A young woman stands against a pole in a subway, framed within the window of the car. She looks directly at the camera. Her face is not expressionless, but it doesn’t evoke a particular expression either. This is what we see: her ease of presence in what is clearly her own space within this public landscape. This might be a mundane occurrence, easily captured on a camera phone, but the shot is clearly staged: meant to tell the viewer something about the woman in this spot in this subway car at this moment. Captured within the image, she now offers a story in an anthology of such images of Torontonians: a book of photographs curated and shot by Colin Shafer to capture the city’s complexity and cosmopolitanism.