The Occupy Wall Street movement made its way to Toronto yesterday. Hadn’t planned to shoot it as I was heading to the camera show. When I missed my Go bus by one frickin’ minute, and had another hour to kill, figured I’d check out King and Bay where the demonstrators were beginning to gather.
Protest marches can be fun to shoot – there are always colourful characters and the signs are a creative exercise in itself. But this is Toronto, the peaceful, so I pretty much knew there would be no photo opportunities like this yesterday. (all photos Richard Budman)
The crowd started to gather just after 10am. By the time it left the King and Bay intersection – it had swelled to well over a thousand people.
Toronto Police presence was light on the day. After the G20 fiasco and the black-eye it caused a normally outstanding police force – officers were taking no chances. Police kept their distance from protesters and stayed well on the outside perimeter working to ensure streets were cleared of traffic so the march could safely precede. But Toronto Police were certainly ready just in case the shit hit the fan and violence broke out. I did see many unmarked mini-vans in the area, each full of Police officers. You could sense if they needed reinforcements – in about a minute hundreds of Police could have been on scene.
There was no shortage of photographers documenting the day. We’re always looking for creative ways to gain height when shooting large protest marches (my best shots yesterday of the march moving along Adelaide were shot with me standing on newspaper boxes.)
In this age of everyone thinking they’re a great photographer because of an iPhone and software trickery like instagram – it was cool to see one dude going old-school with his Deardorff camera gear.
After the demonstrators left Bay and King, they marched east on Adelaide to St. James Park. Some estimates put the peak size of the march at around 2,000 people.
Great to see my old friend, the Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington. Joe recently spent a week in Afghanistan covering things over there so it was good to hear about his experience preparing for such a dangerous assignment.
The march ended up at St. James park. How long they’ll last and how many days they camp out is anyone’s guess at this point.
A few photographers had their helmets with them in case any violence broke out and the projectiles started falling (I left mine at home.)