Don

Don Pullen, Toronto, 1991

DON PULLEN WAS PROBABLY THE FIRST NAME JAZZ MUSICIAN I got to know, and I ended up shooting him many times. This was thanks to my friend Jane Bunnett, whose work with Don in the first decade of her career was utterly crucial to the career she'd end up having. Don Pullen has been gone now for almost twenty years, but the memory of his generosity is something I know Jane and I are still grateful for today.

I heard about Don from my friend Tim Powis, a colleague at Nerve magazine and my tutor as I tried to learn about jazz. He told me that Pullen was playing a solo gig at the Cafe des Copains, a basement piano bar in the old downtown, and that I should really go; he was a big fan of Don's band with saxophonist George Adams. I asked him what Pullen sounded like.

"Well, sort of like Cecil Taylor, but a lot more melodic," Tim told me. "He actually plays songs."

Don Pullen, Toronto, 1987

I showed up with my Spotmatic and shot a half roll of Don playing from a dark corner next to his piano, but my low-light shooting skills were pretty rudimentary and there's nothing worth scanning. During his break, though, I approached Don and asked if I could take a few portrait shots. There was some awkward business with where he'd put his hands, so this shot ended up being the best of the lot; you can see his shirt sticking to his skin; it was a summer night, after all.

After getting my photo, I made my way to where Tim was standing and he pointed out an attractive blonde sitting at a table in the corner. Pullen made his way over and sat down with her.

"That's Jane Bunnett - she plays sax and flute, I think," Tim told me. "I grew up with her in Forest Hill."

I'd learn later that this was the first time Jane talked to Don, and that she'd given him a tape and asked if he'd be interested in playing with her. Remembering it years later, Jane said that Don was friendly but noncommittal, and that it took months of phone calls before she was able to talk him into playing with her on the gig that became In Dew Time, her first record.

Don Pullen, East 85th, Toronto, April 1989

I met Don again almost two years later, when he had begun playing regularly with Jane. She'd booked a gig at East 85th, a jazz club in Toronto's old downtown, which ended badly when the landlord padlocked the club halfway through their booking, leaving the band outside on the sidewalk in the rain.

It was, even before that, a rather tense gig. Don wasn't a big fan of photographers shooting him while he played, especially if they set their flash off in his eyes; two years earlier, I'd seen him hold up his hand and shout "STOP THAT!" when someone's flash started popping during his set at Cafe des Copains.

It would take me another year or so to convince Don that I would never shoot with a flash while he was playing - I didn't like the look of flash in concert photos in any case. But years of dealing with photographers, professional and amateur, who couldn't shoot in the dim light of jazz clubs and concert halls had made Don wary.

There was a photographer in Toronto who regularly ignored pleas from Don and other musicians, and would turn up at shows with his flash blazing and a bag of records for musicians to sign. (I'm told he's still at it, amazingly.) At a showcase theatre gig in the early '90s with Jane, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, Don spotted him stalking around the stage during the soundcheck. He pulled me aside and pointed him out to me.

"If I see him set off that flash in my eyes again," he told me, "I'm going to jump off the stage and stomp a mudhole in his ass."

I was relieved that I wasn't that photographer at that moment, and grateful that, at long last, Don knew that I wasn't.

Don Pullen, Toronto, April 1989

Don was an intense man. I think I caught a bit of that when I convinced him to sit for a portrait session with me, in my Parkdale loft just around the corner from Jane and Larry's house, at some point during the East 85th gigs. I was, at this point, intent on trying to get decent portraits of every interesting jazz musician who passed through the city, nurturing as I was a wholly improbable ambition to become the next William Claxton or Francis Wolff.

Don Pullen, Toronto, April 1989

I photographed Don with the new grey seamless I'd just bought, using the cool, even north light that came in through the windows of my loft. Perhaps I'm projecting, but I can't look at these photos without seeing Don appraising me rather coolly - an inexperienced kid fumbling his way to something at least technically competent.

If you look closely at Don's knuckles you can see the calluses from years of playing with his unique piano style - scooping up big clusters of keys with the back of his hand and tossing them down the piano. He was the perfect mix of the traditional and avant garde musician, with a "churchiness" to his playing that really came out when he played the Hammond B-3 organ with David Murray.

Later that summer I'd shoot Jane and Don together for the CD booklet of New York Duets, and a year later Don was back in town for some concerts promoting the record at the Top of the Senator. I wanted to challenge myself to shoot live music the hard way, so I left my Nikon at home and brought my Rolleiflex, a tripod, and a rented Widelux panoramic camera. I was desperate to get something different from the run of the mill concert shots, but I also thought that Don would appreciate me shooting him with the Rollei's nearly silent shutter.

Don Pullen, Top of the Senator, Toronto, 1990

I ended up with this single, very successful frame, which made all the effort worthwhile. A part of me has always imagined it as the cover for some comprehensive Mosaic Records box set of Don's recordings, but I'm not sure that anyone has ever seen it. Technically I was becoming a better photographer, but that didn't seem like enough.

I photographed Don again when he came through Toronto with his trio featuring Santi Dibriano and Cindy Blackman. I shot them separately and together with my new strobe gear, but decided to use the shoot to experiment in the studio with the sort of "flash and burn" photography that I'd been seeing in live shots of grunge acts. I set up my strobes around Don and his band, but aimed an old 750 watt fresnel light into the white backdrop, turned off the modeling light in the strobe and set the camera to a relatively slow shutter speed.

Don Pullen, Toronto, April 1991

The results, with their mix of colour temperatures and hot ghost shadows, were close to what I imagined, but I couldn't think of anyone to show them to, and they remained unprinted and unseen until today. Even if I'd been a bit bolder, I don't know where I would have sold these shots back then and, frankly, it was Photoshop that allowed me to really pull out all of the potential I imagined in them, almost 25 years ago.

The last time I saw Don was in New York; I ran into him at a show in Brooklyn and he gave me a drive back into Manhattan in what I remember as a particularly large '70s era sedan - a Lincoln or a Cadillac. We chatted like friends, and I remember being grateful for his years of generosity and forbearance with me. Not long after that I learned that he was sick.

Don Pullen died of lymphoma on April 22, 1995.

   

NYC, 1989

NYC 1989, Mercer Street looking south toward Prince

SOHO DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THIS ANY MORE. They've pulled up the asphalt to reveal the cobblestones and the ground level retail has gotten a lot pricier; there's a Balenciaga store just a block or two south of where I shot this in 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. Needless to say, the real estate is worth a lot more now than it was when I took this photo.

In early fall of 1989 my friend Jane Bunnett recorded her second album in New York City - a set of duets with pianist Don Pullen. Jane asked me to take the photos and I upped the ante by asking her if I could come up with the design concept for the record, which was being put out by a small, non-profit CD-only label in California.

The result was fairly primitive - a relic of the Macintosh II era of digital design. The cover photo, shot in Rockefeller Center, was a great example of what photographers did before Photoshop; the sky in the top left corner was blown out on the original negative, but I was able to burn it down in the darkroom with a couple of pieces of cardboard as a mask. Printed with the rebate on a filed-out negative carrier, it's the artifact I'd pull from my files if asked to show what analog photography looked like.

By the late summer of 1989 my girlfriend had moved to Manhattan on a scholarship to study film at NYU, and thanks to a bit of money I'd inherited I was able to afford to visit her regularly. On my first trip down after helping her move into her West Village shared apartment, I brought along my Rolleiflex and set to work trying to get a cover image for Jane's record.

NYC 1989, Con Ed steam on 7th Ave. S.

NYC 1989, Wall Street

NYC 1989, Midtown deco

I was desperate to get a single image that said "Manhattan" without a shot of the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, Times Square or the arch in Washington Square Park. What I did shoot was probably what nearly any non-New Yorker set loose with a camera in the city will produce - a lot of photos rubbernecking up at the forest of skyscrapers.

I had been here before, and like that time, the reason was a girl. In the intervening four years, though, I'd become a better photographer, but what those years hadn't given me was the sort of experience that helps you make original decisions, so it's not surprising that my New York photos from the late summer of 1989 work better as graphics than photographs.

NYC 1989, Card players in Washington Square Park

This is probably the only exception. On my way up from Soho to Rockefeller Center I came across these men playing cards at one of the chess tables in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I circled around them with Rollei and they didn't take much notice of me; I'm not sure if it's true any more, but the marvel of taking photos on the street in New York City was how blithely you'd be ignored, as if the city was after all just a big stage set and being documented was part of your daily routine.

I imagine that there are still men playing cards at the chess tables in Washington Square Park, but a quarter century later I doubt if most of these men would still be found there. Some are dead, I'm sure, and some have moved on, perhaps away from the Village and even Manhattan as the cost of living on the island has gotten so steep.

These are men at leisure in a New York that has ceased to exist. Some are retired, some are unemployed, and all of them are probably enjoying that fine summer day thanks to rent control. What I do know is that you probably couldn't re-create this photo today without someone to take care of wardrobe and hair. It's a bit of a shock when your photos alchemically transform from leftover work into historical records.

NYC 1989, cable

NYC 1989, Graffiti

The shot of the cable snaking along the stone paving at the base of a midtown office block could probably have been taken in any big city, which is probably why it's the most timeless frame from the shoot - and the one take out of contention first for the cover shot. A New York photographer wandering about the city with their camera would probably gravitate toward something this abstract, but that wasn't my job - at least how I'd assigned it to myself.

A neighbouring frame of the graffiti shot ended up on the back of the CD booklet. I'm not the sort of person who thinks graffiti and tagging is a sign of a city in full civic health, but as a photographer I can appreciate the texture and graphic zip they add to a shot.

The odd thing is that even this graffiti seems dated - the syntax and vocabulary of the medium (I'm still loathe to call it an art form) has moved on, and to a connoisseur's eye this would be New York graffiti in its classical period. Even in black and white I'm reminded that New York especially and the world in general was a lot more colourful and graphically adventurous in the '80s; whole stretches of the Manhattan streetscape looked like a Basquiat painting.

NYC 1989, Fire escape

NYC 1989, Rockefeller Center

I have an awful lot of frames of fire escapes. It's not that Toronto doesn't have them, but New York made them an architectural feature; they've been stripped from some of the tenements they once adorned in the last decade or two, and the buildings always seem unfinished without them, a century after they were built. They're quintessentially New York to me, but I never got that definitive shot that would have delivered an undeniable cover shot.

I finally ended up in Rockefeller Center, where I found the image I ended up using for the cover of Jane's record. For budget reasons we had to discard the option of a colour cover, but I imagine the shot above would have served just as nicely as the one we used.

A number of artists designed the deco flourishes that make the GE building and its neighbours a masterpiece - the one above is Lee Oskar Lawrie's "Light" - but using art deco as a shorthand for jazz is a bit of a cliche. It was a useful one for me, though, as I tried to create what would be my first album cover, and a major milestone in my career.

 

The Big Ledger

SINCE I DON'T SEEM TO REMEMBER HALF OF WHAT I PHOTOGRAPHED, I frequently refer to the Big Ledger. I've mentioned it before but it seemed like a good time to actually show the thing, and to tease some of the shots I'll be putting up in the coming year.

the Big Ledger

The Big Ledger was a hardbound accounting ledger book that I "liberated" from Simpson's at the end of the summer I worked in their accounting department, tabulating sales and stock figures by hand as they prepared to consolidate their records as the venerable old department store was being merged into the Hudson's Bay Company.

It wasn't really theft since they were throwing away stacks of these old-school bookkeeping volumes as they were shutting down most of the department and transferring the figures to computers - a task clearly way above my pay grade, as I did all of my work that summer with a calculator and stacks of dot matrix printouts.

The Big Ledger was almost 200 pages long, but when I began entering data into it on Halloween of 1988, I was forced to skip about a dozen or so pages that had been used already. I began recording my career with a pair of portraits - singer Holly Cole and Michael Horwood, a composer, printed for Music Scene magazine, where my onetime Nerve editor Nancy Lanthier was working.

None of the early - formative, sometimes primitive, occasionally embarrassing - work I did for either Nerve or Graffiti magazine are recorded in the Big Ledger, since they'd both gone out of business by the time I decided it was a good idea to keep track of my career.

Starting from the left hand side of the page, I recorded the sequential number I assigned the print, contact sheet or slide I was sending out. (The Holly Cole portrait - the first entry - is assigned P80001; the "P" is for print, the "80" for 8x10. "C" was for contact sheet, "CS" for colour slide.) Moving from left to right I also recorded the name of the subject, the client it was being sent to, its intended use (editorial, promo, commission, gift, etc.,) the date it was sent, the date returned and the amount I was paid.

It seemed a simple enough system, and it served me reasonably well for the next twelve years. Except, of course, when I had a rush job and had to courier a job to a client fresh from the colour rental darkroom or slide lab where I didn't have the Big Ledger to record an entry. After a while I stopped recording when jobs were returned - they rarely were, in most cases. It's not the most accurate record of the busiest period of my career as a photographer, but it's the best I have.

The last entry was made in November of 2001 - a pair of framed prints I sent to a show of live music photography at a gallery in Texas. Between the first entry and the last I filled up 2,143 entries on 66 pages. After this point the work was too occasional - and I was too discouraged - to bother entering anything in the Big Ledger. In a few years the digital revolution would come along and make this sort of neo-Victorian record-keeping almost wholly pointless.

  

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.

 

Lights

Jameson Avenue, Toronto, December 2001

I DON'T IMAGINE THERE'S ANYTHING MORE PURELY PHOTOGRAPHIC THAN SHOOTING LIGHTS. This was taken almost fifteen years ago, just a few blocks from our apartment, on a street in Parkdale that encourages a friendly competition between the residents of its less-than-luxurious apartments to put on a display of Christmas lights.

I was assigned to write a piece about the street for Toronto Life, and spent an evening there just after dusk with my Rolleiflex, some rolls of Ilford Delta 400 and a tripod. This shot didn't make the cut for technical reasons, but I've always liked it nonetheless for its wild patterns and an illusion of depth and even movement.

The American flag in the top left corner also reminds me that this was taken just a few months after 9/11, when emotions were ragged and there was still a lot of bruised empathy in the air. It seems like so long ago now.

Here's wishing everyone a safe and Happy Christmas.

London, Christmas 1997

Volvo Amazon, Hampstead, London 1997

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO I FINALLY CROSSED AN OCEAN. An old friend was living in London with his girlfriend and wanted me to spend Christmas with them. I was 33 and single and desperate for something to knock me out of what seemed like a rut so I packed a bag and a camera and crossed the Atlantic for the first time.

My first few nights were spent experiencing something wholly new to me - jet lag. I'd sit up at night in my room in their top floor flat in Notting Hill and look over the rooftops toward the Westway and wonder: What next? My life had reached what seemed to me a crucial point; I was in my mid-thirties and single and watching my career contract perceptibly every year. I made enough money to get by but luxuries - like vacations - were beyond my means. I wouldn't even be in London if my friend hadn't paid for my ticket.

Most of all I felt terribly alone, but I had felt this way for long enough that it had begun to feel relatively normal, like a chronic illness that could be controlled but would never go away. I'd forget about it most of the time, but then came the days - like the ones where a slippage of time zones had deprived me of sleep - where it would pull me up short and make me feel unmoored and adrift.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London 1997

There was a whole new city to explore but for some reason - timidity, lack of funds, the immense gravitational pull of a pregnant woman close by - I stuck close to Elgin Crescent. We visited the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum (a Hogarth exhibition I was dying to see) and strolled around Soho and Knightsbridge. I made Christmas dinner - ham and turkey - which meant visiting London's superb butchers and fishmongers and living in the shadow of their impossibly high standards afterwards.

Even at the time I knew I was missing an opportunity. A quick trip on the Tube would have taken me to the Imperial War Museum or a walk around Whitehall or Greenwich or Oxford Street. I'd brought my last Spotmatic with me - the Pentax SV with the helpful lighting guide in surgical tape on the body - and sparingly shot my way through three or four rolls.

Highgate Cemetery, London 1997

One drizzly day Paul and I made a trip to Highgate Cemetery, one of the London sights I knew I wanted to see - and photograph. Shooting in Highgate is, frankly, a bit of a cheat; it's one of those places where you'll get a decent shot no matter where you point your lens - acres and acres of picturesque ruin that looks like a Hammer Pictures theme park.

Highgate Cemetery, London 1997

What I remember most is the weather during this mostly snowless holiday season. The vast variety and constancy of English rain is a cliche, but as soon as we left the Tube at Hampstead station I was struck by the dampness in the air - a kind of particulate fog that meant I had to wipe dry my camera lens every time I took a shot; it wasn't rain as much as a light fog with raindrops suspended in the cool, humid air. I wondered that the whole country wasn't thick with moss and mold.

Pierre and I smoke outside Waterloo Station. Photo by Paul Sarossy.

Just after Christmas our friend Pierre came over for a visit from Paris on the Eurostar. A plan to spend New Year's Eve in Paris came and went and we ended up ushering in 1998 in Notting Hill. Paul and Geraldine called it an early night so Pierre and I wandered the streets south toward Kensington and back again searching fruitlessly for a pub or a party. We burned through a pack of his cigarettes and mostly talked about our troubles with women.

Hampstead, London 1997

I came back with a few good photos and an overwhelming sense that things couldn't go on the way they were going. My life needed shaking up or else I'd end up everyone's hapless third wheel, a friend whose simmering life crisis made them an object of pity and, occasionally, a source of irritation.

I would meet the woman who became my wife two weeks later.

 

Winter

Caledon, Ont., Christmas Day, 1988

IT BEGAN SNOWING DURING ON THE WAY TO TERRA COTTA. We were driving to my sister's place in the country and it had been a green Christmas up till now. That would change quickly.

Holidays with my sister were a refuge. It was almost two years since mom had died, and we were still feeling bereft, so these Christmas retreats up in the woods were solace. My girlfriend would always fly to California to spend the holidays with her parents so I was happy to get away from the apartment and the city and feeling alone.

Caledon, Ont., Christmas Eve 1988

The snow started falling on the drive north from the city, dusting the fields outside Georgetown. I was still working at the record store, but I was just a few months from being fired from what would be my last retail job and begin working full time as a photographer. I took my camera everywhere I went, afraid to miss the chance at any shot that might help me build a reputation.

We'd just moved into the place in Parkdale - the loft with the hostile landlord and the thugs he'd hired as superintendents. Eventually I'd end up there alone, the girlfriend and the landlord long gone, and the heyday of my career as a photographer would happen in those three drafty rooms overlooking Queen Street. And all that time my trips north to Terra Cotta were the closest I'd ever get to a vacation from either Toronto or the anxiety of freelance work and bachelorhood.

The next day the show had dusted every tree up and down the road. I took the dogs for a walk and enjoyed that fantastic winter silence, broken only by our footsteps, the panting of the dogs, and the shutter of my Spotmatic.

Caledon, Ont., Christmas Day, 1988