Burroughs

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, March 1991

"WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? Do you want the hat on? The hat off? Just tell me what you want." I was standing on the roof of an abandoned factory with William S. Burroughs, who was being very gracious and pliant in front of my camera, though my only real instruction to him was little more than "Just stand there and be yourself!"

I remember begging Irene, the photo editor at NOW, to let me photographer Burroughs. Local director David Cronenberg was filming the unfilmable Naked Lunch in the old General Electric factory on Lansdowne and the book's author had been flown in for a press conference, where he'd talk up the project with Cronenberg and Peter Weller, who was playing Burroughs' onscreen alter ego.

Even if you were skeptical of the Beats, you'd have read a few Burroughs books back in the '70s and '80s, especially if you were a certain kind of nihilistic punk. His funereal stare and morbid image was a poor fit with the proto-hippie ecstatic poetics of his friends like Allen Ginsberg. Gun-toting and junk-shooting, Burroughs anticipated the hangover from hippie "liberation" in his books, which were grotesque and apocalyptic and very, very appealing to anyone who'd been unable to suppress a snicker while reading Howl.

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, March 1991

I showed up at the Naked Lunch press conference still unsure about whether I'd get my five minutes to shoot Burroughs. Just to be safe, I shot three rolls of the man while he talked to the media, carefully framing to fit our restrictive cover format, but I was grateful when it was all over and I was told that I'd be able to get my portraits. Those three rolls were quickly forgotten, and there's no point scanning anything from them today.

I found a spot just outside the press conference room, overlooking the abandoned GE buildings, and shot a roll of cross-processed colour for the cover. Like most of my cross-processed work, it was done to bring out contrast and saturation, but when I scan them today, I find myself dialing back both in Photoshop. This was where Burroughs intoned the words above to me; if you know anything about the man, I'm sure you can hear them, droll and monotone, in your head.

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, March 1991

For the full-page inside portrait I'd found a walkway between two of the old factory buildings just nearby. I enjoyed taking the black and white shot that ran with the cover feature much more than the cover shot, for obvious reasons - no strict "head on the side, lots of blank space" formatting, and it ran full page most of the time, which was rare. After waiting for years to get a portrait of Burroughs, I knew this was my chance to get one good image.

Ultimately, I think I enjoyed Burroughs' saturnine personality more than his writing. Listening to him read his Dr. Benway stories, for instance, gave you more of a sense of their grim comic potential. In fact, after you'd heard Burroughs read once, his voice would cue up in your head whenever you opened one of his books. My friend Chris and I used to enjoy impersonating him while quoting back lines like "You've got to take a broooad, general view of things." I wanted to try and capture Burroughs whole image, so I tried to get as much of the man as I could into the frame.

I placed Burroughs in the middle of the walkway with the light from the small, irregularly placed windows on either side lighting him, then shot a whole roll of minor variations - moving closer, then farther away, crouching down, then shooting from slightly above him, all with my wide-angle lens. Like much of my work at the time, I was working from something I'd seen before - a famous portrait that I'd always loved:

Alfred Krupp by Arnold Newman, 1963

Newman deliberately set out to take a sinister portrait of the German industrialist Alfred Krupp. The photographer was Jewish and Krupp had been a friend of Hitler's, making quite a lot of money from the Nazi militarization of the country. Even as a "fan," my feelings about Burroughs were always mixed; I liked his lack of sentimentality and the bleak, nihilistic tone of his work, but it was impossible to deny that this was the man who shot his wife in the head playing "William Tell" in Mexico, used family money to hire lawyers to stall the case, then skipped the country. Then he spent the rest of his career trying to explain away the killing as a sort of creative act that forced him to write.

Up close, I see the thin-lipped, cruel old lady's mouth, and cold grey eyes that survey you with an almost predatory appraisal. There was something infernal about the old man, and even through my youthful fandom I had an urge to capture it on film.

William S. Burroughs died in Lawrence, Kansas on August 2, 1997.

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Carolyn

Carolyn Cassady, Toronto, Oct., 1990

CAROLYN CASSADY HAD NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT HER CLAIM TO POSTERITY.  "That's the only reason anyone is interested in me, is because I was married to Neal Cassady and the lover of Jack Kerouac," she sternly instructed the directors of Love Always, Carolyn, a 2011 documentary about her, in the film's first shot.

"That's all the interest is in me. No one has cared about anything else. Even you."

I photographed Carolyn Cassady at the Toronto Festival of Authors in 1990, fourteen years after the publication of Heart Beat, her first memoir about her menage with Cassady and Kerouac, and six years before Off The Road, her second book about living in the centre of the Beat storm. She was at the festival to try to tell what she considered the real story of those two men as separate from the myths that had grown up around them. Two decades later Love Always, Carolyn captured her still at it, the myth as strong as ever despite her efforts.

Carolyn Cassady, Toronto, Oct., 1990

This was the same author's festival where I shot Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins, in the same hotel rooms using whatever available light I could find. I knew almost nothing about Carolyn Cassady beyond the barest of biographical details, but found myself training my Nikon on an elegant older lady, with impeccable clothes and manners and that frank, confident bearing unique to aging women who were once great beauties.

Cassady has been played by Sissy Spacek, Radha Mitchell and Kirsten Dunst in three different movies (so far,) but she always struggled for money despite her unwelcome fame. There's a tense scene in Love Always, Carolyn where she stops by the book table at a British literary festival and notes a new Penguin edition of On The Road with her photo of Jack and Neal on the cover.

It's a famous snapshot, taken by Carolyn, and featured in her New York Times obituary. She crossly notes to the hapless young woman manning the table that it's been reprinted without her permission, uncredited and unpaid. Later, she admits that royalties for its use had been a major part of her income since the deaths of the two men in the photo.

Carolyn Cassady, Toronto, Oct., 1990

The documentary captures an awkward family Christmas dinner where Carolyn shrinks in embarrassment as her children discuss putting out a Cassady jug wine with her famous picture on the label. She seems similarly chagrined at a Beat festival in Denver, where she's surrounded by Kerouacolytes who listen raptly but ignore completely her pleas to discard the myth of the happy-go-lucky Beats, and especially that of her own husband as their manic, wild man muse, a myth tended lovingly by Allen Ginsberg until it took on an apparently indestructible life of its own.

Cassady insisted till the end that her husband was much happier as paterfamilias, working and paying off the mortgage on their suburban home and raising his children. His tragedy was that his chaotic upbringing left him unable to manage that apparently banal task without lurching off for months or years, eventually turning into a "trained bear" performing his Dean Moriarty act for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a role that predictably destroyed him. Her tragedy was that she set her mind on making him the man in her life, a poor decision that ended in regret, alone in his shadow for decades after he flamed out.

Carolyn Cassady died in Bracknell, Berkshire on September 20, 2013.

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Hubert

Hubert Selby Jr., Toronto, May 1990

HUBERT SELBY JR. SHOWED UP IN TOWN not long after the movie version of his book Last Exit to Brooklyn had been released. The film gave him a second (or third?) act to his career, and was the likely reason that a film would be made of his Requiem for a Dream a decade later. I photographed him on assignment for NOW magazine without knowing much about him beyond Uli Edel's film, which was pretty hard going, as you'd expect from a film built around the gang rape of a drunken prostitute.

I don't think he was destined for a cover story, but I shot a roll of colour slide anyway. Actually, I shot only half a roll, the other half being filled with Steve Lacy photos I'd taken a couple of weeks previous. I was still very parsimonious with film, and if I didn't finish a roll, I'd note the frame I was at, rewind it carefully and mark the film canister with the number. When I had an opportunity to finish the roll, I'd load it back into my Nikon and forward the roll to that frame with the lens cap on the camera. Looking back on this tightness from the perspective of the digital age, it seems ridiculous.

Hubert Selby Jr., Toronto, May 1990

Selby was often grouped in with the beat writers, a matter most of guilt by association. He was friends with Amiri Baraka (then still LeRoi Jones,) shared an agent with Jack Kerouac, and his first novel was praised by Alan Ginsberg. The book was the subject of a Lady Chatterly-like prosecution for indecency in England that made it a must-read for fans of transgressive literature. By the time I met him he'd been teaching creative writing at the University of Southern California for seven years and had been championed and published by Henry Rollins, giving him a whole new audience of literary punks.

I photographed Selby in one of the usual downtown hotels - my guess is either the Four Seasons in Yorkville or the Sutton Place (both now closed.) I used the always reliable "Anton light" intending to boost the contrast to get more grain. Selby was pretty lighthearted for most of the shoot, mugging and goofing around for my camera, playing on his reputation for being a leading light of "deviant literature."

Hubert Selby Jr., Toronto, May 1990

The shot above was particularly funny considering the fact that Selby probably shouldn't have been alive by the time I shot him. As a nineteen-year-old merchant marine, he contracted TB and underwent experimental treatment that produced complications, and by the time the doctors were finished with him he had several fewer ribs and most of his lungs missing.

His long recovery led to a heroin addiction that lasted for years, though he'd been clean for nearly two decades by the time I took these photos. This frame is really gallows humour, and probably the most antic author portrait I ever took.

Hubert Selby Jr. died in Los Angeles on April 6, 2004.

AN APPEAL: This blog is over a year old, and hard use has taken its toll on my old HP scanner, which now only produces clear scans on a narrow strip on the right margin of its glass. I'm on the market for a new scanner, but the only comparable replacement costs several hundred dollars beyond my budget, so I'm asking anyone who's enjoyed what I've been doing here - and wants to see more - if they can chip in and help. There's a PayPal button up near the top, and anything would be appreciated. Also, if you feel moved, please click on my Amazon.com links - a small percentage of anything you buy helps fund this blog. Thank you so much in advance.

  

Elmore & George

Elmore Leonard & George V. Higgins, Toronto, Oct. 1990

IT USED TO BE SO MUCH EASIER TO PHOTOGRAPH PEOPLE. The film festival is on here, and a journalist at one of the dailies has written a story complaining that the big studios and their publicists have made access to stars and celebrities harder than ever, leaving writers covering the event to churn out "regurgitated wire copy and 'hot take' write-arounds."

"Readers," he despairs, "are left with one big echo chamber."

This is old news to me, frankly, and one of the reasons why I stopped covering the film festival years ago, after twenty-five years of almost non-stop accreditation. It reminded me, however, that it used to be a lot easier in general to show up with a camera and take pictures of people, if you didn't mind working in somewhat ad hoc circumstances and could summon up just enough charm to get a friendly publicist on your side.

These photos are a quarter century old, and were taken at the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto, back when it was still the more humbly-named Festival of Authors. I'd had some success there the previous year just showing up with a camera and some tenuous affiliation with Nerve magazine, then on its last legs.

I had the backing of NOW magazine this time, and ended up walking away with portraits of writers like Fay Weldon, Marianne Wiggins (then still married to fatwa-cursed and in-hiding Salman Rushdie,) Edmund Wilson, Carolyn Cassady (more on her next week) and Richard Ford. The big catch for me, though, was Elmore Leonard, whose very popular mystery novels I'd been reading in the midst of a years-long hard-boiled pulp binge.

Elmore Leonard, Toronto, Oct. 1990

Leonard was already famous thanks to movie adaptations of his books like Mr. Majestyk, 52 Pick-Up and Stick, and would continue to enjoy most-favored status in Hollywood with Out of Sight, Be Cool, Jackie Brown and Get Shorty. He wrote screenplays for many of these, and his books and short stories are a well to which producers continue to return.

When I arrived at Leonard's hotel room, the publicist took me aside and offered me a "two-fer;" Leonard was a big fan of writer George V. Higgins, also appearing at the festival, and they'd met for the first time that day. They were planning on heading out to a bar to deepen their acquaintance, but if I wanted I could shoot the two of them together. Why would I say no?

I didn't now much about Higgins. He was considered a "writer's writer," whose only movie adaptation so far was the incredibly bleak The Friends of Eddie Coyle starring Robert Mitchum. He had been a lawyer, newspaper columnist and U.S. attorney in his home state of Massachusetts. His books were a reflection of this - hard, cynical, often grimy depictions of life among crooks, hacks and politicians in and around Boston. I figured I could bluff my way through a photo shoot, however, and after all who really cares what a photographer thinks?

George V. Higgins, Toronto, Oct. 1990

The whole shoot was done in "Anton light," with the 35mm lens on my Nikon F3 fully open and the film pushed at least a stop. This was fine for the individual portraits but I was never able to get both men in perfect focus in the same frame. The individual portrait of Leonard ran in NOW and ended up in my portfolio for a while, but this is probably the first time anyone has seen the shots I took of Higgins, with or without his new friend.

Both Leonard and Higgins were known as great writers of realistic dialogue; both men let their characters' words advance the action and define their personalities and motivations more than omniscient third-person description, and Leonard's talent for it was probably one of the reasons why he was such a favorite of moviemakers. It was the kind of critical note that people used to share with each other back in what looks today like the waning years of mass middlebrow literary culture.

Elmore Leonard & George V. Higgins, Toronto, Oct. 1990

If you've ever had to transcribe dialogue or interview tapes you'll know, of course, that it was a ridiculous statement. Except for rare exceptions, not a lot of people speak in complete sentences or coherent paragraphs, and most everyday speech is full of wasted syllables and verbal tics that don't conform to meter or indicate much beyond unformed thoughts fighting to take shape.

Which is why dialogue written by "masters" like Leonard or Higgins is really as composed as a sonnet, where the little details that seem realistic are more like a wall painted to look distressed or a trompe l'oeil crack. Like this, taken (almost) at random from A Choice of Enemies, Higgins' 1984 novel about political corruption in the Massachusetts state legislature:

 "Never mind the bullshit, Bernie," Costello said. "Never mind trying to blow smoke at me like you had some rookie on your hands that you could just intimidate. We go back a long way, my friend, and I know most of your tricks by now. Don't surprise me any more when the little car stops in the circus and the forty clowns pile out of it. I know about the trapdoor in the floor." 

"Okay," Morgan said, resting his chin on his hands, "make your speech."

This sort of dialogue sounds right coming from the men you imagine in Higgins' story - with their wide-lapeled suit jackets and neat sideburns and the collar-length hair they're still not used to and will be grateful to trim back when styles change again. Today, of course, we'd have to make a powerful henchman like Francis X. Costello choose his words more carefully, out of habit and with the knowledge that even a political bullyboy needs to sound like a sensitive bureaucrat attuned to the many bruised sensitivities of constituents and the inquisitional ears of the media.

Let's not even talk about all the "likes" and "you knows" and other tentative weasel words and verbal flotsam that an author would even have to insert judiciously into the dialogue of characters in their thirties and forties to give some sense of verisimilitude with the contemporary. For books that will likely sell a fraction of what the average name writer at the Festival of Authors would have expected twenty-five years ago. It was a different time.

George V. Higgins died in Milton, Massachusetts on November 6, 1999.

Elmore Leonard died in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan on August 20, 2013.

AN APPEAL: This blog is over a year old, and hard use has taken its toll on my old HP scanner, which now only produces clear scans on a narrow strip on the right margin of its glass. I'm on the market for a new scanner, but the only comparable replacement costs several hundred dollars beyond my budget, so I'm asking anyone who's enjoyed what I've been doing here - and wants to see more - if they can chip in and help. There's a PayPal button up near the top, and anything would be appreciated. Also, if you feel moved, please click on my Amazon.com links - a small percentage of anything you buy helps fund this blog. Thank you so much in advance.

 
 

Dr. Clarke

John Cooper Clarke, the Garrison, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2015

I HAVE WAITED A LONG TIME TO TAKE THESE PICTURES. John Cooper Clarke - Doctor Clarke, as he refers to himself now, having received an honorary degree - showed up in Toronto last week, four months after cancelling a previous appearance, and thirty-four years after the last time he appeared onstage here.

I went with two friends and my new camera, the Fuji X-30 that is fast becoming my favorite camera ever. (Thanks again, Kathy and Arnie!) I hugged the stage and sweated bullets and shot a few hundred frames, hoping to make up for lost time and missed opportunities by getting as many decent shots as I could. In the end, I don't think I embarrassed myself.

John Cooper Clarke, the Garrison, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2015

I first heard Manchester's "punk poet" John Cooper Clarke on CFNY-FM back at the turn of the '80s, where they'd play his invective masterpiece "Twat" late at night. Earlier in the day, though, their favorite Clarke track was "Beasley Street," a poem that he delivers at a breakneck pace solo, but which was showcased on the Snap, Crackle & Bop record with a stately musical setting, courtesy producer Martin Hannett and Clarke's "band," the Invisible Girls.

It was written to describe the post-industrial, pre-Thatcher urban decay of urban northwest England in general and Clarke's own Salford in particular, but to me it evoked the declining working class Toronto neighbourhood where I was growing up. Objectively - and with years of hindsight - I have to admit that Salford in the '70s was probably far more dire than Mount Dennis, but when you're young this sort of evocative squalor resonates deeply and romantically.

John Cooper Clarke, the Garrison, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2015

I went nuts with the live shots partly out of frustration; I'd been trying to arrange an interview and portrait shoot with Clarke since the gig was announced earlier this year, and it looked hopeful up until the night before the show, when my e-mail exchanges with Clarke's publicist went suddenly cold. I was desperate to make up for the lack of access with the best set of live shots I was capable of making

The thing is that Clarke has been my wish list of portrait subjects for decades, a list I made with my friend Chris back at the start of our careers. Chris has, I think, ticked off a few of the subjects on his own list; I've been far less lucky, and by now many of the names on my list are dead. Clarke survives, quite against the odds - he had a ferocious drug habit for most of the '80s, a "lost decade" where he wrote nothing - but considering the long interval between his Toronto appearances, I don't give myself decent odds on getting my portrait session.

John Cooper Clarke, the Garrison, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2015

The crowd was, to put it charitably, of a certain age. It was largely the same bunch of aging punks I see at most of the rare gigs that tempt me out of the house - something that I find comforting and a bit pathetic at the same time, and I fully allow that I'm implicated in the blanket description of a "crowd of aging punks."

There were youngsters there, of course, but I have a suspicion that the wrinkly, paunchy, arthritic majority in the room were responsible for the warm reception Clarke's between-poem banter received. That stage patter and schtick made up the majority of his show at the Garrison by a considerable ratio, and it was often bawdy and even obscene, spiked with the wryly cruel humour that's as northern as pie and chips.

In front of English crowds, Clarke has acknowledged that he got his first big break, pre-punk, from Bernard Manning, back when he was doing the northern working man's club circuit. I doubt if a young crowd would have responded to Clarke's humour as happily; it wasn't anything like the "racist" material that made working class comedians like Manning both successful and reviled, but it was a product of a culture where everybody is a target for a jab or swipe, the teller included.

The young - the urban, "educated" young especially - have come of age in a far more anodyne world, where "problematic" jokes are like radioactive material, handled by sanctioned individuals, if at all. They seem to respond to humour with a sidelong glance, to see if anyone else is laughing, their outrage button never far away, but in a room like the Garrison where the oldsters got both the inspiration and the intent of Clarke's gags, they let themselves get swept away. Yay, old punks.

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Twin towers

West Broadway looking south from West Houston, NYC, 1989

I KNEW THAT I'D CAUGHT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER with my cameras while shooting Manhattan streetscapes, but my memory has been so faulty lately that I couldn't be sure. I intended to run this shot a year ago but it took me longer than I thought to excavate this frame from behind the analog wall.

This is the only shot I have of the twin towers, even though I spent the better part of a day in lower Manhattan shooting within blocks of where they stood. At the time, I'm sure I reasoned that the towers were a New York City visual cliche, and while I was aiming to take shots that said "NYC!" without being too obvious about it all, anything that featured them thrusting out over the skyline was just too picture postcard.

It also has to be remembered that the towers weren't well loved during their brief lifespan. Architecture fans didn't have much nice to say about them; they were a monumental expression of a late modernism that isn't given the same warm backwards glance we've used to celebrate postwar midcentury modernism like the Seagram Building, Googie diners or Richard Neutra houses.

They were big and hard to miss, which is probably why I worked to avoid them in my Rollei viewfinder when I was in their shadows, and only deigned to include the towers in my frame when they were far away, nestled in the long crease of a street of brick tenements and commercial buildings, varnished over by late afternoon mist.

There have been only two moments in my life when I knew viscerally that I was witnessing history. The first was the week I spent at my sister's place in Caledon watching the Berlin Wall fall on her TV. The second was the morning my friend Scott called me unusually early and just said "turn on your television." I watched the second plane hit and knew the towers were going to fall before they did.

Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it all. The world certainly doesn't look the way I imagined it would in the anxious, gut-sick weeks that followed. I know people who think it was some kind of conspiracy. I know a lot of people who act like it never happened, or think that remembering it with horror and anger is an overreaction, and that whoever hijacked those planes had a reason that we can understand, or even sympathize with.

I don't know who frightens me more.

My daughters have some vague understanding that something happened in New York City not long before they were born, but unlike the weeks and months that followed that day, they've lived in a world where images of low banking planes and fireballs and leaping bodies and collapsing skyscrapers and lethal dust clouds have been scrubbed away. They have a better idea of what trench warfare was like than an event that set the tone for the century they will call their own.

I have books and videos sitting on shelves and in hard drives, ready to show them when curiosity pierces the amnesiac fog that has, increasingly, drawn a curtain over the last decade and a half.

But the towers were there, once. Even I have proof.

 

AN APPEAL: This blog is celebrating its first anniversary, and hard use has taken its toll on my old HP scanner, which now only produces clear scans on a narrow strip on the right margin of its glass. I'm on the market for a new scanner, but the only comparable replacement costs several hundred dollars beyond my budget, so I'm asking anyone who's enjoyed what I've been doing here - and wants to see more - if they can chip in and help. There's a PayPal button up near the top, and anything would be appreciated. Also, if you feel moved, please click on my Amazon.com links - a small percentage of anything you buy helps fund this blog. Thank you so much in advance.

CNE: Summer's end

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, September 2015

ANOTHER YEAR HAS PASSED in its customary way around here, with a hot, humid Labour Day weekend and a day with the family at the Canadian National Exhibition. Last year I brought my camera on assignment; this year I just brought one along, intending to capture glimpses while I waited in the inevitable line-ups.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, September 2015

Perhaps because of the crowds and the crush and the noise, I always find myself looking up when I'm at the Ex. For a few weeks every year, people are suddenly in motion above the ground on this spot, hauled and thrown through the air by spindly, temporary structures of dubious structural integrity. On Labour Day weekend, the sky is split by roaring jet engines and etched with chalky smoke trails for the air show.

With apologies to Charles Pachter:

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, September 2015

The Ex takes on its most magical aspect at night. I couldn't imagine leaving before sunset, or riding the ferris wheel in the midday heat. The rides that are merely mechanical wonders in the full light of day become mysterious and perhaps more potentially lethal when lit by floodlamps and their own marquees of coloured, blinking lights.

This year for the first time it occured to me that one day, hopefully not too soon, I'll probably be too old for all of this.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, September 2015

AN APPEAL: This blog is celebrating its first anniversary, and hard use has taken its toll on my old HP scanner, which now only produces clear scans on a narrow strip on the right margin of its glass. I'm on the market for a new scanner, but the only comparable replacement costs several hundred dollars beyond my budget, so I'm asking anyone who's enjoyed what I've been doing here - and wants to see more - if they can chip in and help. There's a PayPal button up near the top, and anything would be appreciated. Also, if you feel moved, please click on my Amazon.com links - a small percentage of anything you buy helps fund this blog. Thank you so much in advance.

NOW

NOW magazine newspaper box, Church & Wellington streets, Toronto, August 1990

I PROBABLY SHOT MORE PHOTOS FOR NOW MAGAZINE than any other client, by a very wide margin. I shot my first assignment for them in December of 1988 and handed in my last in November of 1999. I had a lot of other clients when I began working for NOW - including the Village Voice, the New York Times, Guitar World magazine (more on them later) - but by the time my decade-plus run with NOW was over, they were my only regular gig.

That was a problem. But more on that later.

My boss for the whole time I was at NOW was Irene Grainger, the paper's photo editor, and it was thanks to her that the paper had a reputation for interesting, creative photography, the sort of thing that the dailies would have considered too "arty." I was the youngest regular shooter on the masthead, and Irene's relationship with me had a maternal aspect - alternately solicitous, encouraging, concerned and disappointed.

I tested her patience by handing in work ever closer - and past - deadline, struggling in my airless, makeshift darkroom to satisfy my own (often incoherent) vision and the peculiar technical demands of a newsprint publication in the mostly pre-digital age. Thanks to NOW I had some pretty amazing access, and produced most of my best work. I also shot an awful lot of stuff that no one has any reason to look at ever again.

Since my posts on this blog have gotten more chronological, it follows that much of what I'll be putting up here in the coming months will be from my NOW years. Looking back, the wonder of my time at the paper wasn't that it basically gave me a living, but that I lasted as long as I did, as the course of my time at this very left-leaning alternative free weekly coincided with my own gradual drift politically rightward.

The scan above was shot for an in-house ad campaign, and involved the nice people in circulation dropping off a brand new newspaper box on the traffic island right across from the Gooderham Building, where I set up with a flash and a softbox at dusk, shooting westward toward the business district skyline with my Bronica SQa.

I believe the cover of the paper in the clear window on the door of the box is by me as well - Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness, a band much beloved by NOW and Toronto at the time. This photo - a minor technical challenge, probably interesting today mostly for its glimpse of a cityscape that's changed quite a bit since then - pinpoints a particular time in my career, when I had a steady gig and a growing reputation and didn't need to do anything but take pictures to make my rent.

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