Photographic Excellence at TOAF 2025!

PhotoED Magazine
Jun 25
4 min read

Photography highlights at TOAF64

It’s back! The Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (TOAF) returns to Nathan Phillips Square from July 11-13th 2025 for a packed weekend of art, culture and connections. Now in its 64th year, the fair has become a cherished summer ritual in the city for both locals and visitors.

Nestled under the classic white tents, visitors will have the opportunity to peruse hundreds of

unique artists and original works of art in person and browse online at TOAF.ca.

Once again, the fair saw significant interest with 1,027 artist applications. This year’s roster includes over 400 independent artists, including 70 from across the country and 155 joining the fair for the very first time. It was a long and rigorous selection process by a team of four independent jurors - Ed Pien, Tiana Roebuck, Callum Schuster, and Grace Zeppilli. This team has an impressive track record of art-making, education, curation, and collecting which showed in their careful decision making.

Toronto Outdoor Art Fair’s Awards Program is unprecedented in Canada. The vision behind the awards is to create opportunities for artists to advance their careers, provide them with public recognition, and make financial contributions to their practices. Prizes total over $45,000+ in cash and in-kind awards.

Look forward to winner announcements in the Photography & Digital Media category:

Best of Photography & Digital Media Award

$2,000 by Jennifer Longhurst & Lars Bendsen

Honourable Mention Photography & Digital Media

$500 Gift Card by Toronto Image Works

photoED Magazine Award

Three recipients will each receive a one-year subscription to photoED Magazine. One of the recipients will also be selected for a print feature in an upcoming edition of the magazine with a $150 artist honorarium.

To celebrate photoED magazine's partnership with TOAF, here are a few of the photographers selected by the fair, to keep an eye out for...

Clothilde Allen

Montreal based artist Clothilde Allen is interested in the magic of plants, transported by her travels in the Abitibi region, where she fears witches hidden beneath the rocky capes.

From an early age, she created cedar perfumes, plant potions, and insect collections. As a gardener for the city of Montreal, her art and research focus on the representation, cultivation and reclamation of nature in the city.

Bahram Rameh

Bahram Rameh uses form, space, and the body as tools to express inner psychological landscapes and human fragility.

“Insomnia was born from a collision — a literal one that split my life in two: before and after. I lost a close friend in a car accident. I went into a coma. And when I came back, the world was no longer the same — and neither was I.

Sleep became unfamiliar. Not just physically, but deeper: my mind no longer knew when or how to switch off. Memories echoed like subcutaneous noise, swallowing the nights. This body of work is made of fragments from that private war. A tired body, a reflection of my own, is sleeping: on a gas pump, beside a cutting machine, on a subway floor. The performer surrenders his body to chaos; and it’s this surrender to disorder that renders each frame watchable. The beauty of these images lies not in taming space, but in allowing its disorder to speak.

The performer is a mirror of myself. But I’m in the image too — not physically, but through the lens. This is me watching myself from the outside. The camera is not a neutral observer; it is my co-conspirator in a waking dream.

And for the viewer? A pause — an invitation to see the exhaustion usually hidden behind faces. A moment to witness a sleeping body that, even in silence, is still surviving something.”

Steve Kean

For TOAF 2025, Steve returns with a new approach to his award winning work in the Moving Landscapes series. *As featured in the photoED magazine LAND edition.

Steve Kean came to photography while in high school where, ironically, he was failing art class. His disability made it difficult for him to draw or paint, but he had a burning need to create art. A camera was the answer for him.

“The images reflect on the energy of landscape: from serene to highly kinetic. Taken over the course of multiple transits on Canada’s highways and byways, these images were all created by harnessing his movement through the land on trains and buses. Intended to portray the ethereal feeling of being in-between dream states of not-quite-asleep-not-quite awake, the images blur reality just enough to allow us to contemplate our place within nature.

My exhibition posits a question about our place in a fast-paced world and how we experience the land."

Alex Hall

Alex Hall is a lens-based Chinese Canadian artist working in Toronto, Canada. She specializes in photography and alternative processes. She holds a BFA in photography from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) and is a former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada.

Ehiko Odeh

Ehiko Odeh is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Lagos, Nigeria. Her practice explores the interconnectedness of traditional knowledge systems, cultural identity, and resilience. Incorporating ethnobotany she highlights the importance of preserving Indigenous practices while promoting sovereignty through herbology.

Michael Bedford

Trained as a biologist, Michael’s work explores aspects of both the human psyche and the natural world.

“As technology advances, we find ourselves less and less in touch with what fundamentally makes us human and connects us – both to the earth and to each other. I think this has some important consequences that are worth thinking about”.

Michael uses seasonality, light, and darkness to explore various aspects of the human experience, including awe, reverence, isolation, and disconnection.

Zahra Saleki

Zahra Saleki is an Iranian-Canadian artist and settler based in T'Koronto. Her artistic practice encompasses video, installation art, and photography. She holds a Bachelor of Honors in Fine Art Cultural Studies from York University.