The Bear Portraits series began in 1984 when my seven year old son Bear and I were walking down Queen Street in Toronto. I noticed some graffiti on a brick wall we had just walked by, and decided to take a photograph of Bear in front of it. The baseball cap Bear is wearing has a reproduction of Edward Curtis's portrait of Two Moons, a respected Cheyenne leader who fought and defeated Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25th, 1876. I was struck by the confluence of the image on the hat and the graffiti on the wall behind Bear--"Culture Revolution".

Up to this point, I had been working within the tradition of street photography, influenced by photographers like Eugene Atget and Lee Freidlander. I was fascinated by the streets and as a kid I loved watching the panorama of people, traffic and buildings pass me by from the back seat of my father's car.

When I saw Bear in front of the brick wall, not only was I looking at my son through the viewfinder, but I was looking at myself, my father and my grandfather. I was seeing what I didn't see in the photographic archives--images of First Nations people in the urban landscape.

The first Bear Portrait set in motion a new way of looking at the city and, like the graffiti, my revolution was against the invisible urban Iroquois presence.