“Yorkville Photographer”

If a normal picture is worth a thousand words, than Henry Lin’s photographs speak volumes. Henry Lin, a.k.a. the “Yorkville Photographer,” is the city’s latest photography phenomenon. Since arriving in Toronto a few years ago, Lin has built his portfolio and reputation from the ground up, and has shown the residents of Yorkville a new side to their beautiful village. “Very often people say to me, ‘We’ve never seen Yorkville look so pretty,’” Lin says, in reference in to his Yorkville collection. “It’s all about whether a picture has a message or not, whether it has a soul inside or not.”  

Born in Taiwan in 1970, Lin immigrated to Canada in 1993 without knowing a word of English. He arrived first in Montreal and went to live with the Laliberté family, where he spent the next three years learning both the English language and his love for art. He still calls Rose Laliberté "mom". The husband in Lin’s French-Canadian “home-stay” was a professional artist, and the walls of the house were lined with various beautiful oil paintings and illustrations. It was through this exposure that Lin was drawn to a career in the arts. “I lived under that roof for about three years, and it was pretty good training for learning what art is supposed to look like,” he says. “It trained my eyes.”

In 1996, Lin attended Dawson College for photography, where he graduated three years later at the top of his class. From there he made the move to Toronto. While getting to know the city, Lin was immediately drawn to the area of Yorkville, and spent the next two years taking thousands of photographs of the village. The more photographs he took, the more the residents and business-owners in the area began to notice him, and before too long Lin had attained a long list of high-end clients and had earned the nickname the “Yorkville Photographer.”

“It took me two years to build a beautiful portfolio, so I could let people know that this is what I can do,” he says. Since completing his Yorkville project, Lin has gone on to photograph countless events and businesses for dozens of different clients, ranging from the Miss Universe Pageant to the International Film Festival, and from high-end hair salons to fancy restaurants. But even as his work begins to take him beyond Yorkville’s borders, Lin adamantly insists that his heart –and his camera- belong in Yorkville. “Yorkville gave me a strong feeling that this is the place for business people and this is the place for families,” he says. “This place has everything for all ages, from one to one-hundred-and-one.”

Lin’s work is available online at www.424u.com.  
To see samples immediately just look at the banner at the top of this page.

- Jeff Semple, Reporter - Yorkville eNewsletter www.YorkvilleNews.ca