Editor’s note: This series is about our contributors showcasing the art they do apart from writing, and what it means to them. Each week we’ll feature a new artist!

“I’d been taking a lot of black and white photos with my phone, but decided to level up a bit and get a real camera, see what I could do with it. “

Stephen Graham King

Featured pieces: Three photographs in Toronto during early Spring of 2020

I took this on a walk, just a short jaunt up and down my street during this time of social distancing, steering clear of others. I caught this man walking through Riverdale Park alone, along one of the paths below. I like capturing a single person in the context of their environment, and this was one of those perfect moments.

I love the dramatic angle of the path and the railings, the bright, almost washed out sky with only a few clouds and how it contrasts with the deep dark areas in the valley. The one, slender branch that reaches up into the sky. And the slight lens flare right above him.

I think I got a couple of slight variations as he walked, but this one, with this precise position of his legs was the one that spoke to me most deeply. Him moving alone, in this precise relation to his environment, despite all that’s going on.

My camera also has a mode that allows me to pull out only one specific colour. It let me pull out these few, lonely blossoms working at emerging from the dirt. 

I’m learning to play with depth of field, changing how I focus on either the foreground or the background, and how that alters the relationship between them, making different elements of the composition become what the picture is actually about. 

If you’d like to browse more of Stephen’s photography, you can find them on Instagram. You can also follow contact him on his website!

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Born on the prairies, Stephen Graham King has since traded the big sky for the big city and now lives in Toronto. His first book, Just Breathe, tells the blunt, funny, and uncompromising story of his three-year battle with metastatic synovial sarcoma. Since then, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies North of Infinity II (Pas de Deux), Desolate Places (Nor Winter’s Cold) and Ruins Metropolis (Burning Stone). His first space opera novel, Chasing Cold, was released in 2012, and the first book in the Maverick Heart series, Soul’s Blood, came out in 2016. The second, Gatecrasher, was released in 2017. Now the third book in the series, A Congress of Ships, is available from Renaissance!

Stephen can be found online on his website, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.