Failure

Self-portrait for passport photo, 1998

I STARTED THIS BLOG OVER FOUR YEARS AGO. Whatever I thought about the idea at the time - a make-work project to force me to go through my old pictures and post what looked interesting - it has turned out far better than I imagined it would. Which is to say that, as I began going through those first boxes of prints and contact sheets, I wasn't expecting much.

The good news was that I rediscovered photos that I'd either forgotten completely about - alarmingly, if you're the person who's relying on that memory - and gave a second, sometimes profitable life to images that would have been unseen, entombed forever in binders full of negatives or on hard drives. But I wasn't expecting that to happen when I made my first posts here.

What I was most afraid of was digging up photos that would remind me of the low points, in both my career and my life. And I knew there were a few of them. Ultimately they'd lead to writing a post that summed up thirty years of life and work, which would oblige me to be honest about my successes and failures, and especially the bad decisions I might have made. This is that post, at long last, and it hasn't been easy to write.

At the analog wall, going through contact sheets, July 2018. Photos by Jonathan Castellino.

I had no idea I'd become a photographer when I bought that first camera from a pawn shop on Church Street, and I'm still fuzzy about the precise point where I thought that I might make a career out of taking pictures. I didn't go to school for photography and I never had a clue about how you made a living from photos, but I blundered ahead regardless, fueled mostly by the energy of ascending a thrilling learning curve and making better photos all the time.

I probably wouldn't have persevered as long as I did except for two financial factors - the incredibly low overhead I maintained by living cheaply (no car, no vacations) and the low, low rent I was paying on my Parkdale studio space through the whole of the '90s. There have been at least two times in my career when I wondered whether I could call myself a photographer any more. This blog forced me to confront both of those moments, and helped dredge up a lot of painful memories besides.

Many years ago, my (now-)wife and I appeared as an item in a gossip column in Quill & Quire, a magazine about the book trade in Canada. We had been seeing each other for a while; she had been an editor there once, which is what occasioned the item, while I was described as a "very successful photographer." Even more than appearing in a gossip column in a literary magazine, I was shocked to see myself described as "successful."

Never mind that my career was entering the first of those two major crisis points at the time; the fact is that I had never seen myself as "successful" as much as "struggling." I had an idea what a successful photographer looked like (though I didn't personally know any at the time) and I knew it wasn't me. Looking back, maybe having a little bit of notoriety, an established byline and no other visible means of support was what made you a "successful" photographer in Canada. If so, it set the bar pretty low. 

Scanning and retouching, July 2018. Photos by Jonathan Castellino.

For the longest time, staying in Canada was what I considered my first big mistake. I had always intended to move to New York and try to make it there - a move that was probably inspired by my brother, who went to New York in the '60s to work for Albert Grossman, manager of Bob Dylan, The Band and Janis Joplin and many others. It was the place to be a really successful photographer - a really successful anything - in ways that Toronto obviously wasn't.

But I didn't go to New York, for a lot of reasons. The first was that I never felt like I had enough of a financial cushion to take the risk, which might have just been an excuse. The other was that, just at the point when I should have made my move, I was in no sound emotional shape for it. A really bad break-up at the turn of the '90s put me in a tailspin for years, and looking back now, I was battling depression on and off for most of the decade.

Leaving Toronto would have meant a huge financial risk, to be sure, but it also would have deprived me of most of the network of friends and family I had here - not a great place if you're slipping in and out of black moods. The advantages of staying in Toronto - low rent, friends and family, work I could (mostly) rely on - outweighed the risks of potentially making a career in a place where being "successful" paid more considerable dividends, both in money and reputation.

Basically I was afraid, and my lack of the classic middle-class safety net - living parents, a home to go back to - made that fear more acute. Fear and depression - not emotions you associate with "success," but maybe I'm wrong about that.

After a while I stopped making regular trips to New York to look for work there. I'd still get the occasional job from friends like Edna Suarez at the Times, but as it became obvious that I probably wasn't going to make the big move, the beginnings of a network of friendly venues over the border fell away. And when I left both my studio and NOW magazine near the end of the '90s my freelance network here had shrunk as well. So by the time I was described as "very successful" I was struggling to make my rent.

Goofing around in Michael Vendruscolo's studio, 1990. Photographer unknown.

I've been reading a lot of biographies of photographers, mostly to get some perspective on my own career in the business. In a recent book about the late Anglo-Irish photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, his friend and fellow photographer Crena Watson (born 1957) talks about the photo business as it was by the time Clarke died in 2006:

"It changed so much even from when I started. You used to be respected and paid properly and appreciated for your skill and knowledge. And that just suddenly went. He (Clarke) was like a god, and that was just taken away. The big budgets didn't happen any more, there were all these younger art directors who didn't know who anyone was, or what was good and what was bad. It changed so quickly - it was shocking. Nothing to do with digital, actually. When people say, 'It was digital,' that's rubbish. That's just a tool."

"It was in the early 1990s that things changed. They had the recession and stopped paying proper prices, and then they found that young people would do it. They could use someone who's not so good and then retouch after, so I suppose digital played a small part...Those changes frightened him enormously, and he could see that it would never change back. It frightened me too. I was on the cusp of the good times, but he had had the good times all his career, and then suddenly things drop, and no one knew who he was or wanted him much. Quite apart from the worry about money, you'd feel that everything you had worked for your whole life - all your skills and talent - is now nothing. And a lot of photographers commit suicide. It's quite common."

I used to think that, like Watson, I was there for the last of the "good times" in the business, but when I read this it occurred to me that, from her perspective, I was probably one of the "young people" who would "do it" for less money. What I do know is that my own specialty - editorial portraiture - was a notable part of the business when I started shooting in the '80s, that it was in steep decline by the end of the 1990s, and that when I reemerged as a freelancer in the late 2000s, it had effectively ceased to exist.

When I started this blog, I was resigned that I would end up telling a story about failure. The failure to get the work I really wanted, to create a career and a reputation, to make a living in the business. When I turned around and looked at my binders full of negatives - the "analog wall" I talked about in the first post on this blog - it reminded me of this feeling of failure, and promised a long, slow opportunity to revisit and confront my own failure, which is something everyone wants to do, right?

I could talk about bad luck, or the constantly declining state of publishing in Canada, or "digital" and the changes in how we consume media. That might do a lot to explain the context of my career in photography, but if I blamed them for my failure I'd just be making excuses. The simple fact is that I made decisions, and they led me to this point in my life.

The hardest part was separating all of this from the work. I'm the least objective critic of that work, but the pleasant surprise at the end of four and a half years of exhuming my old work is realizing that it stands up on its own, and might actually be on the way to being a body of work. I began this blog expecting to write a eulogy, and I'm finishing it with a sense of purpose I couldn't have imagined four and a half years ago.

And that renewed sense of purpose - I'm unwilling to call it a career by this point as much as a kind of vocation - will be the subject my penultimate post.

Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

JAY BARUCHEL WAS THE LOCAL BOY MADE GOOD WHEN I TOOK THESE PORTRAITS. If by "local" you mean born in Ottawa and raised in Montreal and living in Toronto. In any case, he'd gone from Canadian television to a small part in Almost Famous to membership in the Judd Apatow comic universe, and my best guess was that I was photographing him as he was publicizing Tropic Thunder, which came out around this time.

I didn't do a lot of portraits in my last year at the free daily - not as many as I'd done previously. So when I did get a decent portrait assignment, I wanted to make it count; I was no longer just pointing the camera and hoping for the best, as I'd done more often that I'd care to admit back at the beginning of my return to portrait work a few years' previous.

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

I shot Baruchel at my usual stomping grounds - the Intercontinental on Bloor. We didn't have a room for the interview, so I shot this on a couch in the ground floor bar, which just happened to have some nice light and a dark grey wall just behind my subject, the product of a recent renovation of the hotel. I actually used to spend a lot of time in the same bar over a decade previous, when it had a decent piano player who favoured standards, and my own stubbornly single social life revolved around restaurants and hotel bars.

Like my portraits of Ben Stein a month earlier, these pictures are the result of four years of shooting, starting from a point where I didn't consider myself a photographer any more. I often refer to the work I did for the free daily as being a style with no style, mostly because I'd completely abandoned the look I'd developed and the working method I'd relied on in the '90s. After four years, a new style - simpler and cleaner than the one I'd had before - was emerging. I felt cautiously optimistic. Big mistake.

Tricia Helfer

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

I'M NOT SURE WHY 2007 WAS THE YEAR THAT MY FILM FESTIVAL felt like I was shooting for a fashion magazine. Perhaps it was the direction our editor, Jodi, wanted to take the paper, in pursuit of the ideal young female reader demographic. Perhaps we'd simply accrued enough pull that we could ask for interviews and shoots with some of the more glamorous guests at the festival.

In any case, I wasn't complaining. 2007 might have been my busiest festival ever, and while doing up to seven shoots a day can be taxing on your creative inspiration, it helps if a) your subject is physically attractive and b) they have some training in posing for cameras. As your classic farmgirl-turned-model-turned-actress, Tricia Helfer fit this bill perfectly, and while I might have pushed for her to provide me with something less than a model's repertoire of looks if I'd had more time, this shoot came at the end of a long day and I was frankly willing to coast.

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

Helfer was still in the middle of her run as the Cylon baddie Number Six on Battlestar Galactica when I took these photos - a cultural phenomenon that was part of the avalanche of shows that made premium cable the new Hollywood, and began shooting the kneecaps off of both cinematic features and prime time TV. As an ex-model-turned-actress she was perfect for the role of an unnaturally beautiful humanoid created by a machine race that achieved sentience, inasmuch as really beautiful people often embody what's called the "uncanny valley" effect - that trait of computer-generated actors that might look realistic but possess an ineffable but undeniably disturbing quality that doesn't seem quite human.

But perhaps that was just the light. I photographed Helfer in a suite at the Intercontinental that, due to the time of day, was filled with the strangest but most flattering available light I'd ever encountered in a hotel room. The rooms at the Intercontinental were famously dim, so I could scarcely believe what I was seeing through my viewfinder when I had Helfer sit in what I'd just assumed was the brightest point in the room. I doubt that I could have duplicated that light with a kit full of strobes.

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

Gen. Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

THE STORY OF ROMEO DALLAIRE IS ONE THAT'S WORTH RECALLING whenever anyone parrots the phrase "Never Again" when it comes to genocide and crimes against humanity. Because there have been plenty of Agains since the Holocaust inspired this phrase, and Dallaire was a witness to one of them, in Rwanda, barely twenty-five years ago.

I photographed Dallaire with Roy Dupuis, the Quebecois actor who played him in Shake Hands With The Devil, a film about the tragic UN mission to Rwanda that Dallaire commanded, and which failed to prevent the murder of 800,000 Rwandans at the hands of their fellow countrymen. The film was based on Dallaire's own book, which had in turn already inspired a documentary film, and at this point in his life Dallaire was on a mission to explain just what had happened, in a (mostly vain, in my opinion) attempt to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Roy Dupuis & Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

The story isn't terribly complicated: Dallaire was sent to Central Africa to try to head off what everyone knew was a potential massacre of Rwanda's Tutsi minority by its Hutu majority, then in political control of the country. His mission was hamstrung by the usual rules of engagement by which most UN "peacekeeping" engagements are run, and ended miserably, though Dallaire and his staff were able to save at least 32,000 people from being slaughtered.

It was obvious that Dallaire was left with crushing regret in the wake of his command, and seven years before I photographed him he had attempted suicide with alcohol and an overdose of anti-depressant medication. I did my shoot with him and Dupuis in the courtyard restaurant of the Intercontinental on Bloor, and hoped that my shooting style - get up close, focus on the eyes, linger long enough within the subject's personal space - would capture some of the discipline and intensity that Dallaire projected.

Seth

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I WENT UP TO GUELPH A FEW WEEKS BACK TO TRADE SOME PHOTOS WITH MY FRIEND SETH for a portrait he'd done of me and my family. It was a hand-off we'd been trying to make for the better part of a decade, and it gave me a chance to take some new portraits of Seth. I'd first photographed Seth over twenty-five years ago, but I'd been sitting on this post until I could make my visit and get the new shots.

I have known Seth for over thirty years, if you count our first meeting, when he was in the throes of his youthful Goth phase, complete with bleached hair and a cane topped with a silver skull. When we met again several years later he had changed his look - the same hat and suits that are his trademark today - and begun making his reputation as a cartoonist on what was a new, thriving and terribly exciting scene that included artists like his friend Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and others.

Seth, Parkdale, 1992

Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

Chester Brown, Parkdale, 1992

I had interviewed Chester as a young journalist, not long after meeting the Goth Seth, and around the time I dropped out of college. By the early '90s Seth and Chester were the linchpins of the Toronto graphic novel scene, and had become a trio when Joe Matt moved up here from the United States. I was a fan of all of them, and at some point renewed my acquaintance with Seth and Chet, somehow becoming part of their extended social circle.

It was around this time that I asked if I could do a portrait shoot with the three of them, together and individually. I was in the full throes of my Irving Penn fixation, and had in mind something along the lines of his portraits of H.L. Mencken with George Jean Nathan, or Willem de Kooning with Frederick Kiesler. I shot them in my Parkdale studio, asking them to sign the butcher paper covering the table top in front of them for their group portrait, and do drawings on the paper for their solo shots.

Seth, Chester Brown & Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

I remember it being a fun shoot, and was thoroughly pleased with the results. It might not have been much more than a straining homage to my biggest influence, but I felt I was close enough to touching the master's cloak to get some sort of satisfaction. At that point, it seemed the best way to deal with the anxiety of influence was to give in to the urge to imitate completely.

Not long after I did this shoot, Seth asked me about doing a trade - a portrait for a portrait. I eagerly agreed and asked for a drawing of me, as I imagined myself at my best in the mid-'90s - in an old suit, playing guitar, with my cats at my feet. (I was never really much of a guitarist, so that was just so much fantasy, but I did wear the suits and I'm grateful to have my much-loved and dearly-missed cats, Keebler and Nato, immortalized in a Seth sketch.)

Portrait of Rick McGinnis by Seth, 1994

McGinnis family by Seth, 2015

Time passes and life moves on, so when Seth asked for another portrait shoot with his then-fiancee (now wife) Tania in exchange for some more art, I asked him to make a sketch of my family. (Actually, I'm not sure we even had kids when Seth and I first talked about the trade, which gives you some idea of how long it took us to make this happen. Oh well - neither of us were obviously in any rush.)

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I was curious to visit Seth in Guelph, where he's gone about creating a world around himself in the shelter of small town Ontario - the place where he was raised and where he seems to find much of his inspiration. We walked around and talked each other's ears off and compared notes on modern society (not favorable) and the peculiar experience of getting old (not without its difficulties, but still far better than youthful idiocy.)

Mostly it was nice to renew an old friendship. I've found that friendships are improved with the passage of time, with familiarity providing precious context. It's also nice to find a friend from those years of youthful struggle and unfocused ambition and find them still at work and creating. Seth in particular has increased his ability to mine his inspiration for new work over the years I've known him. I can't say that the world has caught up with him - that would oblige the world to go into full reverse - but he's made it slow down and acknowledge his insights on how the past calls to us, if we're even remotely sympathetic to what it says.

Downtime

High Park, Toronto, 1999

I NEVER STOPPED TAKING PHOTOS. I only stopped making a living taking photos. That's one of the things I've learned while going through my files for this blog. If I had stopped taking photos because my full-time career as a professional photographer had effectively ended there would be no point doing this, because that would mean that I was never really a photographer.

A few months ago I found a Kodak Instamatic camera in a second hand shop, the same model as the one my mother gave me for Christmas when I was a boy - my first camera. I remembered how I'd gone out into the snow outside the house and took photos that interested me: Shots of snow drifts in front of bare trees and dormant hedges, everything composed in what I would learn later were the rules of seconds and thirds. I'm still trying to take those photos nearly fifty years later, and back when I was relieved of the pressure of taking photos for money, that's what I did with my copious downtime.

High Park, Toronto, 1999

I have lived in the west end of Toronto for nearly my whole life. The parks and beaches and industrial precincts of the area have always been where I've gone to reflect and recharge, places full of personal and family history. This is what my hometown looks like in my mind, and every photo I've taken there is an attempt to fix that place and what it looks like in memory and posterity.

I took my Rolleiflex along on family vacations to visit my in-laws in Nova Scotia, fascinated by a place that didn't look like anywhere I'd lived before. This is the landscape of my wife's family and memories, so shooting there was like trying to tell someone else's story without using their words. The shore of the Bay of Fundy, with its shingle beaches and outcrops of volcanic rock, is one of the most primal places I've ever been, with a harshness that I find mysteriously appealing.

Lunenburg, NS, 2003

Harbourville, NS, 2003

Back home, I returned to Mount Dennis, where I took my first photos a few blocks from the Kodak plant where my family worked, and around the west end I know so well. I ended up documenting not just the place where I grew up, but also Parkdale, where we lived, and the old working class and industrial neighbourhoods around Earlscourt and Silverthorn, where we'd end up moving several years later, and where I'm writing this now. Short of family photos or self-portraits, these are probably the most personal photos I've ever taken.

They were also the last outings I'd make with my Rolleiflex. The year after I took the last of them I was put back to work shooting for the free daily, using the first really practical digital cameras. The whole slow, segmented process of shooting with a camera like the Rolleiflex became obsolete and impractical practically overnight, so these photos are effectively my farewell to film photography, though I didn't know it at the time.

Mount Dennis, Toronto, 2001

Junction, Toronto, 2003

Silverthorn, Toronto, 2003

Parkdale, Toronto 2003

Liane Balaban

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

I'M VERY FOND OF SAYING THAT PORTRAITS ARE THE HARDEST KIND OF PHOTO TO TAKE - in fact I said it to someone just the other day. Not coincidentally, I've spent most of my career taking portraits - alongside concert photography, news stories, street photography, landscapes, travel photography and still life work. Which means that I think I have some authority to make this sort of statement, but your mileage may vary.

The weak point in this idea is the fact that you can't take a bad photo of some people, thanks to their physical beauty or - back to the Duane Michals rule - the simple fact of their fame. The combination of the two explains why paparazzi were able to make money in publishing when editorial portraiture (my specialty, unfortunately) had effectively died. I'm reminded of this when I look at shots like this one, of Canadian actress Liane Balaban, the last one I did at the 2004 film festival.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, 2000

I had photographed Balaban before, just after her breakout role in New Waterford Girl, when she was just twenty years old. (I have no idea who I did this job for - it might have been the National Post - but I do know that that this might have been one of the last portrait shoots I did with my beloved Rolleiflex.)

I was a big fan - of her, and of the film, which was that rare thing: A Canadian movie I didn't hate. Balaban put me in mind of Winona Ryder, and her role in New Waterford Girl was like the ones Ryder would take at the beginning of her career. She came off as pretty and smart - the sort of combination that I loved in my favorite actresses of the '30s and '40s, like Jean Arthur or Rosalind Russell or Myrna Loy.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Balaban showed up for my shoot with her at the festival done up for photos - hair and makeup and clothes. As I wrote in an earlier post, she immediately put me in mind of Cecil Beaton's photos of Audrey Hepburn, posing with a similar gamine confidence. After just a few frames I knew that this was going to be a good shoot.

But I can't take too much credit for the results, or with any other shoot where my subject brings some mixture of beauty and glamour and charisma to the room. Liane Balaban was ready, willing and able to be the subject of a captivating portrait; I don't know that I've seen any other shots of her taken that day, but I'm sure a few of them might be as nice as mine, which is a good reason to be humble even when you're feeling proud of your work.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

George Reinecke

George Reinecke, Gas Station Studios, Toronto, Aug. 1993

AMONG MY LITTLE CIRCLE OF LOCAL MUSICIANS AND MUSIC GEEKS, George Reinecke showed up in Toronto as something of a celebrity. A native of New Orleans, he had arrived in Toronto via London, like most people who turn up here unexpectedly chasing a girl. He quickly established himself among the city's network of independent bands, a small but intricately woven circle of groups that included the Cowboy Junkies, Change of Heart, the Rheostatics and other veterans of the Queen West scene of the '80s.

George's reputation preceded him - a former member of Tav Falco's Panther Burns and a friend of the legendary Alex Chilton (Box Tops, Big Star, producer of The Cramps,) he had bona fides to die for. The question we kept asking among ourselves was, of course, "Why is he staying here for so long?" Canada in general and Toronto in particular were still a tidal pool far down the shoreline of the music business, but it wasn't long before his band, Busted Flush, got signed to the Canadian arm of Polygram, a music multinational.

George Reinecke, Gas Station Studios, Toronto, Aug. 1993

It was at this point that I photographed George recording his band's next record at Dale Morningstar's Gas Station Studios, which occupied a few rooms on the top floor of "The Castle," a former baking powder factory in Liberty Village, then still a mostly abandoned industrial district recently gutted by the demolition of the Massey-Harris and Inglis factories. It was where most of the local acts would record demos and albums, and where I'd later photograph Susie Ungerleider, aka O Susanna, for her second CD. (The building is a condo now, the neighbourhood now gentrified.)

I have no idea if I'd been assigned to shoot George for NOW, but the big ledger tells me that I sold some photos to him for promo purposes. I did most of the shots in the big, echoing bathroom that Dale had rigged up to record drums and vocals, but later moved George and his guitar out to a fire escape in one of the building's air shafts. I didn't want to do anything too posed, but the setup with George at a snare drum in a room full of cymbal stands always stood out for me.

George Reinecke, Gas Station Studios, Toronto, Aug. 1993

My other major memory of George Reinecke was when he showed up to watch a band I was playing in one empty weeknight at Lee's Palace. He was at a table with a few other local musicians, and while I'd like to recall that the pressure of having him in the audience inspired a stellar performance from me, I'm afraid all I remember committing were several tuneless, ungainly guitar solos.

After our set I came over to say hello and babbled some utter horseshit about Richard Thompson (I was trying - and failing - to play with modal scales) and he was kind, but I knew that I'd stank like a sack of old fish on a dock. It wasn't long before I gave up on playing the guitar in front of people; sometimes, if you're lucky, it only takes a few mild humiliations to learn to retreat to where you might actually have some talent.

George hung around Toronto for a few more years, but the last time I saw him was outside Dupont subway station near the end of the decade. After that I heard he'd returned to New Orleans, where I'm sure the weather probably suits him much better.

Politicians

Bob Rae, Toronto, Jan. 1997

I HAVE NEVER PHOTOGRAPHED A HEAD OF STATE. Neither a prime minister nor a president. Or a king. (Which would be a problem for me, as I'm a republican.) I have photographed a few mayors - if they count - and the people here, all of whom wanted to be premier of Ontario, the province where I live, though only one of them managed it. (And he lived to regret it.)

Bob Rae has the dubious distinction of being one of the few people I've ever voted for who actually won. (The other was Rob Ford.) When the provincial Liberal government led by David Peterson called a snap election and ran a poor campaign, Rae and the left-leaning New Democratic Party won their first ever provincial election in 1990. It was considered a miracle, and Rae managed to squander this historic opportunity by alienating his party's labour union supporters while trying to balance budgets during a recession. When he ran for re-election in 1995, his party was soundly defeated by Mike Harris and the Progressive Conservatives.

Rae was known after that as the man who blew it, big time. He resigned from the legislature and returned to practicing law - a big deal firm with offices in the Eaton Centre where I photographed him for NOW magazine a year before he finally resigned from his party altogether. NOW was a major supporter of the NDP, but its criticisms of his failed term as premier meant that the man who met me in the lobby of his law office was more than faintly hostile.

It was all I could do to get him to sit for a roll in a spot of very nice, flat light in a boardroom, and the eleven frames I have (the shutter on my Rollei misfired on the first shot on the roll) all capture him staring down my lens with the same, practiced half-smile he'd learned to give years earlier. It's a portrait of a man trying - and failing - to show a brave face in the aftermath of a severe humiliation. He'd compound that humiliation for many years afterward by trying - and failing - to win the leadership of the federal Liberals.

Frances Lankin, Parkdale, March 1996

Howard Hampton, Parkdale, March 1996

Peter Kormos, Parkdale, March 1996

Tony Silipo, Parkdale, March 1996

The race to replace Rae as the leader of the NDP produced four candidates. Frances Lankin, a cabinet minister in Rae's government, was The Front Runner and Heir Apparent. Howard Hampton, another cabinet minister, was The Challenger; Peter Kormos - the outspoken socialist on the ballot - was The Spoiler, and Tony Silipo was The Underdog.

I was assigned to shoot all four candidates for a feature story, and asked if I could do them all in my Parkdale studio. My argument was simple - I wanted to shoot them with the same setting and lighting, to give all four portraits an identical look. I also knew that, while pleading for support from party membership, they were at their most abject and vulnerable, and more likely to do the bidding of a magazine overtly identified with the party. I wasn't surprised when they agreed.

What I didn't say was that I had no intention of taking photos that were in any way heroic, or even particularly flattering. By this time, over halfway through my tenure at NOW, my distrust of politicians had become acute, on its way to the overt, principled hostility I feel for them today. I deliberately chose shadowy lighting and uneasy, off-kilter compositions. I didn't give much, if any, direction, and mostly let them react to the hard spotlight I'd trained on their faces.

(A historical footnote: The "No Justice, No Peace" buttons Lankin and Kormos are wearing were the pre-internet equivalent of a hashtag, a popular slogan that the party's union backers had adopted and were rallying behind in their opposition to the Harris government.)

Howard Hampton, Queen's Park, Toronto, May 1998

Howard Hampton ended up winning the NDP leadership, and moved into the office of the Leader of the Other Official Party, where I photographed him for NOW in 1998. It would end up being an embattled thirteen years as head of the NDP for Hampton, as the provincial Liberals under Dalton McGuinty steadily leached away his party's traditional support base in the declining labour unions, and built a strong new one in the public service unions.

I couldn't have known this when I took these pictures of an anxious-looking man in a big office. I didn't dislike Hampton, but I certainly didn't envy him his job, and if anything I felt a bit sorry for him. Pity is about as much of a friendly emotion as I'm willing to expend on a politician, and these days it's rare that I can find much of it for anyone, regardless of party affiliation.

Tony Silipo died on March 10, 2012.

Peter Kormos died in Welland, Ontario on March 30, 2014.

Garth Drabinsky

Garth Drabinsky, Parkdale, 1996

I KNEW THE DAY'S SHOOT WAS GOING TO BE INTERESTING when my subject was preceded at my Parkdale studio by his personal PR handler. I recognized the man - a few years earlier he had been a movie critic at a free weekly that had since gone out of business. We chatted a bit while he made sure the subject had a refreshment and that the layout of the studio was satisfactory. About a half hour later Garth Drabinsky showed up to be photographed for the New York Times.

Drabinsky was famous in Canada for being something that we didn't do a lot - he was a showbiz entrepreneur. A lawyer, he'd begun producing movies during the great "tax break era" of the '70s, and had gone on to co-found the Cineplex movie chain. Forced out of that, he turned his attention to musical theatre, and helped turn Toronto into one of the biggest markets for musicals in the world. He was celebrated in all the usual ways (locals will notice the Order of Canada pin in his lapel - an award he'd later have revoked) but he also developed a reputation for being difficult, so I suppose I wasn't surprised by his personal flack showing up at my little studio.

The assignment was simple - the Times was doing a big feature on Broadway producers and I had to do a shot of Drabinsky that would fit into the grid of portraits that were mostly being shot in New York. Simple, high-key, white backdrop - nothing challenging. Not a lot of leeway to do something unique, but I was always happy to get work from Edna Suarez and the Times.

Garth Drabinsky, Parkdale, 1996

After a brief conferral between Garth and his flack, they made their way into my shooting space and I fine tuned the lighting and took a Polaroid, which Drabinsky insisted on seeing. I switched to the first film back, but before I could give my subject any directions, the flack got to work pumping him up for the shot.

"Okay, Garth," he began. "You're outside the theatre, walking down Broadway, The sun is just starting to set. The show is a big hit. You look up..."

I focused all my attention on the viewfinder and the shutter while Drabinsky was giving his performance, mostly to stifle a giggle. Somehow I made my way through at least a couple of rolls of slide film and the shoot was over in a few minutes. Drabinsky and the flack were gone after a couple of quick handshakes - the neighbourhood was a dodgy one and I'm sure they wanted to make a quick exit. At dinner with some friends that night, my story of the shoot got big laughs.

We don't do celebrity particularly well in Canada. Besides the tall poppy syndrome peculiar to provincial places, there's an unofficial consensus that celebrity is vulgar. Drabinsky was at his career zenith when I took these photos, but his downfall - a scandal involving fraud and cooked books that led to a prison sentence - was just around the corner, and it always seemed to me that most Canadians quietly agreed that it was somehow karmically inevitable, that his humbling restored the national landscape to its natural, preferred entropy.