Ask A Punk

Syd Deneau

Digital and Film Photography,
Video on DVD played on a CRT
2025 - Ongoing

Crackling stereo speakers and flashing red lights almost obscure the subjects of the Ask A Punk video series. Yet in this project to date, I’ve connected with people from many walks of life as my community comes barreling down sets of stairs, into basements and venues to share in a common idea. Youth subculture and a do-it-yourself mentality drive my passion for the people that I document.
Punk has long been tied to social upheaval and political unrest, as the working classes air their frustrations with music. Adopting a first-person documentary approach, combined with semi-casual conversations about my participants’ opinions on the culture, I tape together a snapshot of the Toronto punk scene in 2025. In a moment marked by rising costs of living, the degradation of subculture and the pressures of social media, it can feel too complicated to involve yourself in your own community. But having grown up in Ottawa and now finding myself in Toronto, I have found my community within the music scene in this city and attempt to make sense of it through observation and documentation.
Ask a Punk attempts to cut through your tv static and bring you something worth sitting down for. By using uncut footage and extended explanations of the culture, I begin to bring you into a punk’s world. This world is concerned with music, artistic craft, oppressive parent culture, identity politics and in our contemporary time, the commodification of clothing and ideals. I look at all of this to ask the question: What is Punk?

About The Artist

Syd Deneau

Syd Deneau is a photographer and videographer who hits their head in any moshpit they go into and comes up with new ideas for tearing up their visuals. Local shows, band portraits and grunge imagery flows in collages they make capturing the energy of whatever warehouse or basement music happens to be wafting up from. Deneau is a BFA photography student at Toronto Metropolitan University who is always seeking inspiration for personal creative projects. They focus works on interpersonal social theory and music culture as their creative skills and technical expertise leads them to experiment with collage and post-processing techniques.

Deneau has showcased in several galleries such as group shows: First Edition: Photobook Exhibition 2025 and Maximum Exposure 31, and solo shows Ask A Punk and Limelight held within TMU Student galleries. Their work has also been published by Fashion Art Toronto as their series BITE ME earned Deneau the SF Third Year Award in 2025 from TMU’s photo media arts program.

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