Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton by Irving Penn, 1950

I OWNED A BOOK OF CECIL BEATON'S PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE I OWNED A CAMERA. Beaton's work - or the collection of images in photography dealer James Danziger's 1980 collection, bought from a remainder table - was probably as important to me as a photographer as the family Bible with all the colour plates of old master biblical scenes - the only art book we had in the house for the whole of my childhood.

I discovered Beaton in college, when I was in thrall to Evelyn Waugh and the story of the Bright Young Things of London in the Twenties. It was that Brideshead Revisited TV miniseries moment at the beginning of the '80s, as significant culturally to the decade as the election of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA was politically, and his photos often illustrated magazine features explaining the era.

I found the book on sale at Edwards Books & Art (now long gone) on Queen Street West, and stared at his portraits of everyone from Stephen Tennant to General Carton de Wiart to Augustus John to Jean Shrimpton - many of whom I had never heard of until I bought the book. The first photographer whose name I recognized was probably Boris Spremo, the daredevil newspaper photogapher at the Toronto Star whose byline accompanied pictures taken hanging from ropes and construction cranes, but Beaton was the first photographer who I understood as an artist, creating work that had a style and a career-long trajectory.

Love, Cecil, a feature length documentary on Beaton's work and life is opening this week at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs theatre here in Toronto, and I spoke to the director, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, on the phone last week to share my thoughts about the man with someone who's spent at least as much time as I have thinking about him and his work.

Nancy Cunard by Cecil Beaton, 1927

Cassandra Wilson, Toronto, 1990

I have had Beaton's photos pasted to the inside of my head for over thirty years, so it's not surprising that they've found their way out many times in work I've shot, like this portrait of jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. I definitely recalled Beaton's very early portrait of Nancy Cunard as soon as Wilson brought her hand up to her face, with its thick beaded bracelet. Beaton's photo is dim and blurred, but it helped him make his early reputation as a society photographer, even at a time when there were plenty of other photographers who could be relied upon to hand in a technically superior portrait.

"He was no great master," Immordino Vreeland says over the phone. "He wasn't a photographer's photographer. He just did it."

"He's always been put down a bit because he wasn't in the darkroom, and he did so much more. Because he wasn't just a photographer - he was so much more than that."

Edith Sitwell by Cecil Beaton, 1927

Tilda Swinton, Toronto, 1992

I was an English student taking a minor in theatre when I discovered Beaton, which probably explains why I responded to strongly to the theatrical aspect of his work - the little stage sets he'd build or simply discovered, like the massive tapestry that he used for the background of his portrait of poet Edith Sitwell. I had the Sitwell photo in the front of my mind when I posed actress Tilda Swinton in front of one in the lobby of the Sutton Place hotel for a film festival shoot, another homage to his influence I was daring people to see.

"I love the portraits of the Bright Young Things," Immordino Vreeland says when we talk about his best work, "and the immediacy of him coming up with these fantastic backdrops out of nothing, but you see what I've chosen in the film. So much of it you'd recognize because it's so iconic, but the portraiture that I didn't pick that much was English society, because that doesn't interest me as much."

"It was incredible to me that you had this character, this personality who was vibrant and creative for decades, he found a way to fit into everything and every new trend that was going on. And he found a way to have a vernacular with all these different people, which isn't surprising because he made these things happen."

Serge Lifar by Cecil Beaton, 1938

Jane Bunnett, Parkdale, 1994

I've read Beaton biographies and diaries and it's hard to ignore how insecure he was, from the beginning of his career to the end of his life. He was hardly born poor, but he had little money or support despite his ambition, and the lush effects he achieved in his early work were often achieved on the cheap.

He often painted or built his theatrical portrait backdrops, and while I don't have a fraction of his talent as an artist, I was inspired by his resourcefulness for the session I did for the CD cover of my friend Jane Bunnett's The Water is Wide. The title gave me a pretty clear cue, and while I definitely drew on the look of an old Pacific Jazz or Contemporary album cover from the '50s, I can credit Beaton with the inspiration to create the backdrop with paint left over from the living room of my Parkdale loft.

T.S. Eliot by Cecil Beaton, 1956

Shyam Selvadurai, Parkdale, 1995

Right from the start, and before I had any inkling that I'd pursue a career in photography, I was impressed with the portfolio of people Beaton built up over his decades of work. Aside from his long access to the royal family, there are politicians and artists and writers (including his old nemesis, Waugh) and movie stars and the Rolling Stones, shot in styles that varied from studio glamour portraits to snapshots.

As befits a man who was as known at one point for his drawings as his photos, and who probably achieved his greatest fame as a film and theatre designer, Beaton had enormous creative resources to draw upon. Despite his avowed lack of technical expertise, he used multiple exposures many times in his career, as in his portrait of T.S. Eliot, which was definitely an inspiration when I was assigned to shoot Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai. While not an exact copy of Beaton's Eliot shot, it gave me the guts to try the only in-camera multiple exposure I ever attempted, if only to say that I'd followed Beaton's prompt and done it.

Nancy Beaton by Cecil Beaton, 1926

Norma Shearer by Cecil Beaton, 1930

Bjork, Toronto, 1997

The first photos that really struck me in Danziger's book were Beaton's dreamy tableaux from the '20s and '30s, featuring yards of draperies, scavenged props and crumpled cellophane - cheap materials meant to give the impression of fantasy and luxury. While similar effects were achieved by a more technically accomplished photographer like Angus McBean - a contemporary whom Beaton pointedly ignore in his many diaries - I couldn't help but be taken by the pantomime surrealism achieved in an early picture of his sister Nancy, or the much more modernist feel he gets from crumpled plastic sheeting in the Norma Shearer portrait.

I had Beaton in mind every time I pulled back the window curtains in a hotel room and draped them over a convenient floor lamp. I don't know how many times I resorted to this trick over the first decade of my career, but the best result was probably my portrait session with Bjork, probably because the singer was exactly the sort of quirky personality that Beaton would have responded to, if he'd ever gotten her in front of his camera.

Audrey Hepburn by Cecil Beaton, 1954

Liane Balaban, Toronto, 2004 

Years after I'd first opened the Danziger book, I began finding inspiration in the work Beaton did mid-career, shooting celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford and Garbo in his custom-designed suites at the Sherry-Netherland, St. Regis or Ambassador hotels in New York City. They were much more informal portraits than the high style glamour and society work he'd been doing a couple of decades earlier, and often did little to disguise the setting.

Working exclusively in hotel rooms during the 2000s, I drew on Beaton once again, using ad hoc or natural light in cramped, rushed conditions much as I imagined he might have. I didn't have the luxury of building up a rapport with subjects like Beaton did with Audrey Hepburn, star of My Fair Lady, the film that made his name as a set and costume designer. But when actress Liane Balaban entered the hotel room during the 2004 film festival looking very gamine - a word I probably learned from reading Beaton - I instinctively put her in a far corner of the room hoping to get something remotely like Beaton's 1954 portrait of Hepburn.

I've written before that I was disappointed with the portrayal of Beaton as a graying court toady in the Netflix miniseries The Crown, and Lisa Immordino Vreeland agreed with me.

"That character they chose - God, he was such an oldie! He looked so stodgy, didn't he?"

"At the same time," she reflects, "it's amazing that he was mentioned in four episodes. I was not happy with the portrayal. I loved the historical aspect of it, and then sometimes they'd show the real archival footage, like when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were with Hitler and Goebbels in Germany, it was fantastic. But I don't think we think of Beaton like that because, well, I think of him as one of the Bright Young Things. I think of him as the younger Beaton, and he was kind of frumpy when he was old. For some reason Snowdon is seen as more attractive."

I think Cecil Beaton is long overdue for rediscovery, and Lisa tells me that she's heard rumours of a biopic in the works. Rupert Everett, who reads Beaton's letters and diaries on the soundtrack of Love, Cecil, would have made a perfect young Beaton, but by the time the film actually gets made he might be more appropriate as the aging photographer, worried about his reputation and legacy and, even more sadly, haunted by loneliness and regret.

For her part, Immordino Vreeland says that she felt fortunate with her choice of a subject, who left such a massive visual legacy in addition to an in-depth written record of his life.

"We had all this material to be able to talk about his emotions, his insecurity, his sadness over love, his different friendships, his creativity. You're fortunate when you have material like this right from the start."

Bronica SQ-a

GEAR CAN BE THE DOWNFALL OF A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER. Acquiring and upgrading it will siphon off the profits of anyone with a less than thriving business. Luckily, I invested in most of the gear I really needed early in the '90s, and used it hard pretty much until my business finally collapsed and the digital revolution made much of it obsolete - whichever came first. This post is the first of a trio devoted to the stalwarts of my camera gear during that decade.

Last week I featured three posts shot in my Parkdale studio during the heyday of my career as a portraitist. Looking them over, I realized that they were all shot with one camera - the Zenza Bronica SQ-a, a modular medium format camera system that I bought used when I realized that, as content as I might have been with my Rolleiflex TLRs, I needed something that had a) interchangeable film backs for quick reloading without switching cameras and b) a Polaroid back for testing exposures and (probably even more important) showing for client approval.

Savoy Cabbage, Parkdale, Oct. 1995

The Bronica was known as the "poor man's Hasselblad" and as a favorite of wedding photographers, and the one I acquired had seen some hard use. It worked beautifully, though, and while renting extra lenses could occasionally be a problem, I came to rely on it as I began experimenting with cross processing and refining my lighting.

I doubt if I would have felt as confident with my still life work without the Bronica's Polaroid back, or the prism I bought to make it function like a true SLR. The bellows style lens hood might have looked like overkill, but it had the great advantage of a slot for stacking filters, and I slowly built up a collection to help correct for colour shifts in cross-processing. Most of all, fully accessorized with bellows and prism, it looked like a serious piece of gear, which went a long way with with impressing dubious clients.

Jane Bunnett, Parkdale, 1996

Melissa Burns, Parkdale, 1996

It lived most of its life on a tripod, locked off and plugged into my Profoto strobe kit and a shutter release cable. I would never have considered the cost of the optional motor drive, as the quick wind grip was all I needed to advance film quickly when a shoot picked up speed. It was the machine at the heart of my studio system.

While I occasionally rented lenses - mostly the 50mm/3.5 in Vistek's rental inventory - I rarely needed more than the 80m/2.8 that came with the package I originally bought. It was no Zeiss Planar, but it was still an underrated chunk of glass, and I never had any complaint with the results, either when shooting album covers for clients like my friend Jane Bunnett (the shot above is an outtake from the session we did for her Cuban Piano Masters CD) or when I finally perfected my high key lighting with my pal Melissa as my model.

I probably haven't run a roll of film through my Bronica since the turn of the millennium. The case it's lived in since then is a time capsule now, complete with unexposed film, batteries and a box of Polaroid pack film. It was the epitome of a really useful piece of gear, but I doubt if I'll ever use it again, since there's almost nothing it does that my new Fuji XT-2 can't do as well. I'm a sentimental idiot, though, who has a hard time parting with gear that's served me well, so it will probably sit in its case, fondly remembered but unused, for the forseeable future.

 

Candido Camero

Candido Camero, Toronto, June 2017

LEGENDARY IS AN OVERUSED WORD, but if you love jazz or Cuban music, it applies to percussionist Candido Camero if it applies to anyone. My friends Jane Bunnett and Larry Cramer have a habit of playing with legendary musicians every now and then, so when I found out that they were bringing 95-year-old Candido to town for a show featuring a conga contest, I knew I had to pull one of the few strings I have and try to get a portrait.

Candido was the conga drummer at the Tropicana nightclub in Havana for eight years before he left for the U.S., where he played and recorded with Machito, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton and Al Cohn, among many others. At some point in the '70s he had a few disco hits, and made a record, Dancin' and Prancin', that managed to become influential on the house music scene. He's had a hell of a career, and it's not over yet.

Candido at Lula Lounge, Toronto, June 2017

I showed up at the club for soundcheck and set up my studio in a bag in the little dining room at the front of the club. The soundcheck turned out to be a rehearsal, and I sat and listened to Candido and the band that Jane had assembled around him, which included pianist Hilario Duran, run through most of that night's numbers.

When I finally got Candido in front of my lights, I took a few simple headshots to warm both of us up. While watching him play, I was fascinated by the tape that he wrapped around his fingers - a trick many conga players use to prevent blisters and cracks on their hands. I asked him to bring his hand up to his face, hoping that the white tape and its serrated edges would add some extra visual interest, and provide a cue for anyone who knows percussionists and their ailments.

Candido Camero, Toronto, June 2017

I can't imagine how many times Candido has sat for a photo during his sixty-plus year career, but he was patient and gracious with me as I asked for the tiniest adjustments to his hands in the tight composition my lighting setup demands. Past the midpoint of my own career, I treasure these rare opportunities to get someone like him to sit for a portrait.

On a whim, I'd packed one of my Rolleiflex cameras and a couple of rolls of film that day. I've been scanning old Rollei negatives for the last couple of years for this blog, but it had been well over a decade since I'd run a roll of film through one of my cameras. I put on a close-up filter to get a tighter frame and shot a roll at the end of the shoot. I'll admit that I was shocked at how rusty I felt with the camera - the focus on this frame (the easiest to print without the need to digitally clean up the background) is a bit soft, and would have been unacceptably so back when the Rollei was my main camera. It was fun to use it again, though, just for old time's sake.

Candido Camero, Toronto, June 2017

Havana, 1995

Yosvany Terry, Havana, June 1995

I'M GOING BACK TO CUBA TODAY, OVER TWENTY YEARS SINCE THE LAST TIME I WAS THERE. I won't be in Havana, however, which is something of a relief, since I don't imagine a lot of the things I saw happening in Cuba's capitol in the early to mid-'90s have either improved or gone away. (UPDATE: Thanks to Hurricane Matthew, the press trip has been cancelled.)

I've posted photos from my first trip to Havana here and here, when I went with Jane Bunnett to document the recording of Spirits of Havana, probably her most important record. I went back four years later, on my own, to take photos for her follow up, Chamalongo. It was a year after the shortages and economic hardship of the "Special Period" led to something that hadn't been seen much in Cuba for nearly four decades - riots against the government.

It might explain why the city seemed unusually subdued, even sombre. One thing that I couldn't help but notice, though, was that there was a curious absence of stray cats and dogs on the streets. It was on this trip that a friend - someone who worked for the government, no less - warned me to stay away from the Cuban sandwiches.

"I don't think that's pork in them," he said, ominously.

Havana, Cuba, June 1995

I took my cameras out on the street, of course, in the spare time I had during that week, between portrait shoots. For some reason, though, I didn't shoot as much 35mm as I had four years earlier, and most of my contacts were made with the Rolleiflex. It was probably because, by the mid-'90s, I was far more interested in what I could do with medium format film, and had also fallen hopelessly in love with the square format frame. (A love that has persisted until today.)

I was trying to pare down my photos to the cleanest, starkest compositions I could manage, though the photo above of the rooftops of the city, taken from the balcony of a friend's apartment in Centro Habana, isn't very minimalist at all. I tried not to dwell too long on the ruined buildings, as hard as they were to avoid (a whole building had collapsed just before I arrived, I was told) though the photo of the basketball court next to the Malecon - my favorite shot from this trip - gave just enough of a hint of that ongoing decay for me.

Partagas Cigar Factory, Havana, June 1995

I asked my government connection if he could arrange a tour of the Partagas cigar factory for me while I was there. The cigar craze was in full swing by the middle of the '90s, and I'd become an enthusiastic smoker when I could afford it. I probably had some vague ambition to sell some of these shots to one of the cigar magazines when I got home, though how I would have done that I couldn't tell you, then or now.

I shot quite a lot of film at Partagas, colour and black and white, desperate to capture as much of the atmosphere and detail as possible. Looking over the contact sheets today, it's the portraits of the workers that stand out, with these three among the best. I also can't help but notice how thin everyone looks, especially compared to Habaneros four years earlier.

Frank Emilio Flynn, Havana, June 1995

My main reason for the trip was to get portraits of the musicians Jane had played with during the sessions. I'd met Frank Emilio Flynn before, when he'd been on the Spirits of Havana sessions, and when he'd come to Toronto for concerts Jane had organized. He was a dear man, and I felt privileged to visit him at his home in what was once a prosperous suburb of the city near Vedado.

Frank was a legendary figure in Cuban music, who formed a link between the older son traditions and the Afro-Cuban jazz revolution of the '50s. His eyesight had been damaged at birth, and he was completely blind by the time he was a teenage piano prodigy. I tried to capture some of the stateliness of his playing, and his considerable dignity. It helped that the light coming from the street through the big windows of his home was so lovely.

Merceditas Valdes & Tata Guines, Tropicana Club, Havana, June 1995

I had shot Merceditas Valdes for the Spirits of Havana sessions, in which she and her husband, Guillermo Barreto, had played key roles. Guillermo, tragically, had died not long after those sessions, and I could see when I met Merceditas in the lobby of the Inglaterra, my hotel, that she was doing very poorly herself. She was dressed in santera white, and was a real celebrity in the Inglaterra's lobby, basking in the attention of the staff.

We took a cab out to the Tropicana club, one of the few relics of the Batista/Lansky/Traficante era to remain in business under Fidel. Waiting for us was conga player Tata Guines, another legendary figure from the Afro-Cuban music era, who set up his drums by the club's famous fountain.

Tata scared the shit out of me. He had an intimidating reputation, and gave off an air of menace that it was hard to miss even if you hadn't heard any of the rumours or stories that attached themselves to him. He was known as a hard man, even though he probably wasn't as scary as his wife, who once stuck a knife in him.

I posed the two of them together with the fountain in the background, and they quickly began running through a series of practiced poses that they'd probably learned for publicity shots and LP covers back in the '50s. It was touching to see them there, in the middle of this carefully preserved throwback to Havana's less than austere past, and even as I took these photos I felt like I was catching the last moments of a musical era quickly passing. Taken together, everything I shot on this trip had an inescapably elegaic feel.

Yosvany Terry on the Malecon, Havana, June 1995

Not everything I photographed was about the past, however. While I was in Havana, Jane had asked me to take some promo shots for a young saxophonist she was trying to help out. Yosvany Terry was from a musical family, and had come up through Cuba's music schools with a fantastic reputation. I met him at my hotel and walked down to the Malecon, the seaside boulevard, where I wanted to take some shots that hinted at what could become an iconic talent. (Which explains the obvious echo of Dexter Gordon in the photo at the top of this post.)

It's worth noting that the saxophone Yosvany posed with in these shots was broken; even for a talented young player, getting instruments repaired was a challenge, and Jane had set up a charity to help provide instruments, parts and repairs for Cuba's young musicians. Yosvany would, however, overcome this brief setback, and leave the country for New York, where he'd play with major figures like Branford Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Henry Threadgill and Taj Mahal. Today Yosvany Terry lives in Harlem, is a Rockefeller grant recipient, and was hired by Harvard last year as a senior lecturer and Director of Jazz Ensembles.

Merceditas Valdes died in Havana on June 13, 1996.

Frank Emilio Flynn died in Havana on August 23, 2001.

Tata Guines died in Havana on February 4, 2008.

Claude Ranger

Claude Ranger, Toronto, July 1988

A CAREER IN JAZZ CAN BE A VERY FRAGILE THING. Gigs are scarce and recording dates scarcer and whole careers can come and go with only glimpses captured in a handful of records and a few photos or newspaper articles. I suppose the precedent for this was set right at the beginning of the music with Buddy Bolden, a hugely influential, even legendary New Orleans trumpeter for whom no recordings exist.

Claude Ranger's career wasn't nearly as obscure as Bolden's, though he was a legendary figure in Canadian jazz, made more so by his mysterious exit from the scene and the fact that he left without any commercially available recordings of himself as a bandleader. When I took these photos of the Montreal-born Ranger in the summer of 1988 he was hardly obscure; after living in Toronto for many years he'd moved to Vancouver, but was still in demand here as a sideman, and had come back to do some dates with my friends Jane Bunnett and Larry Cramer, just after having played on Jane's debut record, In Dew Time.

Claude Ranger, Toronto, July 1988

I photographed him twice, and thanks to my friend Mark Miller I've been able to figure out that one shoot - a dim, shadowy set of photos - was taken at Sneaky Dee's, a little Mexican eatery/club that was located at Bloor and Bathurst before it moved down Bathurst to College and became a legendary punk rock dive. I shot a whole roll tucked into a corner of the stage, trying to get a good shot of Claude in the shadows near the back.

Claude Ranger, Toronto, July 1988

The other shoot was apparently at Clinton's, where I was so desperate to get some good photos of Ranger playing that I brought my own lighting - a single flash on a light stand, bounced into an umbrella - and shot him during soundcheck. Drummers are notoriously the hardest people to get decent shots of during a show, since they're usually at the back of the stage, in the worst light, and moving constantly. I suppose Claude knew this, which is why he agreed to let me do this little staged setup - halfway between a live shoot and a portrait.

Claude Ranger, Toronto, July 1988

Claude was a monster of a drummer, famous for his stamina and energy and love of improvisation, but also for his ability to keep a cigarette lit in the corner of his mouth for a whole set, lighting each new one off the old butt without breaking stride, even during a solo. My good friend and jazz mentor Tim Powis, also a drummer, was a huge fan, and was probably my inspiration for trying to get some really decent shots of Claude playing.

Claude Ranger, Toronto, July 1988

Claude lived pretty hard, and ended up with health issues that saw his public appearances get scarcer in the late '90s. He played a lot of shows with a lot of people, but few of them ended up becoming records, and so Ranger's career ended up being one recalled only in glimpses and stories. It probably didn't help that he lived in all three major Canadian cities, each with their own discrete, sometimes insular scenes, and seemed to care more about playing concerts than negotiating record deals.

There are more than a few jazz careers like Claude Ranger's here in Canada, and while a lot of them have a tragic component, none of them end so mysteriously as his. It's confounding that someone who made such an indelible impression on the bandstand could simply vanish from the country's musical scene and then from the world.

Claude Ranger disappeared near the Abbotsford area of British Columbia in late 2000.

Dewey Redman

Dewey Redman, Parkdale, June 1990

MY PORTRAITS OF JAZZ MUSICIANS WERE MOSTLY TAKEN when I desperately wanted a career that nobody could have anymore. Basically I wanted to be William Claxton or Francis Wolff or William Gottlieb or Herman Leonard; the time when it was even possible to have that career had ended at least twenty years before I took most of my jazz photos, so what I ended up doing was documenting a brief period in the history of jazz music, after it had given up all hope of becoming anything like popular music again, and just as it started turning into a kind of museum music, either practiced by enthusiasts for meagre pay or performed by a dwindling group of "legends," in nothing remotely like the context where it once lived and thrived.

And I know this sounds bleak. It isn't meant to be. I remember the shoots where I made these photos with real fondness, and can savour the enthusiasm that I brought to them, often without the expectation of ever seeing payment. I was truly a fan of the music, and of the people I was photographing, many of whom I met through Jane Bunnett and her husband Larry Cramer, who were making their own way up the first steps of their careers and were often as thrilled as I was to be working with these musicians. And it was through Jane that I met tenor sax player Dewey Redman.

Dewey Redman, Parkdale, June 1990

Dewey was one of my favorite people, ever. Born in Texas, he made his name playing with Ornette Coleman during the revolutionary period of free jazz in the late '60s. Through the '70s and '80s he played with Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, and with fellow Coleman alumni like Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Charlie Haden. My friend Jane asked him to play with her on her first record, In Dew Time (the title track was a tribute to him) and he'd pass through Toronto frequently over the next decade or so to play with Jane or with his own band.

Dewey was one of the funniest men I knew, a natural comic who loved keeping rehearsals, soundchecks and recording sessions light and cheerful. At a soundcheck for a big concert Jane held at St. Lawrence Town Hall in the early '90s, he reduced Don Pullen - a man whose attitude to playing music could generally be described as serious as cancer - to helpless tears of laughter as he pretended that the blasts of feedback through the sound system made him incontinent. At the same show he raucously chided Charlie Haden for his taste in large-breasted women. It was hard to take yourself too seriously with Dewey.

Dewey Redman live with Jane Bunnett, Toronto, June 1990

He had endless great stories about the places he'd been and the people he played with. He remembered doing benefit gigs for the Black Panther's children's breakfast program in San Francisco, but admitted that he mostly did it because Angela Davis looked "so fiiiiiiine."

I visited him at his apartment in Flatbush once. Scrutinizing the door buzzers for his name to no avail, I walked outside again and called his name. Two older ladies stuck their heads out a window overhead and asked me who I was looking for.

"Mr. Dewey Redman, ladies," I said.

"DEWEY! What in hell kinda name is that? You ever heard of a Dewey living here?"

"I ain't ever heard of no Dewey," the other woman bellowed back, before Dewey's head suddenly popped out through another window and he told me which buzzer was his. He was apparently home so little that no one in the building knew who he was; he didn't even bother putting his name on the mailbox.

Dewey Redman, Parkdale, June 1990

I shot these photos when Dewey was in town playing a show with Jane. I was desperate to get his portrait, so I asked if he'd come by one day after rehearsing around the corner at Jane and Larry's house. He dropped by with his Australian girlfriend; I took their photo together. When I visited him in Flatbush he proudly showed me where he'd taped it in the corner of his television set.

The live shot was taken at the concert; I don't remember where it was, but I shot it on medium format with my Rolleiflex on a tripod, hungry to get something different than the usual jazz club shot, grainy and dimly lit. The studio portraits were done with a big softbox in front of the only backdrop I owned, a big roll of gray seamless paper.

I wanted something simple and classic and dignified that caught Dewey's humour and soulful nature. At the time I dreamed that they might have ended up on the cover of an album, maybe on Soul Note or Black Saint records. I don't think anyone has seen these photos until now.

Dewey Redman died of liver failure in Brooklyn, New York on Sept. 2, 2006.