‘A dreamer who took action’: Tribute to beloved Toronto Star photographer the kind gesture of a stranger

She had driven this stretch of the Gardiner Expressway countless times. But on this day, Maithily Panchalingam had mistakenly missed her exit. Then she realized where she was. Maybe she could find the bench?

It was a blustery but sunny December morning. A few days before, a colleague had alerted Panchalingam, who’s on leave from her position as the Star’s associate public editor, to an anonymous tribute to her late husband, Vince “Vinnie” Talotta, a beloved Star photographer who died from complications due to cancer in 2021.

Known for his boisterous charm, Talotta spent more than 30 years at the newspaper, photographing everyone from world leaders to outlaw bikers to runway models. “Shot by shot he’s making the stuff we write entirely secondary to his pictures,” former Star columnist Joey Slinger once mused, later adding: “Vince Talotta can catch lightning.”

Heading into the holidays, news of the bench — whose inscription reads, “A dreamer who took action … Vince Talotta – Toronto Star” — reached Panchalingam and her son at a particularly dark time, after months and months of turmoil.

“I call it the tsunami of my life,” she said.

In early 2021, with her husband in the hospital, she got a phone call from her own doctor. A biopsy had found breast cancer. “OK, we’ll deal with this after,” Panchalingam, who had just turned 43, thought to herself. Later that day, unable to visit her husband due to the pandemic, she called to check on Talotta and found out he had just been intubated. He died a few weeks later. He was 53.

“It’s been a journey. It’s very hard being a caregiver and then turning and becoming a patient, and parenting at the same time,” Panchalingam said, before adding that she’s healing and staying hopeful.

It’s a journey she’s had to endure, she notes, “without the love of my life.” But in a sense, Talotta, and his propensity for optimism, is very much still there.

“He was a beautiful, positive force in my life,” Panchalingam said. “He taught me how to stand up after you get knocked down.”

The pair met in 1997, when she was an intern at the Star. Soon after they first chatted, he came by her desk to ask how she spelled her name, writing it down phonetically so he’d get it right.

“Every time I’d hear his voice, my heart would go pitter-patter, pitter-patter,” she recalled.

Theirs was a “Toronto love story,” she said: A Sri Lankan newcomer and an Italian-Canadian who met at the city paper, where they both started from the bottom.

Without formal training, Talotta had worked his way up from copy boy to staff photographer. He was known as a “people shooter,” a photographer who could quickly foster a bond with just about any subject, whether it was a shy toddler or then-president-to-be Donald Trump.

“He would get them to come alive. He would yell at them. He would draw them in,” recalled Star visuals editor Taras Slawnych, later describing him as the “opposite of a fly on the wall.”

One trademark characteristic of Talotta’s portraits was their intimacy, said Richard Lautens, another Star photographer and longtime friend. “He just made a connection with everybody who he came into contact with. And his pictures showed that,” he said. (Panchalingam described her husband’s ability to click with people as his “biggest superpower.”)

Back on that windy December morning, she couldn’t find a free spot, so she parked illegally and ran out of her car into Harbour Square Park, where a Star reader paid to quietly dedicate a bench to Talotta. Typically, it’s close friends or family members behind such memorializations, which can cost upwards of $2,500, not strangers. But Lautens wasn’t surprised to hear a reader had done that for his old friend — he had that effect on people.

Funnily enough, Panchalingam had previously wondered about dedicating a bench to her husband but admits this location, less than a 10-minute walk from One Yonge Street, the former Star newsroom where they met, is “better than any spot that I could have picked.”

She ran from bench to bench until she finally found it. Her eyes began to well up. For a brief moment, she sat down, looking out at the Toronto Islands, as the sun broke through the clouds.

“It was strange. I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Panchalingam said, referencing the Gardiner exit she had missed minutes before.

For her, the stranger’s gesture affirms the way Talotta chose to live his life — that his kindness and compassion will resonate long after he’s gone.

“This person doesn’t even know what they did for us,” she said. “I will always be grateful.”

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