Hayley Atwell

Hayley Atwell, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

TOWARDS THE END OF EVERY FILM FESTIVAL you find yourself in ever more unfriendly spaces to take photos. The spacious hotel suites with convenient windows give way to the patios of busy restaurants of the corners of windowless boardrooms. I'm not sure just where in the Intercontinental on Bloor I shot these photos of Hayley Atwell, but it was definitely a room without a view.

The original colour jpegs from this shoot were a mess - a mix of two different light sources with clashing colour temperatures that must have made providing a serviceable image or two to the free daily a nightmare. Thankfully I can revisit this shoot in black and white today, which lets me paper over the colour issues by pretending I was shooting for a newspaper at least a decade previous to the actual date these photos were taken, when spot colour was expensive and even the front pages of a paper might have featured a black and white shot.

Hayley Atwell, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

I have posted portraits of Atwell here before - a session I did at the film festival a year after these were taken, when she was in town promoting a film of Brideshead Revisited with Matthew Goode. In 2007 she was still fairly unknown - a young British actress whose credits had mostly been on television, but who had made a splash with a role in Woody Allen's latest film earlier that year. Now, of course, she has had become part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and play's the wife of the grown-up title character in Disney's Christopher Robin this summer.

The room where I took these must have been particularly unpromising - besides the lighting issues, there wasn't a wall or corner worth considering as a backdrop, so I went very, very close for these portraits. Atwell - just twenty-five at the time - was obviously able to handle the scrutiny, and met my camera with confidence admirable in someone whose career was really only just beginning.

Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

WHEN I SHOT THIS PORTRAIT OF PAUL HAGGIS, it was confounding to me that the man was a Scientologist. He was accomplished and successful, to be sure, but that was in Hollywood, in an industry where L. Ron Hubbard's cult has it's highest profile followers, recruited and sustained within the cult because of their fame and success. But he was also clearly intelligent, and that was baffling: How could anyone possessed with some clarity of insight remain in a cult whose core cosmology could be parodied effortlessly in an episode of South Park?

The Oscar-winning writer and director became, ultimately, one of the highest profile defectors from Scientology - two years after I took these pictures. This made him a target of the harassment that famous ex-Scientologists inevitably endure, and which reinforces the organization's status as a cult - for anyone on the outside of the cult, at least.

A 2011 New Yorker story about defectors from Scientology ends with the Canadian-born Haggis wondering, as much to himself as to the interviewer: "I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't." In the decade-plus since I took these photos, I've learned how perfectly intelligent people can hold contradictory, untenable beliefs that they'll cling to despite - in fact, often because of - their intelligence, or more precisely because of their perception of themselves as more intelligent than most people.

Paul Haggis, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

I know that my puzzlement at Haggis' position in a cult was on my mind when I took these photos, but I'm not sure how they affected my approach to him as a subject. I knew that, as a non-performer but a creative, it would be easier to get past any projection he might have of his public image; if there was one thing I'd learned in the previous two decades it was that photographing writers and directors was usually more rewarding for this reason.

I doubt if Haggis would remember this brief portrait session. I doubt if any of the people whose portraits I've taken in a minute or less in the middle of a press day in some hotel room have any memory of our meeting. But I asked him to hold the gaze of my camera lens precisely because I was hunting for some evidence of misgivings or doubt in his expression. And it's probably because of my bafflement at Haggis the Scientologist that I framed him askew in nearly every frame, and why I keep projecting some glimpse of that turmoil into these portraits. But that might just as well be my own self-flattery in action.

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.