About The Artist

My name is Daniel Castonguay, I’m a street photographer based in Montreal, Canada. I started photography in 1979. Living in a great city, I was naturally driven to street photography and depicting the quotidian life in its simplest form. When I started in this field of photography, I worked accordingly to the established standards of the style. At a certain point, I got bored of not being able to illustrate the mood of the “moment”. In order to give a more authentic touch to my work, audacious and challenging the rules, I began to process my imagery to make it a little more mysterious. This had the effect of combining simple moments of life with my state of mind, ending up in a unique "creative street photography" style, hence the name of my series "Quotidian Life". The quotidian life is more or less the same for all with a few variations. A part of my work as a "creative street photographer" is to bring this daily life into a world of fantasy, something related to abstraction. This creates a duality, a paradox. The paradox of the ordinary life in a universe that exists only in one's own imagination that can literally be anything but still being able to relate to. For me, photography is a mode of expression in the same way as writing or playing music. Transmitting an emotion is the essence of my photographic work, bringing the viewer into a story. More specifically, to make the viewer travel in a world of reverie, leaving all the space to imagination. Being a street photographer is above all playing a role in the urban life framework, contribute to its vivacity, its pace and almost belonging to a chaotic scenario. To me, street photography is more than a “picture making business“, it’s being part of a continuous theatrical sketch where I play the role of a silenced character.