Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, Toronto, April 2005

A PHOTOGRAPHER SHOULD REMEMBER WHEN THEY'VE TAKEN PICTURES OF A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER, but most of a day had passed after the news broke before I remembered that I had portraits of Kazuo Ishiguro, shot for the free national daily back when I considered myself just a writer with a camera. Perhaps that's why I forgot I'd taken them - they were just an add-on to the interview I did with Ishiguro when he passed through town on a book tour.

(An interview, I should add, that I also forgot I'd done until I was writing the paragraph above, and thought I should check to see if there was anything besides these photos in my files.)

To be fair, I was working very hard for the paper, writing columns and interviews and reviews and features and shooting other writers' stories in addition to my own. Work that was done in a rush, by someone who was resigned to having blown his chance at a career and was now, simply, doing a job to support a family. (My youngest daughter was born a few months before I took these photos.)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Toronto, April 2005

These photos were shot on the paper's Canon EOS Digital Rebel - otherwise known as the 300D, an entry-level, second generation SLR that took a 6.3 megapixel image, half that size if shot as a jpeg. It was the first digital SLR I used professionally, and I was still struggling with the difference between digital and film, and ascending a steep learning curve with Photoshop.

I was, to be frank, working on autopilot most of the time. Knowing that most photos would be cropped and run a single column wide, I didn't strive for much more than tight, graphic compositions. I was also out of the habit of imagining anything I was doing being portfolio work; every shoot was a job, often done in a scant minute or two at the end of an interview, and destined for disposable newsprint and a website that regularly scrubbed older stories.

Posterity was the last thing on my mind, never mind the possibility that a subject could become a Nobel Prize laureate.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Toronto, April 2005

I don't think I'm the only person who regards the Nobel prize with skepticism. Ishiguro is actually the first winner in years that I've actually read with pleasure - most years the winners have been utterly obscure: Svetlana Alexievich, Patrick Modiano, Mo Yan, Tomas Tranströmer, Herta Müller and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio are just the most recent recipients who made me wonder if the jury was just making up names.

But then again, who has heard of the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, back in 1901 - Sully Prudhomme? The long century since then are just as rich in authors with reputations lost to time: José Echegaray y Eizaguirre and Frédéric Mistral, who shared the award in 1904; the improbable duo of Henrik Pontoppidan and Karl Adolph Gjellerup, who shared it in 1917; Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, who won the prize in 1924, between George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats; Grazia Deledda (1926), Roger Martin du Gard (1937) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1959), who really deserves to be more famous with a name so delicious.

It's often seemed like the award was really just the Nobel Prize for Obscure Nordic Literature: What happened to the reputations of Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (1902), Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson (1903), Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1909), Sigrid Undset (1928), Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931), Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944), Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (1951) and Halldór Kiljan Laxness (1955)? Is it remotely possible that they could have been the peers of Kipling, Tagore, Thomas Mann, Eugene O'Neill, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway or Camus, who all won the award at the same time?

Bob Dylan's Nobel last year makes me wonder if there hasn't been a changing of the guard at Nobel headquarters - a coterie of t-shirt wearing, cable TV binge-watchers who've joked with each other that they're just softening up the public for the day they give the Nobel to Stephen King.

Mostly, though, I'm wondering all of this aloud because I can't remember much about my interview and portrait shoot with Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro except how I kept challenging him about the improbable motivations of the characters in his then-latest book, Never Let Me Go. For posterity, his response:

I think it’s fair to say that, like any metaphor, there’s a weak point, and that’s probably the weak point here - when you ask ‘Well, why don’t they run away?’ That’s the point where I have to come back and say, look, that’s beyond the point that I was interested in. I tried to do what I could by portraying a world that just didn’t contemplate the possibility of escape.

Today it might look like audacity; at the time, I was trying to keep myself engaged while spending most days writing recaps of episodes of The Amazing Race, Canadian Idol and The Apprentice.