Toronto: Skyline

Toronto, looking north from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oct.2015

I WILL NEVER KNOW ANOTHER CITY AS WELL AS I KNOW TORONTO. That I wasn't born here is a mere technicality; I was raised by native Torontonians and have lived here all my life. I may have dreamed of living in other places and will continue to do so, but even in the (probably unlikely) chance that I make another city my home, Toronto will remain the landscape of my dreams.

Having said that, I have lived long enough to see my hometown change, and the city in my mind less and less resembles the one I travel through every day. This fact makes me uneasy. I suppose it's a story that most old Torontonians can tell, but I have photos as evidence.

Toronto, looking northeast from the foot of Bathurst Street, Nov. 2015

Toronto, a once-dreary, Presbyterian town known as the "Belfast of Canada," has been booming for at least two decades, with construction cranes sprouting everywhere along the main roads and up and down the lake shore. I maintain that this hasn't diminished the city's essentially provincial character - and please don't interpret that as a criticism - but the dusty, lonely feel at the outskirts of the old downtown has been banished, along with the sight lines I can still see in my mind.

Nearly twenty-five years ago I tagged along with friend and fellow struggling photographer Michael Ventruscolo as he drove around the city on a dry winter day taking shots for an assignment. I brought my camera along as well, and the roll of negs I took have sat unprinted until today. My photos aren't any kind of lost masterpiece, but I'm drawn to them mostly because they're snapshots of a city that no longer exists.

Lake Shore Boulevard near Bathurst looking northeast, Winter 1991

Lake Shore Boulevard at Dan Leckie Way looking northeast, November 2015

The Gardiner Expressway traces the edge of the city's shore line with Lake Ontario, and where it marches on concrete stilts by the southern edge of the downtown it once traveled through the empty remnants of our moribund docklands. Nearly thirty years later the roadway is being bracketed by condos and office towers and once unobstructed views of the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre (aka the "Skydome") are disappearing.

The Royal York Hotel was opened just before the Great Depression, and older locals will pedantically tell you that it was once (briefly) the tallest building in the British Commonwealth. By the turn of the '90s a crowd of office towers huddled behind the hotel, but it still had a clear view over the Gardiner down to the lake, and proudly remained a landmark on the skyline.

Toronto, Winter 1991

Toronto, November 2015

The spot where I took my 1992 photo no longer exists; I had a hard time finding a place underneath the Gardiner where I could catch a sliver of the Royal York and at least one of the towers in the original shot. This was the best I could do, and it's obvious that even this fractured perspective won't last long, as the old hotel is walled off from the lake and our skyline transforms utterly.

I'm not complaining. I'd rather live in a city whose problems come from prosperity instead of decline, but the pace - incremental as it is - can be disorienting, especially when you have this catalogue of obsolete views crowding your memory. The thing is, though, that Toronto was never a pretty town, and I have no reason to imagine that all of this boom and prosperity is going to make it any prettier.

Toronto, underneath the Gardiner Expressway near Harbourfront, Nov.2015

And once again, I'm not complaining. I know there are prettier towns. New York is more dramatic, London richer with history, Paris more perfectly realized and almost any city in Europe built on Roman walls is picturesque in ways that Toronto couldn't imagine. I can travel there with my camera and take lovely pictures, secure in the knowledge that someone took very nearly the same lovely picture a week, a year, or a century earlier, and that someone will again, a day or a century from now.

But in Toronto, my unlovely hometown, I'm never tempted by the merely picturesque and, given our history, it's unlikely that some miracle of planning and architectural inspiration will spoil generations of photographers here with a perfect vista, and make our shutter fingers twitch in anticipation.

This week another photographer friend passed through town, and over dinner Chris Buck and I compared notes about shooting cities. We talked about Los Angeles, a city where he keeps an apartment, and how an almost total lack of coherent planning. unique vernacular architecture, drifting pockets of urban decay, a worship of kitsch and an amnesiac sense of history have made it one of the most rewarding places to shoot urban landscapes.

I don't understand Los Angeles; it's an alien landscape, constantly tempting me to capture something both bleak and beautiful underneath that nearly constant noontime sun. Toronto, on the other hand, couldn't be more familiar to me, but they're both cities without vanity, and perhaps that's why they're so inspiring.

And despite their size and importance, they're both provincial places (again - not a criticism) that are too busy pursuing their destinies - real or imagined - to take pride in mere aesthetics or history. They both revel in their indifference, challenging you to take their portrait while they go about their business: "Go ahead," they say. "Discover something beautiful here. Whatever you find will be all yours, and I won't make it easy for you."

 

Daniel

Daniel Craig, Toronto, September 11, 2004

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE BOND, a year before he signed on the dotted line. Before he became the sixth movie 007, Daniel Craig was an actor with a serious reputation known for his work on English film and television as well as the odd role in Hollywood films like Road to Perdition and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. I photographed him when he was at the film festival here in Toronto promoting Enduring Love, a small and intensely depressing British drama.

I doubt I'd have this sort of access to Craig today - or that he'd be allowed to present himself so casually to the press, at least as long as he's part of the Bond franchise. Shot in the standard festival hotel room, either at the Intercontinental or the Park Hyatt, I honestly don't remember which. I'd found my sweet spot of light in a corner of the room just past where the window light lost its sharp edges, and I'd shoot my portraits there whenever possible.

Good hotel room celebrity portrait shoots are always as much a matter of luck as skill. With no time to convince the subject to play a role or take part in a concept, you're basically doing a still life with a living subject, hoping that they'll meet you halfway at best, and able to summon enough life in their eyes to hide their exhaustion or indifference.

Pulling back to anything less than a head shot with a short lens usually means they lose their focus; not surprisingly, invading a subject's personal space with a camera forces them to engage with you, even if just defensively. In the assembly line of a press junket, it's imperative that you elicit something from your subject that can be read in the eyes, even if it's surprise or irritation.

Of course it always helps when your subject has eyes of an arresting, icy shade of blue.

Daniel Craig, Toronto, September 11, 2004

There would be a great hue and cry when Craig was cast as Bond - apparently he was too blonde, or not conventionally handsome enough. I didn't get it, but the protests melted away about halfway through the pre-credits bathroom fight scene in Casino Royale. The first Bond film with Craig was fantastic - easily the best Bond since Goldfinger, and if the next two were as good I'd probably be saying that Craig had done the impossible and edged out Connery as the best 007 ever.

But Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were grim and, despite the pyrotechnics, even a bit dreary, and while I still have a lifelong Bond fan's high hopes for Spectre, Craig's very public statements that he's tired and probably done with Bond suggest that the trend hasn't been reversed. And so Craig might vacate the role short of Connery and Moore's tally of appearances, beating Lazenby and Dalton and matching Pierce Brosnan's run as 007.

Which is fine, really. After all, Bonds are far more dispensable than we imagine - there have been more actors playing 007 than filling the roles of M, Q and Moneypenny - and part of the ongoing drama of the franchise is the ritual recasting, roughly every decade.

Perhaps Craig's Bond was a victim of the success of Casino Royale; maybe the new coarse, damaged 007 got too dark, too fast and it's time for the pendulum to swing back again to a lighter, more antic Bond. I'm trying to imagine who might fill that role - top contender Idris Elba could fit the bill nicely - but it'll take a really radical, misguided reinterpretation of Bond to stop this lifetime fan from adding each new film to my collection.

And with luck I hope to get a Bond villain in front of my camera one day.

 
  

Pierce

Pierce Brosnan, Toronto, Sept. 15, 2005

PIERCE BROSNAN WAS ALREADY AN EX-BOND WHEN I PHOTOGRAPHED HIM, joining Connery, Moore, Lazenby and Dalton in rather select ranks. Daniel Craig's debut as Bond in Casino Royale would be announced a month after I took these photos, so for all intents and purposes Brosnan was still James Bond in the eyes of the public.

He was already moving past the role with films like Matador, the movie he was promoting at the film festival where I shot him - a comedy thriller where Brosnan plays a dodgy hit man past his prime. Wisely, Brosnan had decided to use his undersung talent for comedy to subvert the Bond typecasting. It would end up working, giving his career the reboot that neither Roger Moore nor Timothy Dalton were able to manage.

I photographed Brosnan on the courtyard patio at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor - the major festival press venue at the time. He had just finished doing an interview with Xtra!, the city's biweekly gay magazine, when he sat down at our table. Chris, the writer, asked him how it had gone.

"Oh, you know, cocks, cocks, cocks! Ass, ass ass!" Brosnan said ruefully.

Pierce Brosnan, Toronto, Sept. 15, 2005

This set the tone for the interview and photo shoot that followed, as Brosnan smirked and wise-cracked his way through the afternoon, with no intention whatsoever of treating a round of festival press with any of the dignity it probably didn't deserve.

Brosnan had no interest in smoldering or looking dashing for my camera, so the shoot was a distracted one, as my subject chatted with Chris and the publicist while I worked, or idly scanned the other tables in the restaurant, occasionally looking toward my lens but never focusing on it. I don't resent him for it; his priority at that point in his career was to leave James Bond behind, so he didn't want to give the press any more suave headshots that would echo the hundreds he'd posed for since Remington Steele.

The Intercontinental courtyard was an unforgiving setting for portrait shoots, between the clutter of chairs and tables and potted plants, and the indifferent light at the bottom of four tall hotel walls. Overcoming it required roughly equal effort from both the photographer and the subject, but that didn't happen here, and so I ended up with what amounts to little more than a set of overworked snapshots.

 
 

Roger

Roger Spottiswoode, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

DIRECTOR ROGER SPOTTISWOODE DIRECTED TOMORROW NEVER DIES ten years before I photographed him at the film festival, where he was promoting Shake Hands With The Devil, a film based on the story of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, and a project more of a piece with the politically-tinged work he seems to prefer. You could, of course, say that Bond films are also political, and they are - in about the same way that pornography is about relationships.

I definitely saw Tomorrow Never Dies in the theatre, since I didn't own a television when it came out. My experience of Bond films has never been wholly cinematic; as I said when I started this series, I saw all of the Connery Bonds on television, and most of the Roger Moore ones as well, though I tuned out of the series when it became almost pure camp. I only ended up seeing the Timothy Dalton Bonds years later, on DVD, since I spent most of the '80s poor and a film snob and recoiling from the later excesses of the Moore era.

I re-connected with the franchise with the Pierce Brosnan Bonds, and remember being quite happy with Tomorrow Never Dies when I saw it. There was no comparing it to From Russia With Love or Goldfinger, to be sure, but it was on a comparable level with later Connery Bonds like You Only Live Twice - epic and high style, and pitched just at the point where arch touched the border with camp.

Roger Spottiswoode, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

These are not kind portraits. Spottiswoode has what you might call a "lived-in" face, and even the relatively soft light on the courtyard patio at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor Street couldn't hide the deep wrinkles cross-hatched into his face. Like the Monica Bellucci portrait I did at the same film festival, circumstances suggested a stark portrait, and I filled the frame with Spottiswoode's face.

I didn't do this out of malice; Spottiswoode was perfectly decent to me and the interviewer from the free national daily where I worked. I had been doing these two-minute hotel portraits for several years by this point, though, and my reaction to situations where I had to work with almost no control over the setting or styling of a shoot was to submit to the restrictions and document - at least a little artfully, I hoped - the people who were being put in front of my camera.

It was a working method that was still influenced by two real variables - the cooperation of the subject and my own inspiration. I could make up for a deficit in the former with more of the latter, but sometimes the balance wasn't right. With the Spottiswoode portrait, I think I came up with a fairly decent result. In tomorrow's post, though, I wouldn't be so lucky.

 

Monica

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

MONICA BELLUCCI WAS NOT, OF COURSE, A "BOND GIRL" when I photographed her at the film festival in 2007. Today she's the oldest ever Bond girl, and says in interviews that she'd prefer to be called a "Bond woman." Which is probably true enough, but I don't think it's going to stick.

I obviously haven't seen Spectre yet so I can't say anything about Bellucci's turn as Lucia Sciarra, the wife of an assassin made a widow by Bond. As Daniel Craig himself has pointed out, Bellucci is the first age-appropriate Bond girl ever; she's 51 and Craig is 47, though to be fair it always seemed to me that Honor Blackman's Pussy Galore was fully the equal of Sean Connery's Bond in Goldfinger, both in age and temperament. (Blackman was actually five years older than Connery when they made the film, so Craig is really talking out of his hat.)

I did my shoot with Bellucci in a suite at the Hotel Intercontinental, where she was promoting Le Deuxième Souffle, a French gangster film that also featured Daniel Auteuil and soccer star Eric Cantona. This was seven years after Malena, the film that established her as a great international screen beauty after a modeling career and a decade's worth of European films.

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was excited and a bit intimidated by the prospect of shooting Bellucci. I have shot beautiful people before, but few whose reputation was quite as gilt-edged, and the part of me that worships at the altar of Hollywood glamour photographers like George Hurrell was busy imagining the shots I'd be getting.

The room where I shot was set up for television interviews, so I asked if I could commandeer a couple of quartz heads instead of doing my usual scout for the best patch of available light. As soon as Bellucci was standing in the crossfire of lights, though, I knew that the Hurrell glamour shot was not going to happen. There might have been a time and a place for that, but a couple of minutes in a stuffy hotel suite filled with tripods and light stands was not going to be either.

I wanted a glamour shot but I ended up with a rather clinical portrait of a beautiful woman in middle age, denied the talents of stylists or makeup artists. Make no mistake - I have done a little bit of Photoshop retouching on these shots, but nowhere near as much as I'd have been asked to make to meet the standards of a publicist or a fashion glossy. I like the results mostly because of their starkness, but I'm certain that photos like this are the reason why photographers at the film festival no longer have access to movie stars such as Bellucci any more.

 

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.

 

Halloween

Sunnyside, Toronto, Oct. 31.2015

I WENT FOR A SPOOKY WALK. The trees almost looked alive. I saw a sea monster.