Who are they?

PART OF A TRIPTYCH OF A LOCAL BAND, shot for NOW magazine some time in the mid-to-late '90s. The band's name, alas, lost to time. A timeless look, really, and one that a band with a suitable sound - anything from sloppy '70s hard rock to retread punk to cock rock metal with a blues overlay - could slip into like an old slipper.

While there's a point before which you probably couldn't find a band that looked like this (1976, perhaps, if you weren't called The Stooges,) it's a sure thing that in some town, in every year subsequent to that you'd find some band sporting a variation of this look. In some years - 1978, 1987, 1992 - you would likely find dozens, even hundreds.

Some bands presented themselves to my camera at NOW with a blandness or halfhearted generic attitude that made the shoot work, which usually meant putting them in shadow or out of focus, or buried in some larger landscape. A band like this, however, did most of the work for me, and all I needed to do was find a suitably flat band of light and background to let them pose.

They had their image in hand, even if it was a bit identikit in style, but no one casting an eye over the page with the purpose of looking for something to see that night would be much mistaken about what a band that looked like this had on offer.

(UPDATE: My friend Brian Taylor tells me that this was The Sinisters, a glam-punk outfit that kicked around the city for several years. Sure enough, the Big Ledger tells me I shot them in October of 1997 for NOW.)

Who are they?

AT LEAST I KNOW WHERE I SHOT THIS. I'm reasonably certain these are actors - most of my mystery shoots were theatre assignments for NOW - but without names on the negative sleeve my memory can't be relied upon for a clue.

Definitely the ornamental gardens next to St. James, the Anglican cathedral near the old downtown. It's the mid- to late-'90s and it looks like fine weather - a day in early summer, much like the ones we're having now. Like most of my shoots with theatre people, my subjects were carefully placed in the frame, moved into place like mannequins in a doll house. In my memory they're less portraits than dioramas.

 

Who are they?

LIKE MOST OF MY MYSTERY SHOOTS FROM THE '90S, I'm pretty sure these guys are actors, appearing in a local theatre production. I shot a lot of actors back then; NOW put real effort into covering independent theatre, so I would end up at Tarragon or Factory or the Theatre Centre or the Bathurst Street Theatre or some rented hall or improvised space to get portraits of cast members or (more occasionally) a director or writer, just as their production was beginning its brief run - one or two weeks, with no more than the promise of Equity wages (hopefully) to show before everyone was cast back onto the churning waters of theatrical unemployment.

It seemed a rough way to make a living. I'm sure it's even rougher now. With this in mind I always tried to be nice when I had local actors as subjects, even if (or probably because) I knew most of them would burn out on the lifestyle in a few years, leaving a few handbills and programs along with some clippings illustrated with my photos to remember their career on stage.

Guiltily, I'll also admit that I used my shoots with local actors as a chance to experiment with some pose or lighting trick; used to taking direction, they were far more malleable than some politician or celebrity and especially moreso than an actor who'd been bestowed with a bit of celebrity.

Near as I can tell I found these guys near a nice source of natural light and got them to invade each other's personal space as much as possible - something actors do more eagerly than almost anyone else - to fill the frame and leave as little dreaded shadow or black space in the frame as I could. I did individual portraits, but with two guys who looked so much alike as subjects, this sort of thing suggested itself.

I wonder where they are now?

Who are they?

Ladies in costume, 1998

A PORTRAIT SHOOT FROM MY LAST YEAR AT NOW MAGAZINE. I'm guessing these are actors performing in a period piece; normally NOW frowned at shooting theatre people in character but for some reason this was an exception and I'm grateful for that.

I have to give credit to these two women and their costumer - they look correct and have risen to my challenge to re-create a period snapshot with suitable enthusiasm, channeled into a plausible formal stiffness. Shot with my dearly departed Canon EOS Elan, which by this point had become almost an extension of my hand and eye, and processed with my favorite film/chemistry combo: Ilford Delta 400 through Agfa Rodinal.

Every now and then I like to recite these scraps of technical data like a mantra, since they remind me of a time in my career I've come to miss. Even for quick shoots like this I was probably at the top of my game. I wish I'd known at the time that things were going to get an awful lot worse in the next few years, or that the industry - including venerable names like Agfa and Ilford - would go through some brutal changes.

Commercial Bank facade, Brookfield Place, Toronto, 2013

I might not remember who these women are, but I certainly recognize the location - the reconstituted facade of the old Commercial Bank as it currently stands amidst the soaring ribs of Santiago Calatrava's galleria at Brookfield Place in the financial district. We're not big on architectural preservation in Toronto, but in the last few years we've been shamed to at least preserve bits of walls to placate concerned locals and their councillors at City Hall, so developers have courteously held back the wrecking ball and displayed artifacts of the former streetscape like mounted trophies

I wrote a feature about "facadomies" for t.o.night a couple of years ago, and shot the old Commercial Bank facade for the piece. Alas, t.o.night went out of business not long afterward and the story has disappeared along with the paper's website. This photo, for now, is all that remains.

 

Who are they?

Dancers, Toronto 1996?

A DANCE TROUPE, IN THEIR REHEARSAL SPACE. On assignment for NOW magazine, at some point in the mid-'90s. There's nothing on the negative sheet that gives me any further hints - not even a year.

What makes the shot is the shadow on the wall behind them. I wish I'd moved the fan in the background, but the ragged string of Christmas lights on the wall kind of work.

Years earlier I became obsessed with dance photography, and particularly Lois Greenfield's work in the Village Voice. I even cold-called her when I was in New York and visited her studio; she was initially wary of me, but relaxed a bit when I showed her my portfolio and she realized that I wasn't trying to horn in on her beat.

I knew I could never do that kind of work, so the best I could hope for was getting someone to strike and hold a pose, knowing that it would say less about movement and more about the flexibility and strength of dancers. I like how pleased the young woman in this shot looks, effortlessly supporting the weight of the fellow on her back.

Who are they?

Manspreading, Toronto, 1996?

THERE WAS A LOT OF TALK ABOUT "MANSPREADING" LAST YEAR. Here's a photo of a fellow giving his meat and two veg quite a bit of room to air. A fair bit of Memphis style design detail in the background. Don't know what that's all about.

A portrait, shot for NOW magazine, at some point in the mid-'90s. Haven't a clue who, or where, or precisely when. Any guesses?

Who are they?

Mystery trio, Toronto 1995

ANOTHER CONTACT SHEET WITHOUT ANY DETAILS. A trio of men on a stage. Early 1995, shot for NOW magazine. That's all I know.

What I do know is that I meant this to be blurred; there are several frames in a row where I toyed with the focus, pulling it further out as I shot. If you want to know what it looked like in focus, here you go:

Mystery trio, Toronto 1995.

I'm sure you'll understand why I prefer the blurred version.

I had been shooting for NOW at least twice a week for several years by the time I took this, and the challenge to do something new was overwhelming. I was handing in diptychs and triptychs and collages, shooting parts of faces and bits of bodies - feet and torsos and hands. I was assigned restaurants and would hand in shots of chairs and place settings, pots and pans and rows of wine glasses. Even when I had to shoot people, I was trying to take them out of the photo. I was trying to tell myself something, but what?

My portraits were getting more indistinct - shot with razor-thin depth of field and printed through a binder of gauze and tissue and soft-focus filters to add in the blur and grain that excellent gear, modern film technology and my own painfully acquired skill were intent on taking away. I had gotten good and it had gotten boring and I wanted to bring back the joy of discovery and happy accidents that I remembered from my first years with a camera.

Ten years into my career I realized that a camera could be used to make images that didn't look like what we saw. I don't know what took me so long. I had discovered the Pictorialists by this point, but I also had a memory of Gerhard Richter's paintings at a big show of modern European art at the AGO, way back in high school, before I owned a camera or even knew I wanted one. I was startled that an artist would go through the effort of making a huge canvas look like the sort of accident you produce when you're checking your settings or blowing off a frame at the start of a roll. I was struck by the possibilities, and in my early thirties I was desperate for possibilities.

 

Who are they?

THIS MAN IS STANDING IN FRONT OF A PIECE OF HISTORY. Thanks to my increasingly minimal negative filing in the second decade of my photography career, that's about all I can tell you about this photo, apart from it being shot some time in the 1990s for NOW magazine.

The Funland pinball and video arcade is gone now, closed in the summer of 2008, its iconic sign removed from the dubious stretch of Yonge Street where it had stood for as long as I could remember. The man in question - a developer? an activist? head of the BIA? - posed for me up and down Yonge within a half block of the sign, and while I tried out a few locations over the course of the roll, this shot, which only catches a fraction of the sign, would have been enough to signify the place for anyone who grew up here.

Funland, like a lot of Yonge Street between Dundas and Bloor streets, was a tacky, low-rent place, only slightly more palatable than the peep shows and porn shops and a lot less beloved than Sam's, the venerable record store across the street from the arcade, which closed down one year before Funland. It had survived disapproving laws and the general distaste for Yonge Street's abiding appeal from the forces of public rectitude, but it wouldn't survive the hunger for redevelopment that long ago replaced Protestant moral righteousness as my hometown's spiritual fuel.

It's a serviceable bit of editorial work, as much a piece of illustration as portraiture, but I'll bet you that if you put five photographers on this stretch of Yonge with the same subject at the same time, four of them would have produced a shot like this.

  

Who are they?

THE MOST PROFOUND THING I EVER HEARD ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER SAY was Duane Michals, in the introduction to his collection of portraits: "There is no such thing as a bad celebrity portrait." It was proved to me again and again when I showed my portfolio to photo editors and art directors, who slowed when leafing past the pages featuring someone currently high on the celebrity index; they were usually the only photos I was ever asked to talk about.

By that simple measure I had might as well throw away two-thirds of my negatives and contact sheets. As a working photographer in a provincial city, working for dailies and newsweeklies and music magazines, I shot countless subjects who were either utterly obscure - regular people briefly put in the spotlight of a news cycle - or who worked in a business that gave them a flash of celebrity in at least a local context.

And so I have thousands of photos of actors and activists, theatre directors, chefs, wait staff, restaurant owners, politicians, lawyers, businesspeople, dancers and musicians - more of the last, probably, than anyone else. You have probably never have heard of them; many have since moved on to other, more obscure work. Some are dead.

Some time in the mid-'90s I stopped writing down names or dates on the sheets I used to store negatives in their binders. It might have been laziness, or simply a realization that it didn't matter much, as I rarely returned to most of these rolls of film to print them again after the assignment was handed in and the cheque cashed. The result is that, thanks to my lack of effort then and my lack of memory now, I have no idea who I photographed in at least half of the work behind my analog wall.

At the end of each month I'm going to pull out a shoot and feature a scan of one of these obscurities, provided the photo looks halfway interesting on the contact sheet or squinted at through my desk light. If someone recognizes themselves or someone they know, by all means leave a comment below.

Probably shot either in the fall of 1994 or the spring of 1995. I recognize the sculpture in the background as High Park. It's a band, perhaps one plying the gothic genre this city has always enjoyed. I don't want to be sexist and presume that she's the singer, but it's a fair bet.

The rest of the band were photographed singly or in pairs, with this desolate tree in the background; I was fond of creating diptychs and triptychs around this time - Catholic religious art making its influence known - and thankfully my editor at NOW was always able to carve out space on the page to run them.

There are raindrops on her coat. One of the band members is carrying an umbrella. I have fond memories of High Park as a child; I always enjoy shooting there.

The steel pyramid sculptures in the background aren't there any more; they've been restored by the artist and moved to another part of the city. There's nothing special about this photo.