Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate

Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate, NYC, July 1996

NEW YORK CITY FASCINATES ME. I'm sure that being fascinated by New York probably marks me as a true provincial, but if that's true, I'll accept the verdict. For about a decade starting in the mid-'80s, I found myself in New York regularly, at first visiting women that I was either getting to know or breaking up with, or on work assignments, back when NOW magazine had travel budgets to send photographers to shoot covers.

In the summer of 1996 I was assigned to shoot Toumani Diabate, a West African musician, for an upcoming cover, so they dispatched me on a quick day trip to New York City where he was playing with fellow Malian Bassekou Kouyate. They'd just recorded an album together and were staying in a hotel down by Wall Street, so I began pre-visualizing the two men with their flowing robes and instruments made of gourds and skin and gut on the narrow old streets of Lower Manhattan, in front of the banking towers.

Toumani Diabate, NYC, July 1996

I arrived early to scout locations, and found a really nice spot in a side door of the Federal Reserve Building. I collected Diabate and Kouyate at their hotel and brought them to the spot; I told them that I could only feature one of them on the cover, so I asked Diabate to take his kora out of its case and sit down to play in the arched doorway, underneath the massive masonry blocks that make the Fed building stand out among all the other vintage skyscrapers.

We didn't take a single frame before an armed security guard showed up and told us that we had to move on - that they didn't allow photo shoots this close to the Fed building. I wondered how they'd spotted us so quickly - it was literally a matter of a minute or two - but I apologized and asked Diabate if he'd mind if we found another location.

We walked around the corner of the Fed building and down William Street to the Chase Bank Plaza, which seemed to offer a variation on what I was looking for - a contrast between the men in their robes and the massive old towers behind them. This time I was able to shoot two rolls of 120 film with my Rolleis before another security guard showed up and told us that we were on private property, and that we needed a permit to shoot here.

I've always remembered this very difficult, awkward shoot, with its logistical and technical difficulties, and wondered where exactly it all happened. The location of my cover shots were easy enough to find - the Chase Plaza is the only space like it in lower Manhattan, and the wall of the Fed building makes it easy to find the exact spot. Diabate was sitting right where the little white square is hovering at the corner of the plaza, but the concrete guardrail behind him has since been replaced by a much sleeker one in glass and tubular steel.

Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate, NYC, July 1996

The location of my second shoot, with a now-very upset Diabate and Kouyate, was a bit harder to pin down, since the fencing I stood them against obviously indicated a future building site, and the likelihood that the view through the vacant lot behind them has long been obscured.

There's a blog, Flaming Pablum, written by a native New Yorker and music fanatic that I've followed for years, and he regularly obsesses over bits of Manhattan time capsule archaeology, trying to find the locations of iconic band shots and other scenes from the past, usually in collaboration with Bob Egan's Pop Spots blog. After reading about their hunts for the spot where Neil Young was photographed for After the Gold Rush, or where the Plasmatics stood for a promo shoot, I thought I'd give it a try.

Thankfully Google Street View makes this a whole lot easier, without having to buy a plane ticket. With nothing but the rather grand building across the vacant lot behind the musicians to go on, I hovered over Wall Street on my computer for an hour, looking for what appeared to be a wedge-shaped building next to a new tower, when I discovered that we hadn't gone very far at all - just across William to the corner of Cedar, where Diabate and Kouyate stood against the long-gone fence just behind where the burly man in the dark suit is walking in the photo above.

Looking back, I'm amazed at how, after flying all the way to New York City, I really only did two set-ups. Maybe I was feeling frustrated, perhaps even as angry as Kouyate was, judging by his expressions on the contact sheets. It seems a shame - if I'd been a bit more patent, and exercised better bedside manner, I might have persuaded the two men to help me find an even better location to pose them with their instruments; only now do I realize that Bassekou Kouyate never had a chance to take his ngoni - a form of lute - out of its case. There's something sort of lovely about the shot of Diabate with his kora, and I might have gotten something else like it, perhaps even better, of the two men.

It's not that I wasn't a fan of their music - I've been listening to West African griot music since the mid-'80s, a wholly soothing sound built around the cascading, harp-like sound of the kora and the balaphon. In retrospect I can't be angry at the security guards who kept moving us along; it was only three years since the first World Trade Centre bombing, and I'm sure they had orders to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. In any case, I can't help but remember this shoot with some frustration, and as an opportunity missed mostly because I got a case of the nerves.

Grounded

Ash Wednesday self-portrait, Toronto, 2017

I'VE BEEN STICKING CLOSE TO HOME SINCE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, but a new round of travel assignments have started and I'm off to Belfast this afternoon. That doesn't mean my cameras have stayed in their cases, and in any case everybody needs to exercise if they're going to stay in shape.

My main venue has been the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I've spent many more Saturdays wandering around to keep out of the winter chill while my youngest daughter was at her weekly art class. As usual, the big attraction isn't so much the art on the walls as the people looking at the art - my favorite subjects, caught surreptitiously with my little Fuji camera set to waist level viewfinder mode.

Art Gallery of Ontario, Winter 2017

I don't find winter streets terribly evocative, but one morning after the snow had melted a warm front moved in and brought a thick fog with it. I grabbed my camera and headed down to the park at the end of the street.

Earlscourt Park, February 2017

I'd be lying if I said I was housebound all winter - I was invited to appear as a guest on a TV show to talk about movies, which meant an unexpected overnight trip to the suburbs of Burlington, Vermont. I woke up early on the morning we taped and headed out for a wander around the streets near the hotel.

Williston, VT, January 2017

Finally, Motorama came around again this year, and with it a chance to shoot rat rods, muscle cars and hot rods, lovingly restored and put on display by their owners in a big hall in the convention centre out by the airport. More than the big auto show, this is probably my favorite car event of the year here.

Motorama, March 2017

Talladega

Looking down the track, Talladega Superspeedway, Alabama, Oct. 2016

IT'S THE SIZE OF THE PLACE THAT GETS YOU FIRST. A whole town fits into the infield at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway, and that doesn't take into account the town that springs up in the campgrounds outside the track for the race. Despite this, the race weekend never feels overcrowded or mobbed.

I jumped at my editor's suggestion that I build a travel story around living in the infield at a NASCAR race, and when the nice people at Alabama Tourism stepped up to make it happen, I knew I was going to be given a photo opportunity I'd probably never have again.

Infield campground, Talladega Superspeedway, Alabama, Oct. 2016

The infield is a story on its own, independent of the race, and I'll have more on that tomorrow. What was amazing was how well it all worked, with thousands of people showing up with tents, campers and RVs of varying size and quality to create a makeshift community for a hard-partying weekend, then disperse within a day of the race ending.

As a logistical feat, it's actually more impressive than the well-oiled machine that brings the cars, drivers, mechanics and crew to a new track almost every weekend. The people who make that happen are a community of professionals who get paid to make that happen; the folks in the infield and in the campgrounds outside the track are paying for the chance to sit in the sun (or rain) and celebrate their love of car racing, coming from around the country (and the world) with few certainties other than that they'll probably get drunk, eat grilled meat, and use a porta-potty.

Talladega Superspeedway, Alabama, Oct. 2016

As I wrote elsewhere, shooting the race itself proved to be far harder than I anticipated, and was nothing at all like photographing the Indycar street circuit here in Toronto. It was a good thing, then, that my job wasn't to cover a race but the whole circus around it.

The great attraction of a NASCAR race is how close fans can get to the cars and the drivers, so the garages and pits were thronged with people right up until the race started. After my competence with shooting racecars at the Honda Indy improved enough that it felt less challenging, I found myself turning my camera on the people at the track, and the hunt for photos there has never lost its thrill.

Race day, Talladega Superspeedway, Alabama, Oct. 2016

It's one thing to do street photography. It's another where the street has no speed limit, and half the people there are wearing clothes branded with corporate logos. And then there's the constant potential for accidents and misadventure, built into the the experience and anticipated with the waiver you sign just to be there. There's no other place like it.

I'd like to do it again - maybe at Talladega, but certainly at some other iconic track like Indy or Daytona or Watkins Glen. At the moment, though, I'm without any client interested in sending me back to a track with my cameras, so my weekend at Talladega felt something like a swansong.

Alabama

Muscle Shoals Studios, Sheffield, Alabama, Oct. 2016

I DON'T KNOW WHEN I BECAME FASCINATED BY THE AMERICAN SOUTH. It might have started with Elvis, who has been a constant in my life. It might have become more acute when I inherited a dusty copy of Soul Man by Sam & Dave from a pile of my brother's records in the attic when I was in my early teens. It was definitely in full effect by the time I was studying literature in college. And except for a brief trip to Atlanta to shoot the Joffrey Ballet in the '90s and a stopover at Dallas-Fort Worth airport on my way to and from Peru, I'd never been there.

Until last month.

I began planning a trip to Alabama the moment I started writing travel for the Toronto Star earlier this year, with the ultimate goal of living in the infield at Talladega Superspeedway for the Alabama 500. On the way, a side trip up to Muscle Shoals and the music studios there became part of the itinerary, and the music geek in me became as fully frenzied as the motorsport geek.

Birmingham, Alabama, October 2016

The trip began, though, in Birmingham, the biggest city in the state and, along with Selma, one of the flashpoints of the civil rights era. I stayed in a historic bed and breakfast in the Five Points neighbourhood, and with an afternoon to kill after my flight got in, I set out to warm up a bit and shoot the side streets of the area.

I suppose to a nature photographer all cities look the same, but for a city kid like me, any half dozen blocks of a town or city have their own unique quality. Birmingham is built on hills, so my eye was drawn to the gradients and slopes and undulations over which the streets travel and on which the buildings cling. Like any new place, I wished I'd had at least another day to explore, but my itinerary was packed.

Barber Motorsports Park, Alabama, Oct. 2016

The Barber Motorsports Museum has largest collection of motorcycles on display in the world, and its own racetrack just outside the doors. That racetrack is probably one of the nicest I've ever seen - clean and well-designed and beautifully tended, with water features and sculptures tucked into unlikely spots and lovely stands of trees between the hairpin turns.

I could have spent another whole day there but the schedule pressed onward, and the next day we were in the car and on our way to where Alabama borders Tennessee and the urban nexus that is Florence-Sheffield-Tuscumbia-Muscle Shoals. Muscle Shoals Studios on Jackson Highway is being restored as a museum and working studio, but until the grand opening nobody is allowed to take photos inside, so I had to content myself with the photo at the top, which is probably the second most iconic view of the property.

FAME Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Oct. 2016

Rick Halls' FAME Studios, on the other hand, is a fully working studio and has been for fifty years, with tours fit in between sessions so people like me can stand and stare at the Wurlitzer electric piano where Spooner Oldham played the opening chords to Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved A Man."

Cotton bale, outside Tuscumbia, Alabama, Oct. 2016.

Once again, I could have stayed another day - or week - and come back with dozens of shots, but the schedule pressed on, and the only detour I managed to make was to a cotton field outside town, where I picked a bole and shot this photo of a very ponderous cotton bale. Considering the historical weight cotton has for the state - the whole region in fact - I can't be sure whether its monumental quality was something it inherently possessed, or my own projection.

And with that tantalizing glimpse of Muscle Shoals, we headed south again, to Talladega and the race weekend.