Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

COMEDIANS HAVE A STRANGE ENERGY. More than any other performer I've photographed - actors, musicians, you name it - comedians (in general - there are, of course, exceptions) have a compulsion to be "on" all the time, to project something at the camera that has the curious effect of revealing very little about themselves.

I can't help but see that happening in this shoot with Simon Pegg, done at the film festival when he was in town promoting his role in Run Fatboy Run. On one hand, shots like the one above, despite its technical shortcomings (sharp focus is overrated, to be honest), telegraph the most basic facts about the subject, or at least those fact that they want known before anything else. He fast; he's funny; he's too much for the camera to capture.

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Nearly every comedian I've shot has this "come out with guns blazing" attitude for a photo shoot, and I can see why some photographers would be happy to work with it, to simply treat the session as a kind of wildlife photography. This isn't very satisfying to me, so I tried to wait Pegg out as he sat in front of me with the window in the suite at the Intercontinental behind me, providing a direct, unbounced north light.

The result was a stand-off; eventually he got tired of making faces, but when he relaxed (sort of) and simply faced my camera, it was hard to push past that hint of defiance in his eyes that seemed to say either "I will not show you what you want to see" or "I have no idea what you expect to see." This stand-off is where most shoots with comics ends for me, unless I have a little more time to wear them out and maybe even boss them around. It's also the reason why I always let out a little inward groan when I learn that I've been assigned to photograph a comedian.

David Schwimmer

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

IT HAD BEEN JUST THREE YEARS SINCE FRIENDS AIRED ITS LAST EPISODE when David Schwimmer arrived at the film festival with his debut film as a director. That would make him a big star, but he was strangely subdued when I photographed him - as low key and eager to please as a young actor here with his first feature.

I understood his reticence; typecasting ruins careers, and after ten years playing Ross Geller, Schwimmer had to manage his next moves carefully to avoid playing high-strung nerds for the rest of his working life. I thought he'd already been terribly brave taking a role on the HBO WW2 miniseries Band of Brothers as the martinet Lt. Sobel, a character likely hated by viewers more than Hitler.

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

All of this - Schwimmer's uneasy career moment, his unprepossessing attitude that day - made me feel more than usually sympathetic to him as a subject. I'm not saying that I approach every subject as an adversary (though it's not a bad tactic when circumstances demand it) but I had an empathy for Schwimmer at that moment which I rarely feel at a portrait session. Perhaps that was his tactic all along.

Looking over the photos I shot at the 2007 festival, I'm amazed at how much I'd relaxed into the initially difficult lighting I found in the rooms at the Intercontinental on Bloor. There's a flattering softness to the room light that I'd have a hard time replicating in a well-equipped studio. I didn't know it at the time but I was passing through another steep learning curve, a challenge that I neither sought nor imagined when I had a camera put back in my hands just three years earlier.

Thandie Newton

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER BEAUTY. I suppose I could rank my film festivals by the number of leading actresses I was able to photograph, since you can measure your access and status by how many movie stars you photograph who come with hair and makeup people to make sure they look their best. If you don't have a reputation for taking flattering portraits of these people, it's likely your access will be more restricted, even for shoots that barely last a minute. In retrospect, 2007 would be my biggest year.

Newton had made her reputation over a decade earlier with films like Flirting, Interview with the Vampire and Jefferson in Paris, where she played Sally Hemings to Nick Nolte's Thomas Jefferson. If she was typecast as anything, it was the "smart beauty" - the love interest as defined by her native intelligence as her looks. (She would play Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone's W. a year later.)

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Newton was at the festival promoting Run Fatboy Run, a comedy co-starring Simon Pegg and directed by David Schwimmer of Friends fame - another smart beauty, whose love Pegg has to win back at the end of a story full of physical and emotional humiliation. Like many of the actors I photographed in my heyday, she has moved to premium cable for better roles, like the sentient robot Maeve on HBO's reboot of Westworld.

The combination of room and light at the Intercontinental on Bloor gave a monochrome effect to the portraits I shot there for the free daily, so I'm grateful to the makeup person who decided to put purple eye shadow on Newton. I've accentuated it in Photoshop to accent Newton's eyes - the sort of detail work I could only have dreamed about doing in the days of film photography, and as I said earlier, shoot like this are probably the peak of my portrait work for the free daily.

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Gen. Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

THE STORY OF ROMEO DALLAIRE IS ONE THAT'S WORTH RECALLING whenever anyone parrots the phrase "Never Again" when it comes to genocide and crimes against humanity. Because there have been plenty of Agains since the Holocaust inspired this phrase, and Dallaire was a witness to one of them, in Rwanda, barely twenty-five years ago.

I photographed Dallaire with Roy Dupuis, the Quebecois actor who played him in Shake Hands With The Devil, a film about the tragic UN mission to Rwanda that Dallaire commanded, and which failed to prevent the murder of 800,000 Rwandans at the hands of their fellow countrymen. The film was based on Dallaire's own book, which had in turn already inspired a documentary film, and at this point in his life Dallaire was on a mission to explain just what had happened, in a (mostly vain, in my opinion) attempt to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Roy Dupuis & Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

The story isn't terribly complicated: Dallaire was sent to Central Africa to try to head off what everyone knew was a potential massacre of Rwanda's Tutsi minority by its Hutu majority, then in political control of the country. His mission was hamstrung by the usual rules of engagement by which most UN "peacekeeping" engagements are run, and ended miserably, though Dallaire and his staff were able to save at least 32,000 people from being slaughtered.

It was obvious that Dallaire was left with crushing regret in the wake of his command, and seven years before I photographed him he had attempted suicide with alcohol and an overdose of anti-depressant medication. I did my shoot with him and Dupuis in the courtyard restaurant of the Intercontinental on Bloor, and hoped that my shooting style - get up close, focus on the eyes, linger long enough within the subject's personal space - would capture some of the discipline and intensity that Dallaire projected.

Seth

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I WENT UP TO GUELPH A FEW WEEKS BACK TO TRADE SOME PHOTOS WITH MY FRIEND SETH for a portrait he'd done of me and my family. It was a hand-off we'd been trying to make for the better part of a decade, and it gave me a chance to take some new portraits of Seth. I'd first photographed Seth over twenty-five years ago, but I'd been sitting on this post until I could make my visit and get the new shots.

I have known Seth for over thirty years, if you count our first meeting, when he was in the throes of his youthful Goth phase, complete with bleached hair and a cane topped with a silver skull. When we met again several years later he had changed his look - the same hat and suits that are his trademark today - and begun making his reputation as a cartoonist on what was a new, thriving and terribly exciting scene that included artists like his friend Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and others.

Seth, Parkdale, 1992

Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

Chester Brown, Parkdale, 1992

I had interviewed Chester as a young journalist, not long after meeting the Goth Seth, and around the time I dropped out of college. By the early '90s Seth and Chester were the linchpins of the Toronto graphic novel scene, and had become a trio when Joe Matt moved up here from the United States. I was a fan of all of them, and at some point renewed my acquaintance with Seth and Chet, somehow becoming part of their extended social circle.

It was around this time that I asked if I could do a portrait shoot with the three of them, together and individually. I was in the full throes of my Irving Penn fixation, and had in mind something along the lines of his portraits of H.L. Mencken with George Jean Nathan, or Willem de Kooning with Frederick Kiesler. I shot them in my Parkdale studio, asking them to sign the butcher paper covering the table top in front of them for their group portrait, and do drawings on the paper for their solo shots.

Seth, Chester Brown & Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

I remember it being a fun shoot, and was thoroughly pleased with the results. It might not have been much more than a straining homage to my biggest influence, but I felt I was close enough to touching the master's cloak to get some sort of satisfaction. At that point, it seemed the best way to deal with the anxiety of influence was to give in to the urge to imitate completely.

Not long after I did this shoot, Seth asked me about doing a trade - a portrait for a portrait. I eagerly agreed and asked for a drawing of me, as I imagined myself at my best in the mid-'90s - in an old suit, playing guitar, with my cats at my feet. (I was never really much of a guitarist, so that was just so much fantasy, but I did wear the suits and I'm grateful to have my much-loved and dearly-missed cats, Keebler and Nato, immortalized in a Seth sketch.)

Portrait of Rick McGinnis by Seth, 1994

McGinnis family by Seth, 2015

Time passes and life moves on, so when Seth asked for another portrait shoot with his then-fiancee (now wife) Tania in exchange for some more art, I asked him to make a sketch of my family. (Actually, I'm not sure we even had kids when Seth and I first talked about the trade, which gives you some idea of how long it took us to make this happen. Oh well - neither of us were obviously in any rush.)

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I was curious to visit Seth in Guelph, where he's gone about creating a world around himself in the shelter of small town Ontario - the place where he was raised and where he seems to find much of his inspiration. We walked around and talked each other's ears off and compared notes on modern society (not favorable) and the peculiar experience of getting old (not without its difficulties, but still far better than youthful idiocy.)

Mostly it was nice to renew an old friendship. I've found that friendships are improved with the passage of time, with familiarity providing precious context. It's also nice to find a friend from those years of youthful struggle and unfocused ambition and find them still at work and creating. Seth in particular has increased his ability to mine his inspiration for new work over the years I've known him. I can't say that the world has caught up with him - that would oblige the world to go into full reverse - but he's made it slow down and acknowledge his insights on how the past calls to us, if we're even remotely sympathetic to what it says.

Spain, again

The Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 2007

I FINALLY GOT BACK TO SPAIN IN 2007, ON ASSIGNMENT FOR THE FREE DAILY. We had grown an active travel section in addition to all the other trappings of a real newspaper, and got offered a junket by Air Transat to the south of Spain. They asked me if I'd be interested in going. What a silly question.

The trip went straight through the tourist heart of spain - Seville, Granada, Jerez and the Costa del Sol, hitting almost every blue book destination on the way. It was a part of Spain I'd never seen before - all my time there had been spent in Barcelona and the mountainous north - so I was curious what I'd think about the Spain of holiday lets and package tours.

The Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 2007

I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed by The Alhambra. I took plenty of wide shots of the rooms and courtyards, but they were either not quite "there" or ruined by being peopled with other tourists. In any case I had plan B at hand, and spent a lot of time shooting details. There were a lot of details - every wall and door and window frame was loaded with ornament, not to mention the bits of monumental architecture added by later Spanish monarchs.

Leica D-Lux 3

This was my first time traveling with a digital camera, which relieved me of the stress of worrying about running out of film. I went to Spain with the paper's Canon DSLR as well as a bit of review tech - a Leica point-and-shoot (which was really just a re-badged Panasonic with some Leica software tweaks inside.) The intriguing thing about the D-Lux 3 was that it had an extra wide LCD screen at the back to accommodate its panoramic mode. It also came fully charged, but without a DC charger, so I had to be sparing with it for the whole trip, finally eking out the last bits of power till halfway through the last day.

Bull in olive grove, Gerena, Spain, 2007

Bullring, Granada, Spain, 2007

You'd think that I'd have shot a lot of panoramas with the Leica, but for some reason I ended up composing with it vertically most of the time, probably just because landscape shots seemed so ordinary. We went for a tour of a corrida bull ranch/olive orchard, which is where I saw the big fella above, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. It seemed like a nice bookend to the shots I took on a quick visit to the bullring in Granada, which was unfortunately empty the day we were there.

The Alcazar, Granada, Spain, 2007

Estepona, Spain, 2007

Unlike my first travel junket to Spain, or my visit to Peru, I knew that my photos from this trip would land somewhere in the paper, so I did my best to shoot something like conventional travel photos. It was a lot harder than I expected, and I ended up with lots of images like these - pretty pictures of things I saw that edged a bit too close to the abstract to be regular travel shots.

Jerez, Spain, 2007

Francisco Nuñez de Prado, Baena, Spain, 2007

I got closest to that elusive goal when I could fit people into my shots, like our stop in Jerez for the Feria - the big annual summer fair and equestrian celebration - and the Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre, the royal riding school. The Feria was a lot of fun - as much a celebration for locals as a tourist event, and a bit of an outing for the local gentry to show off. I was flattered when our local guide - a pretty young woman from Spanish tourism - told me that she wasn't so sure about the rest of the group, but she could see me fitting in there quite happily.

The highlight of the trip for me was in Baena, where we visited the Nunez de Prado olive oil factory and met Francisco Nunez de Prado, whose family had run the business for generations. In the lovely old whitewashed buildings with his impeccable English and tailored blazer, he looked like the sort of man I would love to be in another life, seemingly content with the lucky accident of his birth. I could think of worse things to do than make olive oil for a living.

Cordoba Mosque and Cathedral, Spain, 2007

Jerez, Spain, 2007

Seville, Spain, 2007

I was under no compunction, personal or otherwise, to avoid the picturesque during the trip, so I let myself go nuts with the sights, from the Cordoba Mosque to the plazas in Seville to the ceilings of various and sundry cathedrals. I still have to remind myself to go for the picturesque full bore when I do travel photography, in an effort to override my instinct to shoot the odd, stark and abstract. Looking over these shots I can see myself wrestling manfully with this inclination.

Malaga, Spain, 2007

Another highlight of the trip was in Malaga, where I saw my first full-scale Roman ruin. I had seen bits and pieces of classical Rome before, mostly in Barcelona, where the stubs of Roman walls could be seen, their stones built upon with subsequent layers, all of which were centuries older than anything I could see at home. But the full reveal of a Roman amphitheatre in the midday sun, as many times as I might have seen pictures of such a thing, really took my breath away when I finally saw it for real.

Finally there was this window in Seville, glimpsed somewhere near the Jewish ghetto, that caught my eye - the sort of thing my camera is constantly being drawn towards. I have good memories of this trip, but a lingering sense that I was still on a steep learning curve with travel photography. I would, eventually, get a bit more practice, but it would take almost a decade to get the opportunity.

Window, Seville, Spain, 2007

Photographers

Chris Buck, Toronto, Sept. 2015

NOT LONG AFTER I STARTED THIS BLOG I began a tradition of posting pictures of my friend, the photographer Chris Buck, on his birthday. I did it initially because I realized, while rooting through my files, that I'd photographed Chris more than almost anyone else in the early years of my career. (I'll admit to getting a little bit of joy from needling him by posting some shots I'm sure he'd rather stayed buried, but I'm kind of a jerk that way.)

Mostly, though, it was a fond gesture towards a friend and peer who was there when I started in this business and, quite against the odds, is still there today, even more of a friend than when we started. I have never really sought out the company of other photographers; at the beginning, it was mostly because they could all have been, in one way or another, competition for work. With time, though, it was simply my own lifelong misanthropy at work, striving to keep my circle of friends as small and discretely separated as possible.

Michael Vendruscolo in his studio, Toronto, June 1990

One exception in the early years was Michael Vendruscolo, another young photographer who Chris introduced to me, as someone who shared our taste and influences. Michael was incredibly talented, and had impeccable taste. He was also far more intellectual about the work than either Chris or I, and it was always interesting to hear him explain what he thought was going on in the work. For a brief period we formed a trio, offering each other mutual moral and creative support.

Not long after Chris moved to New York City Michael seemed to have a crisis with his career. He became more discouraged every time I saw him - he hated the business of selling himself to editors and art directors even more than I did - and then one day he just seemed to disappear altogether. We lost contact, but I would frequently wonder what happened to him, though repeated Googling never turned up any trace online other than his iMDB credits on two Bruce McDonald films.

I assumed he was completely lost until he showed up unexpectedly at Chris' father's funeral last year. Chris recognized him immediately and they spoke, but I don't think he got Michael's contact information and I still doubt that I'll ever see him again. Still, I've always had Michael in mind as part of that tiny, ideal audience I imagine out there, and wondered what he'd have thought about my work, if he saw it at all.

Edward Burtynsky, Toronto, Sept. 2006

Joel Meyerowitz, Toronto, May 2005

I haven't photographed a lot of photographers over my career. There was Bruce Weber, early on, and Vancouver photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, whose own blog was a huge influence on this one. While I was at the free daily, though, I was assigned to interview and/or shoot at least a couple of big deal photographers.

I first met Ed Burtynsky at Toronto Image Works, the photo lab and rental darkroom he started to help support himself while he was developing what would become his very influential take on industrial landscape photography. I rather like this shot; without the option of shooting Burtynsky from hundreds of yards away, standing at the bottom of a quarry, this was the best I could do in the time and space I had to try to refer to at least the tonal palette of his work.

Joel Meyerowitz is a legend for anyone interested in cityscapes and street photography, and he was in town with a show of the work he'd done in Lower Manhattan in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center. It was a somber subject but almost every frame I shot of Meyerowitz showed him smiling - a big, warm, cheerful smile that just didn't seem to work with the subject matter in the gallery. This is probably the only shot where he looked appropriately sombre.

Franco Deleo in his studio, Toronto, June 2015

I've mellowed as I've gotten older, and I've relaxed my shunning of friendships with other photographers in recent years. I can count almost a half dozen other photographers among my circle of friends these days. (I had intended to photograph them for this post, but decided to wait and make them the subject of a portrait series when I finally move on to a new blog.)

There's Paul Till, a colleague from NOW magazine days, and my neighbour Steve Stober, who was only a photo cutline I'd read for years until we met in front of an old house up the street that was being demolished. And there's Gunar Roze, whose colour-obsessed street photography I followed online for years, after an introduction through a mutual friend on Facebook before we finally met in person. And there are new friends I've met on my travels - photographers like Mark Peavy in Birmingham, Alabama or Stuart Forster over in Newcastle, quick friendships made on the road who make me want to get back to traveling again.

Then there's Vince Lupo, who was actually a schoolmate from high school who's lived in Maryland for years - we met again through another St. Mikes alumnus, my friend the ad man Tracy Jones. And there's Franco Deleo, whose family owns Tre Mari, my local bakery up here in Earlscourt. I photographed Franco in his studio behind the bakery, where he was preparing a show of portraits of old-timers from the street's Italian heyday, most of them employees and customers at the shop.

I have another friend, not a photographer but a fellow media veteran and Catholic; he once helpfully described our get-togethers over coffee as "fellowship." Fellowship is what I get from these friendships - a sounding board and a sense of community amidst the adversity of being a photographer at a time when photos have never been easier to create and see, but have never had less marketplace value.

Jonathan Castellino in my backyard, Toronto, July 2018

Probably the closest new friend and peer I've met in the last few years is Jonathan Castellino. We met after I'd been laid off by the free daily and started doing work at blogTO. I kept noticing the work of an incredibly talented photographer being featured there - cityscapes and urbex and terrifying but exhilarating rooftop work. One day I got an e-mail from the photographer who'd done this work, pointing out that we actually knew each other already, from the offices of the monthly that had been printing my column.

It was obvious that we had a lot in common, both in our personal commitments to photography and religion, each of which overlaps in ways that I think we don't have to explain to each other. Jonathan does spectacular work, and our conversations over the years played a big part in reviving my enthusiasm for shooting. He's an intelligent photographer; in a lot of ways he reminds me of Michael Vendruscolo with his interest in what photos mean and how other arts inform a good photographer's work.

Together all of these people have made me feel far more optimistic about the work - my own and the craft in general - than I've felt in decades. I'm not sure I would have realized my great good fortune when I started this blog four years ago, and it's with this uncharacteristic optimism that I wish a happy birthday to my old friend Chris.

Chris Buck in my backyard, Toronto, July 2018