Faces in the Alley: Why Portrait Murals Stop People Cold

During Toronto's winter months, the city is reduced to its basic components. Sound is muffled as snow absorbs it, and colour becomes muted due to the amount of salt that has been spread throughout the city. Street corners become more useful in nature versus serving as entertainment, so that people are moving along with specific purposes; with their shoulders raised and looking ahead to where the next patch of cleared sidewalk is located. However, if you look just off of Queen Street West and the Fashion District, you'll find that Graffiti Alley (which is also known as Rush Lane), has retained its colour through the winter months like an unyielding flame.

The walkway does not have an extravagant feel to it nor does it attempt to be ostentatious. From its inception it served as a service road, where trash receptacles, deliveries and locked doors made up most of the landscape (along with forgetting some of the doors after the fact). Once artists started to see the blank walls as no longer blank, but rather blank canvases awaiting their claim, the lane began to take on a different meaning. Over time, as more layers of paint were added to this space by different artists, Graffiti Alley became a living record rather than an exhibit behind glass. The records were not arranged in any particular order nor did they receive the blessings of curatorial committees. They continued to evolve through the hands of ordinary people who believe that public spaces still possess a greater purpose than just their aesthetic appearance.

Another aspect of the alley becomes clear during winter. In winter, the ground is pale, and the sky has a heavy feel about it. The alley is not only colour but also faces, faces looking at you from the brick, and faces that do not blink. These faces remain with the same expression for every night the city passes by — usually not quite paying attention and usually missing the point. The portrait murals do something in addition to what abstract tags and letters do; they stop people. With these types of faces, a viewer can recognise the subject more than with abstract tags and letters; it is more challenging to dismiss as a simple background. A viewer will want to question themselves about who belongs in that area (of the city) and will be able to do so easily because of the use of a face in the image. The question about who belongs and who gets seen and who gets ignored is the question of street photography and urban living.

The portrait photo is the correct starting point for this article. This mural’s gaze isn’t friendly; rather, it’s real. This mural has the emotional heaviness of someone physically standing in an alley; however, it will also be there the next day, and the following day, and when it snows again. In a city that has an extremely high level of impermanence—leases, pop-ups, condos climbing higher into yesterday’s skyline—this painted face will serve as a sort of groundwork for future segments of the city. It is not permanent in a museum-type way; but it has longevity in the only way that street art can have longevity: it is being constantly re-invitalized, challenged, replaced, and answered.

The Alley of Graffiti is frequently termed “the” destination; an urban landmark, it is also regarded as a must-stop location for visitors wanting to see texture and authenticity. However, tourism is not what provides the value for an editorial on Graffiti Alley—rather, it is because of its function as an outdoor gallery of portraits with no entry fee, no hours of operation, and no assurance that what is there will still be there next month. The uncertainty is not baggage; it is the source of the engine that keeps the alley alive—because each time a new piece appears there, it acts as both a statement and an invitation to respond, remix, repaint, or outdo that piece.

The winter photographs capture how creativity constantly reinvents itself through an old Toronto experience of extreme winter coldness; snow accumulates at the edges of the street, while ice covers the ruts left behind by both cars and pedestrians as they leave their marks and then return. Thus, the alley becomes a chaotic record—of who walked in, slipped over, or turned around, of each person's passage through. Against the backdrop of snow and ice, the murals seem more pronounced; colours used in the murals become methods to combat the washing out of colours that occur during the winter months due to the lack of sunlight. The overall result of how these murals are utilized is as if we are witnessing a film; the narrow lane illuminated in a golden hue from the streetlight and the walls emitting brightly-hued paint create a visual representation of the breath of the city at wintertime.

There is also a more profound conflict in this place that provides so much exposure on social media – is it legal? Is it permitted? Is it ‘vandalism’ or ‘art’? Graffiti Alley lies in the ambiguous middle area of this discussion: there is recognition of it as graffiti, even within its own right, however it isn’t a fully recognised illegal graffiti wall; rather, its existence is based on a level of tolerance that feels unformalised like there is just an understanding and not an actual law or statute. This ambiguity of legality and its equals is the character of this space; it is essentially the place where the rules of the city and the realities of the city are played out every day in private.

Toronto is attempting to formalize the negotiation with various programs offered by the city to support mural and street art in public areas. One of these programs is StreetARToronto (StART), managed by the City of Toronto and utilized as part of the City’s overall approach to graffiti management. One component of this program is to establish initiatives and provide opportunities for artists to create art in an effort to enhance the attractiveness and vibrancy of urban spaces. In many cases, the context in which a wall exists will help define whether that wall falls under a formal program or not; however, in general, the shift that has taken place has changed the conversation between the city and the public. "How do we remove the marks?" is no longer the only question that officials are asking themselves. There now exists the need to ask, "What are we going to replace them with, and how will that replacement impact the street?"

This is when the art moves beyond 'cool' aesthetics and instead become a statement of humanity in a building designed to conceal the human labor of a city. The laneways are the lungs of buildings: they exhale (through vents), the backs of buildings (through back doors), and the loading bays of buildings (as well as being the underside of cities). Once an artist paints a face, particularly one with emotion, complexity, and authenticity, the laneway no longer serves a purely functional purpose and starts to have psychological implications for the viewer. The laneway now becomes one of the few places where cities acknowledge their avoidance of the fact that human stories do not only take place on major streets.

Then there's the audience—there's a multitude of different eyes on this spot as it attracts many types of viewers. For example, locals use the alley like an everyday shortcut (because it is familiar). There will also be photographers that use it for its colour & texture. Couples will also use it for their engagement photos. And lastly, there will be a multitude of visitors that find it via travel lists or social media. The combination of groups makes the alley an attractive place to be; e.g., within a ten-minute period, you will see one person walking through the alley without looking up from their staring at their phone; then you may see someone else standing in the same location filming themselves as the curator is just out of the camera's line of sight whilst taking a picture of themselves with their guests present.

This coexistence of dashes and ticking clocks is the modern city in microcosm but the modern world moves at warp speed and the spaces in which we inhabit are designed to accommodate that speed. Graffiti Alley disrupts that rhythm with its narrowness, texture and density of visuals; it compels one to slow down while viewing a wall. The walls themselves are not easily understood with a single glance; they require multiple scans to understand the pattern of the original paint, the layering of the tags, and where painted areas reveal older paint. The weathering effects left by the environment on these walls also contribute to the story. In winter, the effects of weathering are exaggerated by salt mist dulling the lower parts and the snow accumulating at the base of the wall. In essence, the city acts as an editor of the art that exists within it.

Thus we arrive at the kernel of the good editorial on street art: how long does the public space have for any given message? With a billboard, it simply purchases visibility. A mural earns visibility and then must continually earn to stay visible. While a billboard will be kept maintained, a mural remains visible by embracing change — having it painted over, written over, or responded to in some way. This is part of the reason why Graffiti Alley in Toronto is one of the most photographed streets in the entire city. It provides an established position consistently with constantly changing surfaces and therefore creates an evolving relationship between the setting and its occupants through these changes to surface and thus to content.

Street art has a way of bringing with it the pain and imperfections that are inherent in the medium itself. Unlike the polished and commercialized styles of many other types of visual content, street art isn’t meant to be neutral. Rather, it communicates a mood and attitude, and is open for interpretation. With so many other types of visual media being produced today with a clean look, street art is refreshing and authentic in nature, which is why it is becoming such an important aspect of Toronto at this time.

From the viewpoint of a winter scene, the alley can also be viewed as a study of contrast, with opposite colours, feelings and temperature. The snow creates more light but also creates a harsher environment. In the cold weather, people usually will not stay very long unless they have a purpose. One of those purposes could be to view artwork. When you look at a painted face, it represents a small fire - not in the physical sense because of no heat but from the perspective of where it draws your attention. Focus has become an uncommon occurrence. Most people perceive urban images while in motion. Graffiti Alley creates a need for someone to be still in order to truly perceive what they are viewing.

In addition to its travel writing component, the editorial angle has a life outside of travel writing. By relating to larger themes—without lecturing—such as: Public Space; Identity; The Need for Humans to be Seen; The Difference Between Decorating and Expressing Yourself; and how Cities Deal With Or Resist Creating Uncontrolled Creative Spaces, these themes resonate with readers because of "real-life" experiences. For example, if you walk through a North American city in the wintertime, most of us would appreciate something visually stimulating. If you have ever felt anonymous in a crowd, you know the impact of coming face-to-face with a stranger, even if they are painted. All of these thoughts connect with one another through shared experiences.

Lastly, we must speak of the impermanence of Graffiti Alley: The honest truth regarding Graffiti Alley as it relates to this series of events will continue to evolve as long as the year 2023 exists. The portrait that serves as the foundation for this narrative could change or no longer be maintained in the future. This aspect of graffitied alleyways can therefore be perceived as an unfortunate loss by someone who sees this artistic style as a "museum artefact"; however, it should be understood that alleyways do not serve as museums; they serve as an ongoing and fluid dialogue between those people leaving pieces of art and those who appreciate or have yet to appreciate these forms of expression found throughout the city.

There’s no better way to leave this alley than knowing what you have actually experienced is not simply ‘visiting’ attraction(s), but actually experiencing an ongoing ‘living’ process that continues to operate through Toronto’s street art, living through the ‘cold’ of winter and keeping alive through memory, continuing to remain present. You will have experienced this ‘living’ part of Toronto while experiencing different aspects of the city’s art, but you won’t have experienced its ‘living’ aspect unless you have had a visual memory of one of the city’s many faces as you will undoubtedly remember them all.

And that is the power of Graffiti Alley in winter. The cold strips the city down. The alley builds it back up—one wall at a time.