Bill Hornbostel Photography

Want some soothing images to take your mind off of the pandemic? Here are some of my long exposure black-and-white architectural images, taken in the Greater Toronto Area (from Mississauga in the west to Cobourg in the east), Glasgow, and Reykjavik. Some of these images are currently for sale at the Elaine Fleck Gallery in Toronto.

Beautiful work by an early Romantic-era watercolour painter, Thomas Girtin.

This is basically whenever there is some phenomenon I want to photograph at night.

Winter and pandemic lockdowns got you down? Take a virtual trip with some of my colour images from #Bermuda. These were taken over the course of several trips to the island, and were the beginning of my return to colour photography.

For all you fans of The Thomas Crowne Affair.

Tired of pandemic lock-downs? Here's some virtual travel for you with a blast from the past: black-and-white images of Bermuda, taken over the course of several trips to the island. The images include long-exposure images as well as infrared exposures, which gives foliage a white, surreal look.

This is a fairly neat find: bits of three-thousand year-old Tyrian purple at an archaeological site in Israel. What is Tyrian purple? It's a colour-fast dye produced by the secretion of some sea-snail species, known as Murex, in the eastern Mediterranean. The dye is named for the city of Tyre in what is now Lebanon (which is, incidentally, one of the oldest continually-inhabited cities in the world). The ancient purple dye industry would gather thousands of these unfortunate ...critters and crush them to obtain fairly small quantities of the dye, making it ludicrously expensive and thus affordable to the fantastically wealthy, kings, and emperors. The Mixtecs in what is now Mexico had access to other species of Murex (which range from Mexico down to Costa Rica) that could produce other purple or red dyes, and they extracted the colour by "milking" the Murex, rather than crushing them. In 1859, a chemist named William Henry Perkin accidentally made a synthetic colour close to Tyrian purple while he was trying to synthesize quinine; the colour got marketed as "mauve." The Wikipedia entry on Tyrian purple also notes that Tyrian purple, like other high-chroma pigments, can't actually be rendered accurately on a standard RGB monitor.

Also, the Elaine Fleck Gallery's artsy.net link: https://www.artsy.net/elaine-fleck-gallery

Hi everyone, I’m going to get back into social media after taking a hiatus caused, among other things, by some rather nasty back pain. (my last post in December was when I thought things were getting better - before they didn't). I’m continuing to chip away at images I shot before all the pandemic lock-downs, as well as what I hope will be a new still-life series (still debating what I think of it). In the last few months, I have also realized that my work, in its current st...yle, is a meditation on ideas from two different strands of ancient Greek philosophy, Platonism and Stoicism. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Platonism is the school of thought founded by the 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato. Not only was his work elaborated upon by followers for centuries after his death, and later influenced Western philosophy in various ways up to the present day, but Platonic ideas were also incorporated into Christian theology and Jewish philosophy. So, just a tiny bit influential. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in the 3rd century BC, and was named for the stoa poikile (painted porch) on the north side of the marketplace in Athens where Zeno and his followers had gathered to talk about their ideas. The Stoics, too, had a great deal of influence, especially in ethics and logic, and most famously the second century AD Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a devotee of the philosophy. I got stuck on different ideas from each philosophy. From Platonism, it was the idea of ideal forms contrasted against everyday reality. From Stoicism, it was how to be happy in the face of a world of disappointments and struggles. The two different philosophies manifest themselves in my work in different ways. My current style of processing images combines an aesthetic of ideal beauty with a certain grittiness, especially in urban landscape. Meanwhile, the longer exposures are intended to pull one out of the frenetic pace of everyday life and into a place of calm contemplation. I thought when I started with photography that I was leaving behind philosophy for pure aesthetics; I figured that if I wanted to say something deep, I would write a book. Apparently, I was wrong on that account. But I don't think you actually need any understanding of either philosophy to enjoy my work. I’ve started re-reading works of ancient philosophy to get a better handle on these ideas and how they have influenced what I do. Over the next few months, I’ll likely share some of my thoughts on them. In the meantime, I would also like to announce, on a completely different note, that the Elaine Fleck Gallery has joined artsy.net to give gallery represented artists more global exposure no small thing during this time of pandemic lock-downs.

Osgoode Hall 2 Part of my Toronto series, this is a second view of Osgoode Hall. The Palladian-style building is currently home to the the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Divisional Court of the Superior Court of Justice, the offices of the Law Society of Ontario and the Great Library of the Law Society. For this image I chose to show a part of the building in the context of the grounds, which contrast with the severe symmetry of the architecture.... As with many of my images, you can get this one at the Elaine Fleck Gallery.

I took this image while I was covering Remembrance Day last year for Port Hope Now; I found the simplicity of the scene to be rather powerful. Of course, in the age of COVID the ceremony has to be stripped down and public access limited.

Ashbridges Bay Another in my Toronto series, Ashbridges Bay is located east of downtown, near the Beaches neighbourhood. The water was pretty calm that day, but moving just enough to create an imperfect reflection of the boats and the skyline. As with many of my other images, this is available through the Elaine Fleck Gallery in Toronto.

Yonge-Dundas Square I've been chipping away at making more images over the last several months. One of the most recent I've finished is this one of Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto.

Ontario Place Part of my ongoing Toronto series, this image is one of several (now closed) exhibition "pods" at the entertainment/recreation spot on the shore of Lake Ontario. Designed back in the late '60s, the pods are basically a mid-century vision of a future that never quite happened.

Streetcars Outside TTC Russel Carhouse This is another image of my ongoing Toronto series. The TTC yard is on Eastern Avenue, and it just seemed so funky that there were a pile of streetcars just sitting there in tidy rows - except for the middle, in which there was just one.