Photographer takes images ten years apart of Toronto from exact same spot

A Toronto photographer took photos ten years apart to show just how much the city had changed in that time. Taken on his phone, the images are all taken from the exact same location and point of view. It’s fascinating to see the differences. Some are obvious, others are almost unrecognisable.

Spanish photographer Guido Gutierrez Ruiz has a passion for urban planning and architecture. After scrolling through his old Instagram photos, he thought it would be interesting to go back and revisit some of the locations he’d shot all those years ago in 2013.

Some of the images show how parts of the Canadian city have simply been left to fall into decay, such as the elevated highway, the Gardener Expressway.

Guido’s images often show clever use of reflections to give us glimpses of the amount of construction work going on in the city. In many of the 2013 images, we see cranes and half-finished buildings reflected in windows. In the 2023 images, we now see the shiny finished skyscrapers where the cranes once stood.

It’s a fascinating way to document change across an urban area. Any city with rapid growth would be similarly interesting.