Random Photographer

In conversation with Julia

Photograph by Julia Gotz

Saturday night was the perfect and rare kind of evening in Toronto. The air was cold and the snow storm fast approaching, but winter weather didn't matter. Life and a buzzing high energy filled the streets with the kind of surealism hard to describe. The holiday season is as good an excuse to celebrate as any other.

On College street, there they were, laughing on the corners, drunkenly going to party number 3, others catching cabs home, ....or wandering into John's Classic Italian for that spontaneous late night pizza slice.

There was Julia. She introduced herself as, at joolya.ca, not julia.ca because it was already taken. She noticed us, as we stumbled into John's, bringing life back to the place after the 1am lull. Me, I noticed her, the lady with camera, out on this perfect Saturday night filled with right moments. A rowdy crowd of partiers passed by the window. Julia was up, her eye up to the camera in hand, shooting the commotion, then out the door for less reflection.

She wanted to photograph us. She told me she does not shoot professionally, because photography becomes stale when you shoot to make money. I don't want to believe that. From her photoblog, she is Julia Gotz. That night she was Joolya, the photographer sitting at the table by the window with a camera, poised to record it all for the blogpost titled "Snowstorm, John's Classic Italian.

The random encounter hit me, where was my camera?