Portraits of Queen West

Kevin Steele’s “sequential art” book of the glory days of Queen Street West.

Tomorrow (September 14), I’m hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco. On September 22, I’ll be livestreaming into the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy.

Portraits of Queen West is Kevin Steele’s extraordinary photo-book, a work of “sequential art” featuring time- and space-series of a single — rather glorious — stretch of Toronto’s Queen Street West:

https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest

Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through Mackerel Multimedia, the pioneering Canadian multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s — one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html

Steele’s pioneering work — in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash — helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto’s most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable.

Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web’s critical “view source” affordance…