A Toronto musician documented her life with a photo a day for 15 years
Maddy Wilde’s photos are a DIY archive of Toronto’s arts scene
At 21, Toronto musician Maddy Wilde was working at a movie theatre when inspiration struck.
A customer came in with a camera around her neck and explained that she’d been taking one photo each day, a project modelled after New York photographer Jamie Livingston, who took one daily Polaroid for nearly 20 years until his death in 1997.
Wilde decided she wanted to shoot a photo a day too. She captured her young friends in Honest Ed’s; at music festivals; on old TTC cars with red fabric seats; around Toronto’s music venues, many of which have now closed—the Silver Dollar, the Smiling Buddha—and at the Imperial Pub, which is set to close next month after 81 years.
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Now 36, Wilde just celebrated her 15th anniversary of daily photography. She celebrated with a party where she projected her collection of daily images, for two seconds each, on a loop—which took about three hours.
Wilde’s photos form a granular autobiography meant to sum up what happened each day. Her life as a musician in bands including Born Ruffians, No Frills and Moon King has been exciting, but as with anyone, there are boring and sad days too. At the project’s anniversary party, one of the 5,475 images projected on the wall was a self-portrait she took while crying in her early 20s. “It’s kind of like journalling,” she says. “It’s just the truth.”
Wilde grew up in the Annex, near Honest Ed’s, and her project is as much a time capsule of a changing Toronto as it is a documentation of her life. “I know how much time flies now,” she says. “When I started this, the concept of doing five years was crazy. When I got to ten years, I thought, Ten years isn’t even that long. It must be a getting older thing.” The photo she snapped on the project’s 15th anniversary was of her bandmates in No Frills.
Now, Wilde plans to get to 20 years. She has a vision for when that time comes: developing every single photo—she shoots on film—and displaying them in a long, tunnel-like space, perhaps at Finch station.
“It changed my life,” she says of the ongoing archive. “It makes me live each day with a bit more intention.”
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
