In the glory days of print media, Canada had two national rotogravure publications, Canadian and Weekend Magazine. In 1971, at the ripe old age of 17, I got up the nerve to phone Weekend Magazine’s art director, Max Newton, and asked him to critique my work. For whatever reason, he agreed, liked what he saw, bought one picture for the back page and assigned a story to me about AA baseball in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. When it was published, one of the photos made the cover. I was hooked! Two photoessays for Fortune (the business publication of Time-Life) led to corporate work and in 1976, Reader’s Digest Books assigned to me a large project in Atlantic Canada.

For nearly fifty years I have photographed annual reports, books, brochures, magazine portfolios and special projects for blue-chip corporations including Teck Resources, Echo Bay Mines, Canadian National Railways, Canadian Pacific Ltd., Quebecor and Air Canada. Through The Art for Healing Foundation, prints of my photographs are on display in many institutions including The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, and The Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte Saint-Luc, QC, where there is a gallery dedicated to my images of Canada.

My last photo exhibition was in October/November 2022 at TAV College in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal. Familiar Streets, Extraordinary Times In and Around Côte-des-Neiges is an uplifting affirmation of my neighbourhood despite the ravages of Covid-19. It was featured in The Montreal Gazette. The photos were later acquired by the college and are permanently displayed there.

I’m not in the habit of referring to myself in the third person, but this is excerpted from the dust jacket of A Canadian Journey: “Through his camera’s eye, Daniel Wiener has captured the tempestuous wind and the morning’s stillness, the right-of-ways and our rites of passage, youthful bravado, strength of character, and the toughness of spirit that comes with age; in short, images that show us who we are.”