One guy found the whole world in Toronto, and has the photos to prove it
One man’s mission to find a person from every country on earth within the Greater Toronto Area is almost complete. Starting in June last year, Colin Boyd Shafer, a photographer and high-school teacher, started Cosmopolis Toronto, a blog of intimate portraits of people from all but ten of the world’s recognized nations, and several disputed territories, too. “As a geography teacher, I’m comfortable with talking about countries,” Shafer told us. “So I figured tying that to portraiture could work.” The numbers certainly suggested that the project was possible. In 2011, Statistics Canada calculated that almost half of the Toronto-area population—about 2.5 million people—was born overseas, most of them in Asia or the Middle East. The same year, Canada had a foreign-born population of about 6.8 million, or just under a quarter of the country.
A little over a year after starting the blog, Shafer has interviewed and photographed people born just about everywhere, save for a handful of Pacific nations and Monaco, San Marino, and East Timor. Surprisingly, even people from countries as mysterious as North Korea and remote as Tonga were to be found living in Toronto or its suburbs. Each subject was photographed once in a GTA location where he or she felt at home, and then a second time holding an object with sentimental value. Many chose photographs of loved ones, while others chose food, clothes or a diary kept since moving to Canada. The photos, especially those of people from places riven by conflict, are powerful. “Many of [the subjects] do not fit within the majority ethnicity or religion of that particular country, which I think is really important—that these people are not chosen based on anything other than where they’re born.” Shafer said. “That was something I felt really strongly about and I kept it consistent throughout…this is not a bunch of individuals representing countries, but instead where they were born.”
We asked Shafer to select ten photos that he felt best represented the series. Click through the photo gallery to see them, with his commentary. A book featuring all of the pictures in the Cosmopolis Toronto series is currently in the works.
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- <strong>Nadia, Bangladesh</strong><br /><br /> “This photograph has taken on a kind of iconic position within the project...it says a lot. It's the old subway car, you've got a lot of things going on in the photo. People are always wondering if the person to the left is covering their face, even though I think they were just wiping their face because they're tired. It was a hard picture to take. She wanted to be in that station because that's where she spends a lot of time.”
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- Nadia holds a special blanket that her aunts in Bangladesh spent six months making for her
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- <strong>Abdel, Chad</strong><br /><br /> “He says Toronto saved his life. This is where he was diagnosed with his fatal heart condition and where he got surgery at Sick Kids. Now he's making it and ended up going to a great school, doing everything he wanted to do. That's pretty cool. In many cases I've had people say: 'yeah, this place saved my life,' but in Abdel's case it's true.”
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- Abdel holds a picture of his mother
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- <strong>Catherine, Lesotho</strong><br /><br /> “That picture was the most risky. We actually had a tow truck pull over to help us, thinking we had broken down. There's a small little part on the Gardiner where you can pull off to the side, I think it must be for emergencies. We did that and quickly took a picture, but it's very symbolic. She chose that place because she remembers that being her first scene coming into Toronto, seeing the city from the Gardiner.”
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- Catherine holds a miniature statue of Lesotho's coat of arms
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- <strong>Abdel Rouf, Palestine</strong><br /><br /> “I was getting a lot of messages from people who really wanted to be included who were from territories or places that were not necessarily autonomous or fit the country framework, like Palestine. The picture says 2,000 words. The fact that it's in the Eaton Centre and there's this real traditional look to him, but also he's in this modern building that many of the participants said was an important place. 'Wow, look, I'm in a modern developed country, there's all these flashy things.'” But for him I think for him it was: 'How can I keep my five girls and wife entertained as someone who doesn't have a lot of money? Well, we can just walk through the mall and feel like we belong here.'”
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- Abdel holds a picture of his father
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- <strong>Eileen, U.K. (Shafer's grandmother)</strong><br /><br /> “That space has been her own for forty years now. That corner is where she lives. She wouldn't admit it, but she literally spends the majority of any day there. Why my family's legacy became Canadian was basically just a mistake. [My grandparents] really wanted to move to a place that wasn't a colony of Britain and they really wanted to go to somewhere Spanish speaking because my grandfather was born in Spain...so he applied in the newspaper to a teaching job in Colombia and got accepted, everything's great, and then he looked at the return address and it was British Colombia. The job was really good, though. And right before he was about to come they said the school is going to be built in Toronto.”
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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- Eileen holds some family photo albums
- (Image: Colin Boyd Shafer)
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![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/culture/cosmopolis-whole-world-in-toronto/&title=One guy found the whole world in Toronto, and has the photos to prove it&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cosmopolis-toronto-intro-624x395.jpg&description=[caption id="attachment_284136" align="alignnone" width="656"] (Images: Colin Boyd Shafer)[/caption]
One man’s mission to find a person from every country on earth within the Greater Toronto Area is almost complete. Starting in June last year, Colin Boyd Shafer, a photographer and high-school teacher, started Cosmopolis Toronto, a blog of intimate portraits of people from all but ten of the world's recognized nations, and several disputed territories, too. “As a geography teacher, I’m comfortable with talking about countries," Shafer told us. “So I figured tying that to portraiture could work.” The numbers certainly suggested that the project was possible. In 2011, Statistics Canada calculated that almost half of the Toronto-area population—about 2.5 million people—was born overseas, most of them in Asia or the Middle East. The same year, Canada had a foreign-born population of about 6.8 million, or just under a quarter of the country.
A little over a year after starting the blog, Shafer has interviewed and photographed people born just about everywhere, save for a handful of Pacific nations and Monaco, San Marino, and East Timor. Surprisingly, even people from countries as mysterious as North Korea and remote as Tonga were to be found living in Toronto or its suburbs. Each subject was photographed once in a GTA location where he or she felt at home, and then a second time holding an object with sentimental value. Many chose photographs of loved ones, while others chose food, clothes or a diary kept since moving to Canada. The photos, especially those of people from places riven by conflict, are powerful. “Many of [the subjects] do not fit within the majority ethnicity or religion of that particular country, which I think is really important—that these people are not chosen based on anything other than where they’re born.” Shafer said. “That was something I felt really strongly about and I kept it consistent throughout…this is not a bunch of individuals representing countries, but instead where they were born.”
We asked Shafer to select ten photos that he felt best represented the series. Click through the photo gallery to see them, with his commentary. A book featuring all of the pictures in the Cosmopolis Toronto series is currently in the works.
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An excellent Toronto story. Good article, well done!
I just got paid $7500 working off my computer this month. And if you think that’s cool, my friend has twin toddlers and made over $8k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do,
➜➜➜…➜➜➜➜ PAYRAP．ＣＯＭ
Did he find any Canadians?
So who care,s a rats ass.
This is amazing !! Reminds me of ‘Humans of New York’….everyone has a story thats strongly influenced by where they are from.
He probably went out of his way to avoid people who were spineless and passive-aggressive, so I suspect he didn’t bump into too many Canadians.
Sorry to disappoint you David, but this is what we Canadians look like.
I love this. So creative and inspiring. An excellent way to showcase, and more importantly, embrace all the cultures that make up Toronto.
well you must have cared enough to comment