Chris Buck

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Sept. 1989

IT'S MY OLD FRIEND CHRIS BUCK'S BIRTHDAY TODAY and I'm posting some old pictures of him as part of a tradition I began with this blog. We're both 53 this month; it's not a round number or one that looks particularly significant on the page, so there's not a lot I think I can say about it except that it feels neither young nor old. Somewhere between the parlour and the kitchen of middle age, the front door behind our backs and the back door in sight.

As I said when I began this tradition, I probably photographed Chris more than anyone else I knew (with the possible exception of my roommate Sally, who I was constantly pressing to hold up colour grids for film tests.) We'd use each other as guinea pigs to test out new cameras or lighting setups, and these two shots were taken just a month apart. The photo at the top is probably the closest thing I ever got to a nude in my career; I'll let you decide if that's a pathetic admission.

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Oct. 1989

The next shot was part of my struggle to master high key lighting; I've posted a frame from this shoot before. As much as these were tests of cameras or film or lighting, they were also an opportunity for each of us to experiment with how we presented ourselves to the camera. Chris would become much better at it than I ever did; I have never overcome my unease on the wrong side of the lens.

The final shot is recent, taken in the middle of our day long epic hang in New York City earlier this summer when I came to town to see the Irving Penn retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had been a big year for Chris, who had published a thick monograph of his portrait work just before Christmas. Walking through the Temple of Dendur, I impulsively asked him to stand between two statues of Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of healing. I have no idea if that means anything. Happy birthday, old friend!

Chris Buck, Temple of Dendur, NYC, July 2017

New York City

Irving Penn's camera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2017

THERE ARE FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS THAT I'D GET ON A PLANE TO SEE. Irving Penn and Chris Buck are the only two I can think of right now, so last week I took a quick trip to New York City to see the Irving Penn Centennial show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my old friend Chris Buck.

It was a pilgrimage - a follow up to the one Chris and I made just after he moved to New York, over twenty-five years ago, to gaze upon the door of the still-living-and-working Penn's studio. Appropriate to a pilgrimage there was a reliquary - Penn's Rolleiflex, on display in a glass vitrine - and a shroud of sorts in the shape of one of Penn's studio backdrops, helpfully available for Instagram and selfies.

Chris Buck in front of Penn's backdrop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2017

Rick in front of Penn's backdrop, photo by Chris Buck

It was the most purposeful trip I've ever taken to New York; my only objectives were the Penn show and an extended hang with Chris in his adopted hometown. So no shopping, no business, and no visits to any of the attractions I still haven't seen yet for some reason, like the High Line, the Cloisters or the WTC Memorial.

It was a good thing that I'd set aside time for two visits to the Penn show, because I learned that my old friend Chris takes gallery shows at a gallop and does a running commentary while he does. The Penn show was crowded, so our visit there together ended up being like a scene from a French film where subtitles rattle past like a news crawl. No matter - I'd have the next day to take in Penn at my leisure.

Upper East Side & Central Park, NYC, June 2017

In the song "Venus de Milo," Tom Verlaine of Television (one of my favorite NYC bands) sang "Broadway looks so medieval." I wasn't near Broadway for this trip, but Central Park and the neighbourhood around the Met certainly looked medieval on the morning I went back to see the Penn show.

The Met was quiet when I arrived, the Penn show almost deserted. I took out my camera and set about one of my favorite camera pastimes lately - shooting people as they look at art. As an aside, New Yorkers - and people visiting New York - are for some reason less self-conscious when a camera is pointed at them than Torontonians, who require more stealth to capture unawares. Also, the Met is a bloody fantastic museum.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, June 2017

Chris Buck: Uneasy

Chris Buck, Toronto, Sept. 2016

MY FRIEND CHRIS HAS PUBLISHED A COLLECTION OF HIS PORTRAITS. Uneasy: Portraits 1986-2016 is, as the title states, thirty years of his best portrait work. It came out last month, is huge and very expensive to ship, and might be one of my favorite photo books ever.

Twenty-seven years ago, when he was about to move to New York City from Toronto, I sat down with Chris in the basement of his parents' house in Etobicoke and interviewed him about his career so far, and what he wanted to accomplish with this very big, risky move. Part of that interview has been excerpted on the dust jacket of Uneasy.

A year and a half ago, when he was still working on the book, I sat down with him again for another interview and photo session. Here are the best bits from over an hour of talking about portraits, careers, family, digital photography, money and strippers.

Chris Buck, Etobicoke, 1990

ME: So, looking back, was moving to New York a good decision?

CHRIS: It was probably the most important one I ever made. The most important thing is that it took me out of the environment where I grew up. Being here in Toronto now is very pleasant and very livable but for whatever reason, whatever childhood trauma, leaving was very liberating. Getting away from my peers, my family, as much as I love them, was good for me psychologically. 

It's not that I remade myself in New York. It's that in Toronto, people perceived me the way I was when I was 12 or 14. In New York I could be me at 26, a grownup, having my wits about me and some sense of confidence, a man and not a boy. All these things I didn't feel when I was in Toronto, whether it was the local music scene or my peers from high school or middle school. I would recommend it.

For work opportunities it was the big pond - still is the big pond in most ways. That afforded me opportunities and access that I wouldn't have had here. For one, access to top cultural and entertainment figures for subjects. The magazines - I wanted to work for magazines at the time - that was where all the magazines were. But most importantly in New York I was among the best of the best. It put me in that environment where I had to rise to compete. That was challenging but was really good for me.

George W. Bush by Chris Buck, 1999

ME: You've shot three presidents. (Four, by the time Uneasy finally came out.) Did that help make your reputation as a portrait photographer?

CHRIS: I photographed W first, then his father ten years later, then I did my shot with Obama three years after that, and the shoot with Obama was the turning point in the way you're talking about. W was not president when I shot him, and he was so hated by everyone who mattered in my business that putting him in my portfolio was actually a negative. George HW Bush has become more respected in recent years, and certainly sitting with a sitting president who was as iconic as Obama...Getting him in a way made the other two significant. 

Now I've shot three presidents. With Obama it wasn't just doing a sitting with him as doing a portrait that looked like my work. I was kind of walking on air for six months. The shoot itself was pretty amazing and I'm proud of myself for the way I handled it in, like, four minutes. In many ways it felt like, in the 25 years I was working up till that point, everything I learned was used in that shoot.

Newsweek, portrait of Michele Bachmann by Chris Buck, 2011

ME: I think your portrait of Michele Bachmann was a real game changer for you. It was identifiably your portrait and it became a news story and a social media phenomenon. How much did it affect your career?

CHRIS: Only in retrospect, years later, did that became an iconic cover, and because of that I got seen as a great cover photographer. Six months later I started getting covers. The person on that cover was an A-list person. What had happened to me in the past was I'd be shooting the inside story people, not the A-list people. So what's ended up happening in the last five years ago is that half of the celebrities I shoot are household names - my last shoot was Trump. I did Yo-Yo Ma, Kendrick Lamar. 

I was either shooting people on their way up or their way down. Now I'm shooting people at their peak. One of my wishes was - I said this in an interview I did six or seven years ago - that I wanted to make Chris Buck portraits with A-list people. I don't always achieve it, but I do often enough to make it worthwhile.

The funny thing about that picture that you'll appreciate - a lot of people were criticizing and commenting on the picture, because some people were criticizing me, and others were defending me by saying that I didn't choose the picture, the magazine did. But of course you look at it and say "That's a Chris Buck picture." And the funny thing is that I've handed in a lot of pictures like that over the years - they just don't run!

Nick Offerman by Chris Buck, 2013

ME: Back when we were starting out we used to make fun of the high concept shoots that were done by people like Annie Liebovitz, but I noticed that after you moved to New York your own work started to take on a conceptual edge that I guess it didn't have when we were both poor and inexperienced and just trying to get a good shot. How did that happen?

CHRIS: You're right. There are certain pictures of mine that make me think 'this looks like Annie Liebovitz.' And I think it goes back to our criticism of Liebovitz, which was a kind of literalism. My conceptual pictures, when they were effective, do not have that. They're hinting at something, or they're creating a mood, or there's a prop that's suggesting something contextually. It's not this thing where Bette Midler is lying in a bed of roses, or the Blues Brothers with blue paint on their faces. I think her stuff got better later on, but there is an aspect of a literal narrative, and the complete story is there. I try not to do that. I try to have it more open ended or suggestive. Ideally I like to have some aspect of ambiguity or mystery to it. 

But part of that is the marketplace. I remember doing a meeting at Esquire, and the art director saying to me "We want our own David LaChappelle and maybe you're it. Do you think you can be that guy?" And I don't know what I said, maybe I tried to change the subject, but I didn't say no. I wanted an opportunity, but I wasn't going to embrace something I didn't want to be. LaChappelle to me was the wrong direction for portraiture, all about the show, very garish, bright colours. 

I think that having photo editors wanting to go in that direction - there was something we discussed at the time, but in terms of how I would shoot and edit, and how my editors would choose different images than me, had to do with, we were thinking about what would look good in a photo book, what would look good on your wall. Versus their "what will look good after you turn the page in your magazine." And I think that the LaChappelle images jump off the page. They're dynamic, and people get them. There's a lot of people who are obsessed with platforms like Instagram eroding the value of our profession as photographers, but people like LaChappelle show that that really can't happen

Yes, some Instagram photographers will become more serious photographers because that will be their entryway, but most won't, because they won't set up scenarios, they won't learn lighting. Lighting takes time even if you have a knack for it. I prefer the more simple portraits, even the kind of portraits that I don't do particularly well, like Wolfgang Tillmans' portraits, or Catherine Opie's portraits, that are often just a simple shot of a person in a space by a wall where there's nothing happening, but you know as a photographer that they shot a ton to get to that photo; it feels psychological but there's nothing you can pinpoint that's actually happening. I've done those pictures, but they're very difficult to do.

Robert De Niro, from the Presence series, by Chris Buck

ME: Your Presence series, which you collected in a book, was really important to me because it seemed like a reaction to the way we once used to obsess about getting access to celebrity subjects, and how frustrating it was to deal with managers and handlers and publicists. You were getting that access and then taking pictures where the celebrity was in the shot, but not visible.

CHRIS: It's saying, right, you know what? Fuck you! You're not going to be visible. But it's also, and that's where the title comes from, you've got Robert DeNiro. All you need is the name. You don't need to show him. That picture is instilled with Robert DeNironess, because his name is next to it and there's proof he's there. Their essence makes the picture cool, and that is celebrity portraiture, right? This is a picture of David Lynch. Cool. A lot of my friends who knew my work were like, "this is the ultimate Chris Buck portrait." It's dry, it's witty, it's a celebrity, but you've filtered out the noise; their face is not necessary. Their name and your name is enough.

I'm not a conceptual fine artist. I find work like that, when it's funny and it's inviting, I like conceptual work that is high concept like that. In the way that John Cage's work is - there's a playfulness to what he does.

ME: It's sort of like that book was your 4'33".

CHRIS: Exactly. But I needed to put them in the picture to ground it, which I know is strange. Putting them in there and then showing proof was a way of saying this isn't just a concept, this is actually a thing. This is real.

Billy Joel by Chris Buck, 2001

ME: What's the default you go to when you get a portrait assignment? What would you do, knowing that you'd deliver something, no matter what? What's the common thread linking all your photos?

CHRIS: Usually there's some kind of prop, there's some vague sense of awkwardness and an off moment. I wouldn't say it's an in-between moment. It's a real moment, but it's a kind of awkward moment - that's where I go. And it usually involves interacting with a physical space or an object. I use that to get people to come along on this ride with me, to get into the role. It gives them something to bounce off. It helps them move from "Oh, I'm having my picture taken."

A lot of getting that unusual picture is kind of believing in it and wanting it, and being ready, suspending disbelief for yourself first. Of course, more than half the time they'll say no, but if you try all the time you'll get those pictures.

Chris Buck, Toronto, Sept. 2016

ME: What's next for you? After the book, what are you really excited about doing next?

CHRIS: You always feel like, as much as you're proud of things you've done as you get older - and you forget how you failed - you have to feel like what you could do next is going to be the best thing that you do. What makes me excited about the Gentlemen's Club series (a series of portraits of the husbands and boyfriends of strippers) is that it's such a good idea. When I was first talking about it, people were really confused by it: Stripper's boyfriends? Why stripper's boyfriends. But then I asked them if they wanted to see some of them, and they said yeah - who are these guys? I wanna see! 

There's so many things about them that are interesting, but the more I'm doing it the more I'm seeing the self-portrait aspect, seeing how much I'm connecting to them that I didn't really know initially. And how much I'm liking them. And how much they're self-portraits again. I was thinking the other day - "Fuck! Self portraits again!"

ME: Why is that a problem?

CHRIS: I was curious about someone I don't know that's two steps removed from a world I might be in. I might go to a strip club and watch a girl dance, but I'm not going to be friends or be social with this dancer. I'll have a professional interaction but I'm not going to go past that. Secondly, their romantic partner, I'm not going to have a connection with them. I'm getting close to what I want (with the series) but I'm not there yet. If I can make my best portraits ever with this series, then this could be the most important work I do. They're not celebrities. I realized when I was doing the (Hewlett Packard ad) series, if you can do a strong image that's not a celebrity, it has more power than a great picture of a celebrity.

If you can make a picture that has universal appeal that doesn't rely on that, you're moving into the area of a W. Eugene Smith. Something iconic. This is a photograph for the ages. This is a photograph that will be powerful. And if I can make a picture of this guy and not tell you what the context is, and you say "This is a weird picture. This is cool. Who is this guy?" If I can do that, I've hit the mark.

Chris Buck

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Oct. 1989

IT'S MY FRIEND CHRIS BUCK'S BIRTHDAY TODAY, and in keeping with a tradition at this blog, I'm posting some more photos of him. As I wrote in the first birthday post, Chris was my subject more than anyone else in our early years as photographers, and I have this surplus of photos of him, back when we were under the influence (of Irving Penn.)

The shot at the top was taken in my Parkdale loft not long after we moved in, after I'd bought my first roll of white seamless paper and a set of strobes and started trying to figure out high-key lighting. If it looks like an album cover shoot outtake, that's probably because a lot of the photography I looked at was on record jackets and CD booklets; at this point in my career getting my work on an album sleeve was a cherished ambition.

I suppose you'd call this sort of pose "mock heroic." we tried on a lot of poses while shooting each other for our lighting and film tests; just how heroic or mocking we looked was usually a hit and miss matter.

Chris Buck, Toronto, Sept. 1988

This shot was taken a year earlier, in the hallway of a hotel (I'm guessing the Park Plaza, now the Park Hyatt) while Chris and I waited around to shoot actors and directors at the film festival. A pretty smoldering look, don't you think? It didn't have anything to do with me.

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Oct. 1989

Back in my Parkdale studio again, and another shot from the same session that produced the photo at the top. These were attempts to solve two problems - capturing action, and copying the look of Robert Longo's "Men in the Cities" series. I was a big fan of Longo at the time, and knew that this series of drawings had begun with photos he took on the roof of his New York City apartment, and I wanted to see if I could catch the halfway point - photos that looked more like the drawings.

What can I say - it was the '80s.

Chris Buck, Toronto, Sept. 2015

The final shot is more recent - part of a portrait session we did last year to go with an interview I made with Chris (still unpublished.) He was in town for a job, staying at an Airbnb in the east end, and I sat down with him for an hour-long chat, inspired mostly by a similar interview we did twenty-five years earlier, just before Chris moved to New York City.

After the interview and shoot, Chris and I went for lunch and he showed me his rough edit of photos for Uneasy, the retrospective collection of his portraits that he's publishing later this year. His Kickstarter for the project did very well, and after teasing us with a book of portraits of invisible celebrities, we'll finally get a chance to see the best of Chris' portrait work collected in one place.

Film Festival 1988

Eric Stoltz, Toronto, Sept. 1988

BY THE SUMMER OF 1988 I HAD OWNED A CAMERA FOR JUST THREE YEARS. In that time I taught myself to develop film, got my first photos published and decided that this might be what I could do with my life. By the time I got ready to shoot portraits while covering my third film festival as a reporter, I had been on a steep learning curve from the moment I took a photo from the living room window of my mother's house.

I came across these negatives while scanning my portraits of director Todd Haynes. The 1988 Festival of Festivals was apparently a busy one for me - I also shot Abbie Hoffman there that year - but I don't know who I was working for, and I don't recall any of these photos being published anywhere until now. They're important to me, however, because they mark the moment when my apprenticeship had ended and I was out in the marketplace, competing with photographers with years more experience than myself.

Aki Kaurismaki, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Aki Kaurismaki was a film festival favorite - a Finnish director who made the sort of deadpan films that were once the specialty of Wim Wenders. He'd arrived at his first Toronto festival a few years' previous as a package with his brother Mika and a film version of Crime and Punishment. He'd have a hit of sorts with Leningrad Cowboys Go America a couple of years after I shot this, and is still working today.

My kit for this festival was pretty minimal; unlike the previous year, I didn't bother bringing along lights or a medium format camera. Everything was shot with whatever available light I could find, mostly in some variation of the "Anton light." I can't think of many places I might have sold such a dark, moody portrait like the Kaurismaki one, which is partly the result of very dim window light and a thin negative.

Evan English & John Hillcoat, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Evan English and John Hillcoat were an Australian writer/director team who showed up with a brutal prison movie starring Nick Cave, a particular favorite of mine at the time. I remember them being very dour and cynical but dryly funny; a vague twitch of memory suggests that I might have interviewed them in addition to taking their portrait.

If these photos are a record of anything, it's my frantic search for a style. The shot above wouldn't have looked out of place in a British music paper just a few years' previous; I was carrying around a creative Rolodex in my mind, picking out solutions I'd seen before in response to the challenge of each new shoot. Some worked, some didn't. I'm not sure what Evan English is doing nowadays, but Hillcoat went on to direct music videos for people like Depeche Mode and Crowded House, and movies like the 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Dusan Makavejev, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Dusan Makavejev's Coca Cola Kid was a big favorite of mine a couple of years before I photographed him - probably because of Greta Scacchi's very sexy performance - and some Serbian friends had filled me in on his importance as a director in Tito's Yugoslavia. He was at the festival with Manifesto (also titled A Night of Love,) a Golan-Globus production with a mix of Americans, Brits and Yugoslavs in the cast that's almost unknown today.

A lot of my solutions to the hotel room shoot that year were fairly unoriginal, but this is one of the few that would become crucial to developing my own style in the years to come - the full-frame, tight close-up of the face, preferably with a short lens, forcing interaction between myself and the subject by invading their personal space. I also have a suspicion that this was the first film fest I shot with my Nikon F3, having graduated up from my Spotmatics when I decided that I needed to look more professional - the sharpness of shots like this suggests that I was working with much better lenses, in any case.

Eric Stoltz, Toronto, Sept. 1988

American actor Eric Stoltz was one of the stars of Makavejev's film, and he was thoroughly wired for my brief shoot with him, mugging and pulling faces and performing for my camera. At the time I was a bit put off by this - for some reason it made me feel like he was doing most of the work, not me - but I like the energy in these shots today. Stoltz was a young actor vaguely associated with the "Brat Pack" a couple of years' previous, who'd go on to have much more of a career than many of his peers, appearing in a wild variety of films and on Broadway, and on TV as both an actor and director.

While going through these negatives I noticed that I was still being parsimonious with my film, devoting just half a roll to each subject. I was a lot more careful with the shutter, re-framing and focusing with each new shot, a working style that was a lot more like medium format work than the rapid-fire shooting that I'd adopt when I finally got a motor drive for my 35mm SLR.

Fernando Solanas, Toronto, Sept. 1988

The film festival must have had a focus on South American or Argentine films in 1988, because I have portraits of two directors from Argentina in my files, and no memory of how they got there. Fernando Solanas was a very political director who had only returned to his country a few years previous after living in exile in Paris. Three years after I took this photo he was shot six times in the legs but survived and went on to run for government several times, winning office twice.

I must have known something about his story as I gave Solanas a very heroic treatment for this portrait - the 3/4 profile and thousand-yard stare in full effect.

Fernando Birri, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Fernando Birri was considered a key figure in Latin American cinema, and was at the festival that year with a film called A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, based on a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. In 1959, he appeared at the Cannes film festival with a short film with probably the world's longest title: Vera historia de la primera fundación de Buenos Aires como también de varias navegaciones de muchas partes desconocidas, islas de reinos, también de muchos peligros, peleas y escaramuzas, tanto por tierra como por mar, que nunca han sido descriptos en otras historias o crónicas, extraídos del libro 'Viajes al río de La Plata', original del soldado alemán Ulrico Schmidl, miembro de la expedición capitaneada por don Pedro de Mendoza, quien publicó por primera vez estas memorias, bien anotadas para utilidad pública en la ciudad de Francfort el año 1567.

My portrait of Birri is another example of how mostly undigested influences were all over my work at this time - I knew as I was focusing my lens for this shot that I was echoing a Roman Vishniac portrait that had appeared on the cover of his book A Vanished World, which had come out a couple years before.

Sasha Mitchell, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Sasha Mitchell arrived at the festival as the star of Paul Morrissey's film Spike of Bensonhurst (also released as Mafia Kid.) I probably would never have taken this photo if it wasn't for Chris Buck - Morrissey's connection to Andy Warhol meant that Chris was desperate to get a portrait of the director, and I tagged along, somehow ending up in a hotel corridor with Chris doing tag team portraits of the young actor, who had previously been a model for Bruce Weber; I think that influence more than amply comes through in this shot.

A year later Mitchell would end up with a role on Dallas, and starred in a series of kickboxing films.

I did an awful lot of shooting at the 1988 film festival, and even if I can't remember any of it being published, it was probably the best week of work I might have done that year, if only because it made me shoot at least once a day for at least a week, responding to different subjects and situations and working through my influences on the way to trying to create my own style.

The film fest would continue to be my big week every year for almost two more decades. During the '90s I'd refine my festival shooting, working with medium format cameras and a tripod to get much more formal, carefully composed portraits, but the arrival of digital and the steady erosion of time for shooting with each subsequent year meant the fast, off-the-cuff shooting I did in 1988 would become the norm again, and I'd have to re-learn the lessons I first had here.

   

   

Lemmy

Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, Toronto, 1987

HE WAS - AS WE ALL WILL BE - KILLED BY DEATH, THOUGH MORE SPECIFICALLY THE CAUSE WAS CANCER. Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead passed yesterday, having cancelled concerts earlier this year amidst rumours of ill health. I don't know why I always presumed that a man who lived so recklessly for so long would be around forever, but I was sad when I heard the news.

Once upon a time I tried to pretend I was too good for the sort of music - heavy metal or hard rock or just "rock and roll" as Lemmy preferred to call it - that Motorhead played. I was a newly minted punk and in love with the "year zero" ethic of that music, and even though I'd loved that sort of thing for years, it all had to go.

That was until the video for "Ace of Spades" started getting regular play on The New Music, a local TV music show. I doubt that anyone believed that my enthusiasm for the track (and "The Chase is Better Than the Catch," the video for which was obviously filmed on the same day) was merely ironic. I'd quote the lyrics aloud with a laugh ("You know I'm going to lose and gambling's for fools but that's the way I like it baby I don't want to live forever") that did a very poor job of disguising how much I enjoyed everything about the song - and Lemmy's windswept performance of it in the video.

In the end it wasn't worth the effort, and I had to admit that Motorhead were pretty fucking awesome.

Motorhead, Concert Hall, Toronto, 1987

I only saw the band once, touring in support of Orgasmatron, their Bill Laswell-produced record as they passed through the Concert Hall here in Toronto. I brought along a camera and took some pretty uninspired shots from halfway down the floor, either unwilling to brave the crush in front of the stage or the brutal volume at which they played. I completely pussed out, and my photos are proof.

I didn't even finish a roll, which turned out to be fortunate when I hung out after the show to watch my friend Chris Buck try to do a portrait of Lemmy and his band in the balcony of the hall.

Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, Toronto, 1987

It was a pretty chaotic affair, with roadies and hangers-on crowding around while Chris shot. He also had to endure merciless taunting from Lemmy, who clearly had no intention of giving Chris anything he wanted. I stood on the sidelines and snapped a half dozen or so shots of Lemmy as he mugged and baited Chris. It was as close to bloodsport as portrait photography gets.

I dug these shots out after hearing the news of Lemmy's death. They've never been printed before, and are one of only a few examples of candid shooting by me over thirty years of work. Lemmy was always on my "list" of must-shoot subjects, but we never crossed paths again and I guess I was always counting on him being around. He said he didn't want to live forever, though, and I should have taken him at his word.

   

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

I WAS NERVOUS AS I BEGAN SETTING UP MY LIGHTS to shoot Sonic Youth in their Montreal hotel room. Guitarist Lee Ranaldo almost leapt across the room when I opened my camera case, and began inspecting my gear.

"What do you have in there?" he asked. "Is that a Rolleiflex?"

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore seemed to be eyeing me warily from the bed by the far wall. We'd met before, and I was going to see if they remembered, but before I could say anything they had a question for me.

"Hey, you're from Toronto," said Thurston. "Do you know this guy Chris Buck? He keeps wanting to take our picture. He's pretty weird."

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, 84 Eldridge Street, NYC, October 1985

The last time I'd been in a room with Kim and Thurston was over five years previous, when I went to New York City for the first time. Dave from Nerve magazine told me that I should try to set up an interview with this band, Sonic Youth, while I was down there.

"I don't like them, but I think they could be important," he said. He arranged for me to borrow a copy of their latest record, Bad Moon Rising, from CKLN, the college radio station at Ryerson, and I took it home for a listen. There was all this stuff about Charles Manson and a guest vocal by Lydia Lunch, who always made me uncomfortable. It was droney and noisy and dark. I though it was sort of scary.

An interview somehow got arranged with their record company, and I met half the band - Kim and Thurston - at their apartment on Eldridge Street in the Bowery. I have a vague memory of Thurston's impressive record collection, and none whatsoever of my interview with them, but when it came time for the photos, Kim and Thurston suggested we go to the roof of the building.

It was a pretty mediocre shoot. This is the best frame. I must have been intimidated by them because this is the closest I ever got. At one point they jokingly posed like Run-DMC, so I suppose they were trying to get me to loosen up, but I was probably still spooked by the whole Manson thing.

Sonic Youth live, Diamond Club, Toronto, Nov. 1988

The next time I saw Kim and Thurston again their band had become one of my favorites, thanks to the release of Evol and Sister, which are still among my favorite records of the '80s. The Manson thing still go to me, but I'd come to tentatively embrace the whole culture of morbidity that was a big part of indie rock at the time.

They played the Diamond Club (now the Phoenix Concert Theatre) and I shot the show for Nerve. I've been over the whole roll and a bit I shot of the show and for some reason I have a lot of shots of Lee and Kim, a few of drummer Steve Shelley, but none of Thurston. I don't know why. Perhaps I was already feeling put off by his rather relentless hipper-than-thou persona. Maybe I was just stuck on the wrong side of the stage.

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

Just over two years later I was assigned by my friend Tim at HMV Magazine to shoot the band in Montreal while they were on tour supporting Neil Young. As recalled in Kim's recent autobiography, Girl in a Band, it was "grueling; the dead of winter, a frozen ocean of endless arena locker rooms."

Nineteen ninety-one would prove to be, as Sonic Youth would later dub it, "The Year Punk Broke," but just two months into that year, Kim didn't recall her band going over too well with either Neil's crew ("Throughout the tour, we were almost never allowed a sound check...") or Neil's fans:

"Neil always drew big crowds, including legions of hippies loyal to his music. Those same crowds were incredibly put off by us, to the degree that if fans sitting among them appreciated or applauded one of our songs they were aggressively shouted down."

After I told them that, yes, I knew Chris Buck and that he was a friend, we got down to the shoot, which I did with a combination of cross-processed 120 film - both slide and negative - and two rolls of black and white shot with my Nikon. I did nothing to disguise the hotel room location - it was where I did most of my shooting for so many years, and there were only so many white walls you could stick someone against.

Sonic Youth, Montreal, February 1991 

Two days later, for some reason, I found myself backstage at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto after their show with Neil. As Kim would remember in her book, the tour passed through Canada in the depth of winter, and Toronto had just been hit with a big snowstorm.

The band were only staying a half block away at the Westbury Hotel (now a Marriott Courtyard) and Kim and I were among the last people who left the Gardens. Both before and after that, I'd talked with Chris and his friend Dave about how Sonic Youth - and Kim in particular - seemed to be afflicted with a kind of Canuckophobia, based on frequent remarks they'd made about the place. Kim's aversion to Toronto seemed to go back to a year she spent here at York University. I spent a year at York; I can understand why you'd hate Toronto if it was your home base in the city.

With this in mind, I noticed that Kim wasn't particularly dressed to navigate the huge snow drifts between the arena and her hotel, so I made myself conspicuously helpful, gallantly holding her arm as we navigated the drifts. I figured that if she was going to have such a bleak take on my hometown and Canadians, I'd might as well do my best to provide a counterpart - the chivalrous Canadian lad, courtly and respectful of ladies who might be unprepared for our bitter climate. (Think Mountie Constable Benton Fraser from Due South.)

I remember getting an actual smile from Kim when I saw her to the door of her hotel. I might actually have bowed from the waist.

I suppose I was a shocked as anyone when Thurston's infidelity a few years back spelled the end of not just Kim and Thurston's marriage but Sonic Youth. Some of my generation seemed genuinely saddened, even disillusioned, by the news. I had always seen Thurston as a bit of a boy-man, so once I was past the shock it all made sense - or about as much sense as any divorce does.

My reaction felt a bit more personal than it would at just any bit of celebrity gossip, though, because of my long, if fleeting, acquaintance with the band, and the couple at its heart. It was like learning that some old college friends who seemed perfect for each other had busted up, with obvious acrimony. It felt very adult, but the second part of Sonic Youth's name had always been ironic, as their fans knew all too well, though it took something really grown up to make the joke finally stick in everyone's throats.

   

Chris

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Toronto, June 1990

MY GOOD FRIEND CHRIS BUCK HAD HIS BIRTHDAY THIS WEEK, and as I promised a year ago at this time, I thought I'd dig out some more portraits I took of him back when we were young photographers, testing out film and equipment with each other as subjects. I found these buried in a binder of unedited slides, and found them interesting, if only for technical reasons.

They were taken in my Parkdale studio, shortly before Chris moved to New York. We were constantly on the search for any technical or creative edge we could find while still searching for something like a unique style, and while playing around with cross-processing, old cameras and alternate printing processes, we came across Polaroid's line of instant slide films.

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Toronto, June 1990

Polachrome (the colour film) and Polapan (the black and white version) looked like regular 35mm canister film, but had to be developed with a hand-cranked film processor and a pack of processing chemicals. Eager for any sort of edge we could find, we both bought a batch and went to work in my studio/bedroom, setting up seamless backdrops and strobe lights.

If you zoom in close on the colour scans, you'll notice the very wide grain, separated into red, green and blue. It was a film-chemical process, but the result anticipated digital photography for some reason I can't explain. It produced a pointillist sort of effect that I very much liked, but after testing the film out with a variety of filters and exposures, I think we both came to the conclusion that it was risky to work with, mostly because we couldn't guarantee a consistent result that we could sell to a client.

The black and white film, on the other hand, had a remarkable smoothness - a grain-free texture that was reminiscent of Polaroid's Type 55 positive/negative film. Unfortunately both films left a notable amount of debris on the film - a cinch to Photoshop away today, but a deal-breaker back in the days of drum scanners, before digital image processing was cheap and easy.

Chris Buck, Parkdale, Toronto, June 1990

Chris was - still is, I'm sure - a ham in front of the camera. These are a selection of some of the more restrained poses from the slides. I promised him I would try to respect his dignity when choosing photos for these posts.

I think Chris must have been going through a Morrissey period when I took quite a few of our portraits of each other, but since I didn't have vases of gladioli sitting around the studio, he had to make do with looking moody and a bit diva-esque.

From the #bucklikeness Instagram series - photos by Chris Buck, 2015

Chris has been having a good year down the States, as far as I can tell - surviving the shrinking of the ice shelf that is editorial portraiture by branching out ever further into corporate and illustrative work. He's also begun a series for Instagram featuring a 3-D printed likeness of himself, which he carries around and poses daily wherever he goes.

He's having more fun with this than I think he'd like to admit. And for the first time I think he's found a subject that's as pliant and cooperative as he's always wanted.

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.