Please continue to pre-order! Thanks to each of you who contributed, and to everyone who spread the word.  This project is funded; it's reached the initial goal that enables me to make the book and three posters.

I am excited and grateful!

Further pre-orders help me print more copies, and allow me to spend more time on the overall project. 

Queen West Complete, Summer 2015 captures every address from Simcoe Street to Roncesvalles Avenue in panoramic photocollages. This campaign produces three posters and a book and supports Portraits of Queen West, an ongoing photo and book project by Kevin Steele, documenting changes on one street spanning over 20 years.

About Queen West Complete, Summer 2015

Queen Street West is one of Toronto’s most recognizable and continually changing streets, known for its mix of independent shops, bars, galleries, and historic buildings.

Over one week in the summer of 2015, I photographed every address along the street from Simcoe Street to Roncesvalles Avenue, a distance of almost 5km. This was the only year I attempted this. My plan was to one day assemble the city blocks into linear panoramas.

Seven years later, I assembled the first city blocks from the summer 2015 source, for the covers of Portraits of Queen West: Spadina to Bathurst. (The book was successfully funded through Crowdfundr in 2023 and is currently sold out.)

Last year, when I began work on the next big volume in my series, I returned to the summer 2015 folder and put together the stretch from Bathurst to Strachan. That's when I decided to build all of the summer 2015 blocks now, to finish the complete picture of Queen West I set out to make ten years ago.

This fall I finished assembling the last of the summer 2015 city block collages, and now I want to turn them into a book and three posters.

The project follows in the tradition of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Whereas Ruscha went on to photograph other Los Angeles streets, my focus is on documenting the same street repeatedly, capturing Queen West as it changes over time.

The interior layout of the book will be similar to Ruscha, showing both sides of the street on each page, with each address labelled. Queen West Complete, Summer 2015 will be a simply bound, horizontal, full-colour book, the same dimensions as POQW: Spadina to Bathurst. Like that book, it will be reversible. Below is a mock-up of a two-page spread.

What This Campaign Supports

Funds raised through this campaign will support:

• Designing and printing three 18" x 24" posters, each showing part of Queen West Complete, Summer 2015:
• A Summer Day in Parkdale poster (both sides of Queen Street West in Parkdale) — almost ready for print
• North Side poster (title to come) — to be designed in a similar format to the Parkdale poster (14 rows, vertically stacked)
• South Side poster (title to come) — to be designed in the same format as North Side (14 rows, vertically stacked)
• Assembling, designing and printing a 48-56 page book featuring the complete series
• Covering printing, materials, and production costs

Funds raised beyond the campaign goal will support continued work on the Portraits of Queen West project, including design, production, and the time required to complete future volumes, such as Bathurst to Strachan, to be published by Black Eye Books.

Shipping and Pickup

Posters and books ship in separate packages. Posters ship rolled in triangular tubes. Books are shipped flat in protective stayflat mailers. 

Local pickup in Toronto and Hamilton will be available for all rewards at no additional cost.

About Queen Street West, Toronto

Toronto is Canada’s largest city, located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. Queen Street is an east-west thoroughfare that stretches 14.2km across several neighbourhoods in Toronto, passing through the downtown core, parallel with the waterfront.

This project covers the 4.6km of Queen Street west of Simcoe St, to its end at Roncesvalles Ave. Queen West in Parkdale is the 1.4km between Dufferin St. and Roncesvalles Ave—the area west of the railway corridor.

About Portraits of Queen West

Portraits of Queen West is my project. I’m Kevin Steele, and I’ve been photographing Toronto’s Queen Street West since the early 2000s. What began as a creative exercise in capturing storefronts and textures has grown into a long-term visual record of the street and its changes.

I’m not a historian or activist — I’m a graphic designer and photographer. Focusing on one street made the project manageable while allowing the images to gain documentary value. The first book in the series, Portraits of Queen West: Spadina to Bathurst, was published in 2023 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. It covers both sides of the 600 metres between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street, arranged like a walk west and back again. It is currently sold out.

I moved away from Ontario in May 2017, for economic and family reasons, to Saskatoon, and had to stop taking pictures of Queen West.

The break was an opportunity to assess and organize my photo archive. I worked on finishing collages of many of the city block I had captured source for, streamlining and improving my process. I mapped my vision for a complete book series and made the first book.

I've returned to Ontario and I'm photographing Queen West again. Future books will include recent pictures.

This year, Portraits of Queen West has had three goals:

• building the remaining city blocks of Queen West Complete, Summer 2015
• preparing pictures and city blocks for Bathurst to Strachan, which will be finished in 2026
• taking new pictures 

There's still lots of work left to do on Bathurst to Strachan, but 2025 has been a good year for the project.

Join the Portraits of Queen West mailing list. I only send out emails when I have news; I hate spam as much as anyone.

About Kevin Steele

I grew up in Saskatoon in the 1970s, spending many summers with my dad in Toronto. He always lived on or near Queen West.

As a teenager, I was a graphic artist and photographer. I moved east in the 1980s, to attend Ontario College of Art, just off Queen West.

In 1989, colleagues and I started a graphic design turned interactive media company, Mackerel, which operated in a series of studios near Queen West, until 1997.

When digital photography become accessible I began taking pictures for fun and creativity. Queen Street was one of my subjects because I lived there. In the years that followed, I precariously balanced professional design projects with my growing photographic activity.

I live in Hamilton with my younger brother and three cats.