I used to be on the Regent Theatre in Oshawa capturing Northern Pikes for a neighborhood weblog and I assumed, ‘I’ve accomplished this earlier than,’” Simeunovich remembers. “I seemed in my information and I noticed that I took pics of Northern Pikes again within the ’90s on the Danforth Music Corridor.” She then began to pay extra consideration when bands she shot a long time earlier than, like Tea Occasion, Blue Rodeo and Sven Gali, got here to city.

Within the late ’90s Simeunovich left her pictures profession and have become a postal employee. However as she neared retirement she started interested by her subsequent step. It turned out, it might be her earlier step: photographing bands, this time posting them on social media, as a substitute of in {a magazine}.

However with venues shuttered, Simeunovich needed to {photograph} musicians away from the stage. In summer time 2020, that mission grew to become an exhibition, “Playgrounded,” on the Station Gallery in Whitby.

“‘Playgrounded’ confirmed that people who find themselves inventive will discover a option to create,” Simeunovich says. “Some individuals are blessed with with the ability to do what they love for decade, like Blue Rodeo and the Tragically Hip. Some artists by no means make a dent and transfer on. And a few work at different endeavours to present them the liberty they should come again to what they had been meant to do if the celebrities had lined up.”

The celebs certainly aligned for Simeunovich, who got here again to what she loves: being in a darkish, packed venue, digital camera raised, ready for the right shot.

“People who find themselves nonetheless enjoying needs to be proud. For these of us in our 50s, these bands had been the background to our youth,” she says. “It’s our music neighborhood’s historical past and Toronto’s historical past.”

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