Iman

Iman, Toronto, May 30, 2007

SHE REALLY, REALLY TALKED A LOT. I mean, a lot; I actually felt sorry for David Bowie at a certain point. I imagined that he didn't get a word in edgewise at home, and had this image of him holding up his finger and saying "Yes, dear - " and "Of course, darling, but..." For the first time in my life I had a reason to imagine David Bowie's home life as an old radio comedy about a retiring, milquetoast husband and his firebrand wife.

Supermodel Iman was in Toronto promoting her role in the Canadian franchise of Project Runway, which was a huge hit at the time and the subject of much coverage in the free daily. I was, of course, more than a bit overawed to be photographing Mrs. Bowie - I can't lie about that - but the prospect of having one of the world's most famous models in front of my camera was also intimidating, and I wondered if it would be possible to get anything where Iman didn't merely slip into studied poses.

Iman, Toronto, May 30, 2007

The shot at the top is very nearly what I imagined I'd get, and much of the shoot - done on the terrace of a penthouse suite in one of the new boutique hotels downtown - is like this: Iman in autopilot, presenting the sort of face that I imagine Peter Beard or Patrick Demarchelier or Richard Avedon would have tolerated for a few frames before imploring her to pretend that she cared.

It was the shot I handed into the free daily, in any case, but going through the shoot years later I noticed the frame just above. There's a bit more happening here - perhaps a bit of impatience coming through: The seasoned model concerned that this rather silent newspaper photographer isn't up to capturing her best face. If I flatter myself, it reminds me of a still from an old Italian movie - Anna Magnani or Gina Lollabrigida building up to a fierce tirade at some hapless male co-star. In any case, my closest brush with fashion's upper echelon.

Local

Barn, Elora, Oct. 2017

FOR A FREELANCER, EVERY NEW YEAR FEELS LIKE A LEAP INTO INSECURITY. The start of a new year is a wholly arbitrary milestone, of course, but with fiscal year budgets wrapping up and employers on holiday, the slight interregnum can feel like a shifting of mysterious gears. I already know that this year begins with some changes, some of them potentially major.

I used to have a holiday ritual at the end of every year: I'd look over my account books and tearsheets and try to justify spending another year living with the bottomless anxiety of freelance work. For much of the early '90s it wasn't a hard choice to make - I was covering my rent, keeping my equipment in working order and paying for small luxuries, though bigger ones like travel were beyond my means.

Even more importantly, however, I was still coasting near the top of a learning curve and making work I liked - even if it was harder to get new clients as excited. As that decade came to a close, however, my earnings were declining and - worse still - the learning curve had plateaued; I was feeling frustrated and uninspired. It looked like I'd have to make a serious decision soon enough, though events would soon make that decision for me.

Don Valley, Toronto, Oct. 2017

As this new year begins, the apparent end of my travel writing gig - one of the best I've ever had - is a big and unwelcome change. While I try to find new travel assignments, I'll be staying very close to home. In anticipation, I spent much of the fall and early winter looking to shoot every outing and excursion or bit of dramatic weather.

I have to make my hometown feel like a foreign place, as strange and disquieting as anywhere else in the world I might have been sent. Coming upon a dead deer - hit by a car on the nearby expressway but looking so peaceful - on the grass at Todmorden Mills was an unsettling gift, found while killing time during my daughter's playdate with a friend. A family outing to the Elora gorge was another, where the landscape seemed more than a bit enchanted.

Elora, Oct. 2017

A long, late autumn brought a thick fog in one morning, and inspired another trip to the park at the bottom of my street with my camera, like the one that I took before my last round of travel. The challenge with shooting my own city, of course, is finding ways to make it look mysterious and magical without the aid of evocative and flattering weather conditions.

Fog, Earlscourt, Dec. 2017

I live next to a cemetery. Cemeteries are tempting subjects, and I could rely on at least a half dozen within easy reach by transit to find photos, but they're a challenge. Graveyards are compelling landscapes that tug at our natural morbidity and fascination with death, but they do half the work for a photographer. The challenge is finding something new in places shot to death (no pun intended.)

This year, for her birthday, my wife suggested we take a stroll through Mount Hope, the second oldest Catholic cemetery in the city. She wanted to find the grave of a parish priest she's researching, and I wanted to show her where my grandparents and uncle are buried. Of course I brought my camera.

Mount Hope Cemetery, Toronto, Nov. 2017

Finally, with the end of the year in sight, we went on an outing with my birth father and his wife to the ROM - one of my favorite places in the city when I was a boy, now quite changed. We'd all been looking forward to the show of Christian Dior fashion, and I had a photo in my head I wanted to take. These are the closest I got to that image, which I can only describe as "drunk and disoriented at a society party."

Dior exhibition, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Dec. 2017

I won't pretend that the new year doesn't fill me with as much anxiety as those unsettling ones twenty years ago, though I'm much happier with my work now than I was then. Since actually making a living isn't either as imperative or possible, I've set myself different goals - to be announced shortly.

It's also likely to be the last year for this blog. The end is in sight for the excavations of my archives; I'll likely have found and posted the best of my work on film within a month or two, and without the need to scan and retouch, I'll make quicker progress through the digital work shot in the last dozen years. Big stars, but short shoots, and a momentary loss of style. I hope I'll find something worth sharing.

Fashion

Unknown model, Parkdale, 1994

MY CAREER AS A FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER WAS BRIEF AND SPORADIC. Which is to say that I didn't really have a career as a fashion photographer at all, though I have always loved really great fashion work, and had no shortage of ambition to make some of my own.

The reason was simple enough; my favorite photographers shot fashion in addition to portraits and whatever else was their specialty, and some of their most iconic images came from their fashion work. Avedon with Dovima and the elephants. Penn's photos of his wife Lisa in pretty much anything. I wanted to take a lot of great photos, so I wanted to work in as many places that would let me take them.

My first problem, however, was that I was not working in New York City in the mid-50s. It would take me a while to actually grasp that inescapable fact.

My first proper fashion shoot was for NOW magazine, early in my time there. We were doing a special section and the idea was to have the city's fashion luminaries wear the clothes instead of some model. Dierdre Hanna, the paper's fashion editor, made the arrangements and on a day I distinctly remember as cold, wet and miserable Dierdre, the clothes and a hair and makeup artist arrived at my Parkdale loft.

Catherine Franklin, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Jeanne Beker, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Ray Civello, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Jeanne Beker had moved from hosting The New Music - a program I'd watched avidly as a teenager sniffing out the last smokey vapours of punk rock - and had helped start Fashion Television, which became a big deal in the industry. Ray Civello was the owner of some high end salons and had launched his own line of product, and Catherine Franklin was the fashion director for Toronto Life Fashion, one of the two big fashion magazines in the country.

We shot on a day when the thugs hired by our landlord to harass the tenants out of the building went on the offensive, knocking on my door while I was shooting to issue vague threats that I should "get out." Explaining the situation to Dierdre and everyone else in the studio meant that I was more than usually tense while I worked.

I wanted desperately to make a good impression on these people, as they seemed to hold the keys to work I longed to do. I felt like a nervous kid, working at the edge of my technical competence and besieged in his apartment by guys with names like Dwayne and Harry. In hindsight, it's a colourful anecdote. At the time it felt humiliating. Does all of this show in the photos? You be the judge.

Sally, Parkdale, 1991

The results of my first real fashion shoot - which never translated into work with any of these people, by the way - convinced me that as a fashion photographer, I took okay portraits. I needed practice, and the nearest person I could practice on happened to be my very pretty roommate Sally. I'd never lived with a woman who wasn't my mother up till then, so Sally's makeup ritual was something I couldn't help but notice. I was looking at a lot of old fashion magazines, and one day I had an idea.

Left: Erwin Blumenfeld, 1950. Right: Irving Penn, 1959.

I'd finally bought a proper medium format studio camera - a Bronica SQ-A - and after picking up a close-up filter to give the standard 80mm lens some vaguely macro function, I asked her to sit under my little set of strobe lights and set about with her lipstick and mascara. I had come to the conclusion that sharp focus was an arbitrary thing, and likely overrated, so I dialed back the lights and shot with cross-processed slide film rated two stops below the ISO on the box.

I ended up getting something more than vaguely like what I had in mind, which felt like success. (Though it was only while scanning these shots over 25 years later that I decided the bottom shot actually looks better in black and white.) I put one of these shots in my portfolio, hoping someone would respond to what I was trying to do. No one did.

My next kick at fashion shooting came when my old Nerve boss, Dave Macintosh, phoned and said that his new girlfriend was a model whose agent told her she needed more work in her portfolio. He asked if I was interested. Sally had moved out by that point, and I was desperate for a new model, so I eagerly said yes.

Teri Walker, Parkdale, 1992

I rented my favorite sky and clouds backdrop for good luck and explained to Teri my idea for something slightly evocative of surrealism and Magritte. We shot for a while with one simple black dress and then Teri went out to the living room to get the hair and makeup person to give her a new look. I came out and saw the candy-coloured curlers, thought "Eureka!" and said she had to get back into the studio for another setup. I shot negative film cross-processed into slide; it was a trick that didn't often work, but this time it turned out exactly as I'd hoped.

Teri Walker, Parkdale, 1992

We shot for the rest of the afternoon, finally heading outside to get something a bit more "street," which led us to the less salubrious of Parkdale's two diners. I ordered a Labatt's 50, set dressed the table with my own Zippo and Lucky Strikes (Teri didn't actually smoke) and took a couple of rolls. At the end of the day I had a lot of film. I'm not sure if the results were what Teri had in mind, but I'd had a glimpse of what it was like to work with a real model.

It would be two more years before I'd have that experience again. I'd met a young fashion designer at a party somewhere who knew my work from NOW; he asked if I'd be willing to shoot some promo work featuring his clothes. He'd take care of the expenses of models and makeup and I could do what I wanted. It seemed like a good deal, and I knew that I'd never get a chance shooting fashion if I couldn't show off something that featured models and actual clothes.

Unknown model, Parkdale, 1994

We shot with two models and three or four outfits. A set of shots with a model in a bathing suit never did much for me, but the photos I did with the other girl turned out much better. She was young but Eastern European so she looked much older than her age; I recall that she was married, and that she couldn't stop playing with Nato, my very friendly kitten. I honestly wish I remembered her name, because the setup we did at the end of the shoot was probably the closest I ever got to work that looked like the fashion photos I wanted to make.

These shots have Penn all over them, there's no hiding that. But I was able to use props that I liked - a scarred and stained tabletop, an old fan from the attic of my mom's house, and a pair of lemons from my kitchen to set off the model's blue jacket. I shot on slide film, which is unforgiving with exposure, but I was at the top of my game in the studio by then, and everything came out just as I'd imagined. I was eager to work with the designer again, but somewhere along the line he'd gotten some good press and, imagining he could get a better deal, blew me off rather callously. It's why I always remember my favorite fashion shot with some bitterness.

A footnote: The shot just above is not the best one from the shoot. My neighbour across the hall in the Parkdale loft was a set designer/opera singer, and he loved that shot when I showed it to him. He asked if he could borrow it to have it turned into a painting for a show he was doing. It was sent off to an artist to be copied, who then sent it back to his studio, the original slide taped in an envelope to the paper wrapping. An assistant signed for the delivery, quickly unwrapped the painting - and then threw away the paper, with my original slide still attached.

This is why I love digital so much, and why I'll never shoot another roll of slide film again.

Lost slides, ungrateful designers, a generally sour feeling. My attempts to shoot fashion pretty much ended here. I could never find the energy or the resources to throw myself into the cycle of testing and promos and mailers that were required to get a shot at doing paid fashion work. And it would be years before I learned the dirty secret of fashion shooting - that no one really makes money at magazine work, which is just a ritual for gaining favour with the editors who assign the really lucrative jobs in advertising campaigns. Models and stylists and makeup people and photographers work together in a web of mutually exploitative relationships pro bono, hoping that one person's break will buoy a few of them upward. Perhaps I never would have been a decent fashion photographer, but I would have loved to have had a shot.

Jane

Jane Seymour, Toronto, Feb. 9, 1988

I DEFINITELY SAW MY FIRST JAMES BOND MOVIE ON TV. Goldfinger came out the year I was born, and by the turn of the '70s Bond films were showing up on television as "special movie presentations," heralded by weeks of hype. James Bond on film has been around as long as I can remember, like a public utility, regular if occasionally unreliable.

It goes without saying that the Bond films on TV synced up rather nicely with my adolescence, so the "Bond girl" pins down some ideal concept of femininity to the cork board of my worldview. I do not think I am alone in this, nor does it worry me unduly.

Jane Seymour, Toronto, Feb. 9, 1988

Jane Seymour was the first Bond girl I ever photographed, near the beginning of my career, not even three years after I bought my first camera. It had been a rapid ride at that point, learning on the job mostly at Nerve and Graffiti magazine, then gaining enough skill and confidence to get to the point where a national fashion magazine assigned me to shoot Seymour as she passed through town promoting - what, exactly?

I honestly can't remember. Her book, Jane Seymour's Guide to Romantic Living had come out almost two years previous, but Winds of Remembrance was set to air on TV that year, so perhaps that was it. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was still five years in the future, so whatever she was in town to publicize, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was thinking "Bond girl."

Seymour played Solitaire, the creole fortune teller in Live and Let Die, the 1973 Bond film made just as the onset of the Roger Moore era was dialing up the camp big time. Her character's virtue was a major plot point, something that couldn't be said about probably any other character in Ian Fleming's books. It had been fifteen years since she'd played the role, and she was one of a handful of former Bond girls who continued to have a career after Bond uttered his final innuendo to them before the credits rolled.

Jane Seymour, Toronto, Feb. 9, 1988

I was just 23 when I did this shoot, and intent on trying to prove to Fashion (then Toronto Life Fashion) art director Brad McIvor that I was up to the job. The magazine was a very big deal back when Canada had a relatively healthy magazine market; a regular credit there was good for your portfolio, and a stepping stone to potential fashion work and (more crucially) lucrative advertising gigs.

I remember showing up at Seymour's hotel suite with my antique-looking Mamiya C330 and not the standard Hasselblad, and just one tiny flash with an umbrella bounce. I must have looked like a nervous kid, because that was what I was. I chose a spot by a big window draped with shears hoping that it would produce a high key effect; in the darkroom this was difficult to achieve, digitally it's a matter of just a few clicks and swipes with the mouse.

Of my first Bond girl I don't recall much. She was very pretty and very tiny, and I remember that her big eyes and '80s hair made her head look too big for her body. She was also the first person I ever heard refer to themselves in the third person, which stuck with me, as I had no idea real people did such things.

 

Trimmings

Teri, Parkdale, 1992

HER NAME WAS TERI, AND SHE WAS THE GIRLFRIEND of Dave, my old boss at Nerve. She was a model and needed portfolio shots so Dave gave me a call. I wanted some fashion in my own portfolio, so it was a good trade.

We started in my studio in Parkdale but - impetuously - I suggested we head outside after a few different setups and try to get something ... grittier. We ended up in a dodgy greasy spoon by the corner of Lansdowne (now long gone) where the patrons gave us funny looks but let me shoot in a booth and in the back, by the kitchen, where they stacked the empties.

My brief forays into fashion photography will be the subject of another post. All I can say now is that I loved the challenge of shooting fashion and even liked some of the results, but couldn't see my way to getting a foothold in that part of the business.