I’ve been to the top of the CN Tower. I’ve been to the IMAX at Ontario Place and seen sports at the Rogers Centre. I’ve jogged along the Martin Goodman Trail, shopped at the Eaton Centre, and seen the Group of Seven at the AGO and dinosaurs at the ROM. I’ve had martinis at the Royal York, watched TV in Yonge-Dundas Square, tasted the Danforth, and talked on a cellphone at the corner of King and Bay. Maybe postcard-makers have made postcards with me in them doing these very things, and maybe they’ve airbrushed me out of them.

When I think about Toronto, I sometimes think about the AGO or the decor at the Royal York. But the Toronto that lives in my head doesn’t have very many shots of the CN Tower in it. Instead, it’s made up of pictures of the scuzzy little building on Spruce Street where I live; the demographically confusing streetscape at Parliament and Carlton where I wander and shop; wet children trying to manipulate the water feature in Regent Park with sticks they’ve picked up off the ground. I’ve never seen any of these things immortalized in a postcard: the postcard-makers aren’t interested in these grimier, danker points of view or these smaller, more ramshackle subjects.

Look at some of the pictures on this page. They weren’t taken by the tourist board, they haven’t been focus-grouped and they aren’t owned by the City. I found them on Toronto photoblogs, of which there are more than 300 currently in existence on the Web. The kinds of pictures photobloggers take remind me of the pictures found in a family photo album: they’re personal, they tell stories and they don’t try very hard to hide the dirt, yuck, zits and indelicacies that exist and breathe life into the two-dimensional scene. In a way, photoblogs are the opposite of postcards—they give us souvenirs of our own city. Through the sheer profusion of their image collections and the diversity of their subjects, photoblogs bury, in an avalanche of alternatives, the icon-heavy, clichéd images that threaten to make up the face of our city.

Photobloggers take pictures of things tourists might not see or look for: graffiti, garbage, puddles, slush, angry motorists—the humdrum minutia that make this place magical for the people who live here. When you visit these sites, you can scroll through pictures of the things you actually see when you live in this town. It’s a little jarring at first: the images here are so familiar you wonder, for a second, whether someone has raided your memory or the memory card of your camera. You wonder, for a second, whether you might see yourself in some of these pictures. It’s like looking through a family album, but one that has great composition and fewer of those shots where your jocular cousin holds two fingers up behind your head.

Each of the 300 photoblogs operating out of Toronto has between a few dozen and several hundred photos archived on it, so one might conservatively guess that there are about 250,000 blogged photos of Toronto on the Web right now. That’s a lot of angles and a lot of characterizations. Unimaginative tourism boards tend to show us an unflaggingly consistent iconography of the city; photobloggers, on the other hand, are in the business of disrupting it by showing us a multitude of conflicting truths. It’s like tying yellow ribbons on every oak tree in the park: photobloggers remind us that there isn’t one definitive symbol for us to focus on, so we have to look everywhere. And when we do that, we start to see the real Toronto.