Merry Christmas

Christmas lights, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

I'D LIKE TO THANK EVERYONE WHO'S FOLLOWED THIS BLOG and wish them a very Happy Christmas or Chag Sameach or whatever seasonal greeting fits your bill. The year has turned out very differently than I imagined it would around Christmas last year, when I was haunting my hometown's hydro corridors with my camera. I've been to a lot of places with my cameras that I didn't imagine I'd ever visit, and even managed a tentative return to portrait photography. I've also met a lot of great people on my travels. It's been fun.

Christmas lights, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

Here are a couple of shots taken in the Riviera neighbourhood of Los Angeles, just after sunset and just north of Sunset Boulevard, a month before Christmas. I was going to say that Christmas in L.A. feels very odd for someone from Canada, but on reflection it's really no stranger than anything else in L.A. I'm looking forward to more travel and more portraits, but before that I have a post devoted to a Canadian legend, and a little bit of looking back to start the new year. In the meantime, all the best to all of you.

James Chance

James Chance. Toronto, Dec. 2016

SINCE STARTING THIS BLOG I'VE BEEN REMINDED ABOUT HOW TIME HAS PASSED, and how quickly time is passing. With this in mind, I've become preoccupied with unfinished business, and trying to get portraits of people I've always hoped would end up in front of my camera. Last week I had just such an opportunity.

James Chance has a new record out, and was booked by local music promoting legend Gary Topp to play a show here - once in the early fall, then later in December after that show was postponed. I was a fan of Chance and his bands - the Contortions, James White & the Blacks, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks - long before I ever owned a camera, though he never seemed to pass through town when I was shooting seriously.

I had copies of Chance's records Buy and Off White when I was a lonely misfit high school punk. When most of my schoolmates were into Rush or Springsteen, I was in the basement listening to Chance's punk rock take on funk and free jazz, which sounded like boiled essence of late '70s New York City soundtracking Chance's alternately needy and spiteful vocals. I even went so far as to buy a white dinner jacket and acquire a broken alto saxophone, which I never learned how to play. I didn't make a lot of friends in high school, but I did wear the jacket to the prom.

I can thank Chance for not only giving me an appropriate soundtrack for my slightly retro-oriented teenage angst, but for being my gateway drug to the "challenging" jazz I'd end up listening to a decade later - people like Defunkt, Ornette Coleman, James Blood Ulmer, Last Exit and David Murray, who was briefly Chance's sax teacher. Chance also provided a teasing primer for the American Songbook tunes that would obsess me in the '90s when I (pseudonymously) wrote a column on old jazz for a local weekly.

James Chance live, Rivoli Club, Toronto, Dec. 2016

I arrived early at the club, hoping to get Chance to sit for a quick portrait after soundcheck. It turned out that he didn't do the soundcheck, but Gary talked me up to his guitarist, Tomás Doncker, and I was assured that he'd probably be willing to sit for a portrait after the show. I broke down my studio in a bag again, stuffed it under the soundboard and met some friends for the show.

It was a great gig. Chance has always led a tight band, and I shot a bit from the front of the stage while they did a couple of old Contortions songs, material from his new record, a Gil Scott Heron tune, and encored with James Brown's "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)." With the show over, I collected my gear and waited for a green light from Chance to do a shoot. With some reluctance, he agreed.

James Chance. Toronto, Dec. 2016

I set up on the stage after the gear had been cleared away - my little white folding backdrop and two LED lights bounced into umbrellas. I waited for James to sign CDs and do some business with Gary before he made his way back to the stage and my little studio. He was obviously suffering from some serious back pain, so I got it over as quickly as possible.

For almost half of the frames, Chance has his eyes closed; he seemed to be marshalling what energy he could after a strenuous night. Luckily I really like taking pictures of people with their eyes closed. But when he opened them and fixed his gaze on my lens I was startled at how huge his eyes are, and how fiercely they seemed to look through the camera at me. The shot above is very far from the most intense of the photos I took at the Rivoli that night.

Not wanting to tax Chance further or take up more of his time, I shook his hand and thanked him for the opportunity to take his portrait.

Los Angeles

Downtown L.A. from the Loew's Hollywood helipad, Nov. 2016

THERE'S NO OTHER CITY LIKE LOS ANGELES. I can't think of a more unique set of circumstances where a city like this could exist. Hugging the sides of mountains on an earthquake fault; home to a world-straddling entertainment industry; lacking a single discernible downtown and, in fact, having several of them; containing not only infamous traffic-clogged freeways but several massive parks.

I used to hate Los Angeles, like most people from the other coast. That was partly L.A.'s own fault - the movie industry has been telling nasty stories about itself and its hometown since the silent era. I fell for the bad press and the sinister myths - until I actually started going there. That's when I learned that the myths were almost all true, but that there was so much more to the place. Mostly, though, I learned that you can't take a bad picture of L.A.

Hollywood hills, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

House in the hills above Malibu, Los Angeles, Dec. 2016

My return to L.A. after an eight year break began at the top - the helipad of my hotel, to be specific, and its view to the old "downtown" under a cloudless sky. My room looked out at the mansions running down the side of the Hollywood hills, where you couldn't help but wonder if the people living there, looking out of their windows, knew that other eyes were looking back. Looking seems to be a major activity in L.A., where a view is a status symbol, and half the population seems to be doing its best to be seen.

My previous trips to the city had been fleeting, involving buses and taxis and hotel rooms and movie theatres, and I was lucky if I got a chance to get more than a couple hours' time on foot. This trip was different; being on foot in Los Angeles was the whole point, and after the helipad, it began the next morning at that most iconic of locations: The Hollywood Sign.

Beneath the Hollywood sign, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

After making my way to just under the sign, I wandered down the streets below the big letters and the radio tower, fascinated by the homes on the slopes of Mount Lee. I'd imagine there's an enormous metaphorical weight to living beneath the Hollywood sign, and if I were susceptible to that sort of symbolic baggage it might be a huge burden to live with, depending on your circumstances.

It's impossible, of course, to be in L.A. and not have movie scenes flit in and out of your mind. L.A. is not only a backdrop but a character in so much of Hollywood's self-perception, so it's not surprising that so much of the city - an artificial creation, as they've reminded us so many times in films like Chinatown - looks like a set, with its painted stucco walls and careful plantings of desert fauna chosen to withstand drought. And then there's film noir - the darkest corner of the city's myth, which makes you wonder what could be going on in every prosperous home off Sunset Boulevard.

Hollywood hills, Topanga Canyon, Riviera and Malibu, Los Angeles, Nov.-Dec. 2016

After starting in the hills, I ended up, appropriately, by the sea. Malibu, to be precise, right by the pier, on the Pacific Coast Highway. Another place that I'd imagined in my mind thanks to countless movies and songs before I even saw it. Which is the strangest thing about L.A. - you think you'll know what it looks like, only to arrive and discover that it's either a lot bigger or a lot smaller, but definitely a lot stranger than what you expected.

My little bit of spare time in Los Angeles was given over to meeting with two friends I'd never met - men I knew through friends or long online acquaintance. As I get older it seems more imperative to make these virtual friendships actual, and it was a great pleasure to spend time with Tom and Robert, talking about photography and music and movies and culture - and the city where they both chose to live, having been born and raised far to the east and north.

Tom Rogers, photographer, Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

Robert Avrech, screenwriter, Los Angeles, Dec. 2016

It occurred to me later that both Tom and Robert are men with discerning visual taste, and that making their way independently to this very peculiar city probably wasn't an accident. I'm looking forward to talking with them again, the next time chance sends me to their adopted hometown, with its unprecedented circumstances and endless opportunities to take photos and look.

Los Angeles: Cars

Lightning McQueen, Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

THE PETERSEN AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM WAS CLOSED the last time I was in Los Angeles, so I made it a priority to get there when I finally made it back. There are a lot of great car museums in the world, but the Petersen is somehow special, located as it is in a city where cars and roads are essential to its municipal and mythic identity.

I'm not hard to please when it comes to car museums. Put a few dozen really nice autos under decent lighting and I'll lapse into my customary fugue state, eyes locked on details and trim, intently taking in the lines running back from the headlights and grille to the trunk lid and rear bumper. The automobile is probably the most iconic bit of design of the previous century. Which is probably why this century is producing so few really beautiful cars; the time of the auto as peak technology and fetish item might be passing. Which makes my appreciation of places like the Petersen so fervent.

Also, they have the BatCycle.

Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

The most stunning room in the museum was devoted to the Bugattis - almost a couple dozen of them, from the earliest roadsters to the Chiron, with pride of place given to the Atlantic, an art deco masterpiece of a car and one of the two originals known to survive, which managed to be even more stunning in person than any of the hundreds of pictures I'd seen over the years.

Bugattis, Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

I couldn't imagine living in L.A. without a car, though I know it's possible (if highly inconvenient.) Unlike my hometown, though, it's a place where the lack of rain and snow and road salt keeps cars on the road much longer than I'm used to, and car culture of every type, from hot rods to supercars to low riders and exotics, can be glimpsed everywhere.

I could spend a year or more in Los Angeles just documenting the car culture if what I saw from the back window of my Uber or while walking the eerily people-less streets meant anything. On my first morning in town, wandering down the streets beneath the Hollywood sign, I took snapshots of the real rides people use in L.A., parked under the high, specular California sunshine.

Cars, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

Years ago, watching the original Gone In Sixty Seconds, it struck me that L.A. was the real-life version of the Pixar movie Cars, where there was a whole infrastructure and support system devoted to servicing cars, meshed carefully with the one that kept human life viable under the desert sun. These cars looked more at home here than the people; after all, so much had been done to tame the landscape to their needs, and even with a bumper askew or under a tarp, they looked like they took pride of place in the landscape, masters of their domain.

Santa Monica, 2008

Lifeguard station, Santa Monica, Jan. 2008

I WENT BACK TO LOS ANGELES LAST WEEK for the first time in eight years. Back when I worked for the free national daily I used to go there a lot, on movie junkets. We'd be put up in a good hotel for a night or two, and between the screenings and the roundtable interviews I'd maybe have a few hours free to wander about, and it wasn't long before I came to the conclusion that Los Angeles was one of the most photogenic cities I'd ever visited.

My last trip to L.A. was for a film whose title I can't recall. I do remember that one of the stars was Ted Danson, who was so committed to campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary that he barely spoke about the film and spent most of his time telling a table full of international journalists - none of whom could vote in an American election - how great it was to have a beer with Hillary.

Santa Monica beach. Jan. 2008

At the end of the junket I checked out and had a few hours to kill before my ride to LAX. The hotel was on the beach in Santa Monica, so I decided to go for a stroll over to the pier. It was January and fog kept rolling in from the ocean, so my first closeup glimpse of the Pacific Ocean tapered into a misty wall about ten or fifteen feet from the water's edge.

I hadn't been taking a lot of photos outside of work. I was, to be honest, reluctant to describe myself as a photographer any more. A few years previous, when I was still the paper's photo editor, I'd had lunch with my friend Chris Buck when he was passing through town, and he'd practically pleaded with me to start shooting again. It had made me feel a bit guilty, and I suppose that's why I'd started packing a camera in my bag when I went on junkets.

My favorite camera at the time was a Sony Cybershot - a little compact digital snapshot camera that I'd basically gotten for free, and which distinguished itself from most of the other pocket cameras on the market with its Zeiss lens and a well-designed rangefinder, which I appreciated as I didn't like framing and focusing with the LCD screen on the back of the camera. (I still don't.)

It was light and easy to use and took really nice shots for something so small. It was the successor to the Olympus Stylus I'd bought in the last years of film photography, which I'd carried with me everywhere during a time when I wasn't doing much, if any, professional shooting. They were the sorts of simple cameras that suited my now-far-less-ambitious status.

Seagull, Santa Monica Pier, Jan. 2008

The fog began clearing a bit as I got closer to the pier, but it never let up enough to take away the lovely soft light that suffused everything that afternoon. I took a lot of tourist snapshots - the lifeguard stations (closed for the winter,) the palm trees and the pier, of course, which is an attraction on its own, with its aquarium and shops and amusement park.

It had been a long time since I'd shot anything just for fun. Slowly, as the afternoon went on and the sun began setting, I realized how much I was enjoying this. I wasn't fooling myself that I was getting anything groundbreaking, since what I was shooting was so essentially picturesque. I was getting snapshots and postcards, to be sure, though it was still satisfying to just frame and shoot.

Santa Monica pier, Jan. 2008

Santa Monica was my last movie junket, and a few weeks later I was laid off from the free national daily. The next few years were stressful - back to freelancing, buying a house, trying to figure out just what I wanted to do with the balance of my life. Looking back, I probably wouldn't have entertained returning to photography if it weren't for a) that lunch with Chris and b) that afternoon in Santa Monica.

It was just a couple of hours on my own with a little camera, but it felt good enough to be shooting again - and getting shots that, if not wildly original, at least looked like what I wanted to capture. I didn't know it at the time, but I was both at the end and the beginning of something, so in retrospect these photos have a pregnant, even ominous significance that only became clear in retrospect.