Toronto’s financial district is one of those places where the world compresses until it becomes almost unbearable in its clarity. At the heart of downtown, brokers in suits cross paths every morning with people without homes, tourists and construction workers, taxi drivers and couriers, commuters and immigrants. It is here that photographer Sam Keravica has spent over six years working on his ongoing project The Cost of Living — a title that works on two levels, like a pun the photographer himself seems to carry with him.

Sam Keravica has grown up alongside this project in the most literal sense: he began photographing the district as a university student, with what he himself describes as a naive optimism, and over time found in it an increasingly complex terrain on which to reckon with himself — his ambitions, his financial insecurities, his privileges. The financial district becomes not merely a backdrop, but a surface on which to read something universal: the way each of us negotiates our own survival, our sense of belonging, our idea of the future.

The Cost of Living photographs this multiplicity without hierarchy. The housing crisis and rising cost of living in post-COVID Canada are present in the images not as explicit critique, but as atmosphere — in the light bouncing off glass and concrete, in the shadows cast by skyscrapers, in bodies passing through. The question running through the entire project is radically ethical: how much are we willing to sacrifice for a tomorrow no one has promised us? Sam Keravica raises it personally, speaking of the precarity of artistic life, the weight of migrants’ sacrifices, the ambiguity of what we call “wealth” — before opening it out toward something collective. What seems non-negotiable, for everyone, is dignity.

The Cost of Living is a project still in progress, and perhaps that is as it should be. Toronto keeps changing, the district keeps welcoming and excluding, and Keravica keeps returning — camera in hand, as a way of standing in the middle of it all without ever stopping to ask questions.