Keith van Paassen

PhotoSensitive announces its latest project, DESTINATION TORONTO -- a photographic gift from the Toronto photo community to the City of Toronto to help overcome the negative profile SARS has brought to the city.

A Toronto-based social documentary group, PhotoSensitive has organized 60 photographers to capture life in the city throughout the summer of 2003. The result will be a 120-picture exhibition and CD.

The exhibition and CD of work will be presented to the city to promote Toronto.

PhotoSensitive has documented many of our city's struggles during its 13 years of photojournalism exhibitions. Poverty, United Way, the Hospital for Sick Children and the Daily Bread Food Bank have all come into focus more clearly through its black-and-white photography.

The world's understandable concerns over SARS have caused great hardship to many in our city. All manner of businesses, particulalry the service and tourist industries, were forced to lay off staff as travellers declined the Toronto destination. Our doctors and nurses battled valiantly to contain the problem, and succeeded, but not before their city had been taken off the tourist map.

Bernard Weil

PhotoSensitive is setting out to deliver a Toronto that is alive and well. And the proof will be with DESTINATION TORONTO. Beginning as summer starts, through to mid-September, 50 photographers -- all volunteers and covering their own shooting expenses - will shoot the wonderful celebrations Torontonians share with visitors from around the world each summer. Although the number of visitors may have been low in 2003, Toronto's best photojournalists will prove to the rest of the world through exciting and powerful pictures that in the summer of 2003, Toronto was not about masks and fear, but people enjoying and celebrating their city.