The Boxer

Film shoot, Toronto, May 1990

WHILE I'VE ALWAYS BEEN PROUD OF THE RESULTS OF THIS SHOOT, I've never felt like I could take total credit for them. My best friend from high school was a cinematographer, and he invited me to come on the set of a short film he was shooting. "It's a boxing film," he told me, knowing that was exactly the sort of thing I was dying to photograph.

The room was set dressed and lit when I showed up, and they kept the smoke machine going pretty much all day. So these are partially my pictures and partially his, which is to say that they aren't really taken with available light, and that while I might have lit it this way, I didn't - I was using my friend Paul's lighting. With that caveat, I still have to say that I liked what I got on that day, nearly thirty years ago.

Film shoot, Toronto, May 1990

The film was directed by Milan Cheylov, at that time an actor and aspiring director working with his wife, Lori, to get his new career off the ground. He shot a couple of short films with Paul, both of which featured Ron Savoy, a young boxer Milan had taken under his wing.

Ron was a good looking kid, and I ended up doing headshots for both him and Milan, which basically constituted the majority of my career as a headshot photographer. I don't know what happened to Ron, but Milan is a television director whose iMDB profile includes shows like 24, Law & Order: LA, Bones, Prison Break, Dexter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Designated Survivor.

Film shoot, Toronto, May 1990

The film was shot at Newsboys Gym, a venerable boxing club in the east end of Toronto, long gone now, though it did inspire a women's gym called Newsgirls that's still open. While I was shooting there I wanted to capture as much of the atmosphere of the place as possible, since even then I knew that places like this were living on borrowed time in a city that's changed so much since I started my career.

Like I said, I have always remembered this shoot as a success. Cheap as ever, I only shot two rolls of 120 film, but I could have scanned more than just the shots featured here. It was probably the shoot that convinced me that I'd made the right decision to sell my Mamiya C330 and buy my first Rolleiflex; the camera was so easy to use and the results were hard to deny. This is probably where my love affair with the Rollei begins, but more about that later.