Village Voice

Voivod, Montreal, December 1989

THE VILLAGE VOICE IS DEAD. If you've never read, or even heard of the Village Voice, I doubt that you care; one more newspaper gone in an age when newspapers go out of business every month. Even for people who care, it's hardly news - for fans or readers or former employees the paper essentially died last year when it ceased print publication and went completely online.

My first proper assignment for the Voice was nearly thirty years ago, when photo editor Edna Suarez phoned me and asked if it would be too much trouble to hop up to Montreal to shoot the Quebec prog metal band Voivod for the paper's next Rock & Roll Quarterly supplement. I'm not sure Edna was aware of the distances involved getting from place to place in Canada, and even before I did the math in my head I knew that whatever I made probably wouldn't cover the cost of a return ticket on the overnight train.

But I didn't mention that and of course I said yes. This was my first real gig shooting for an American publication and I couldn't blow it, so I packed nearly my whole studio - my ProFoto strobe kid and light stands and two cameras - and hauled it all down to Union Station and onto the VIA Rail train. I arrived in Montreal the morning after a blizzard and went upstairs from the Gare Central to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for breakfast, stowing all my gear by the wall next to my table in the fancy restaurant across from the Marie, Reine du Monde Cathedral, where I waited for the band's manager to meet me. The cost of breakfast ate up the last of whatever I'd make from the shoot.

Aki Kaurismaki, Toronto, Sept. 1988

I think I sold my first photo to the Voice nearly two years earlier. Preparing for his big move to New York, my friend Chris Buck had already started doing work for them, and he arranged for me to send the Voice a print of my shoot with Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (a big deal at the time, at least in film fest circles) on spec. They might have used it, but I can't be sure; I've never been good at keeping tearsheets, so what got sent and what got printed is sometimes hard to match up.

Another big assignment for the Voice was one of the only examples of sports photography I've ever done. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had been a gold medalist at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but had the medal taken away when he tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. He attempted a comeback three years later, which began at the Hamilton Indoor Games. Edna called me up and asked if I'd do the shoot. I had never shot a sporting event and knew I'd have to rent something like a 300mm/2.8 lens to pull it off, but of course I said yes.

Ben Johnson, Hamilton, 1991

I only remember a couple of things about the shoot. The first was Johnson's visible disappointment when he learned that he'd finished second, which I was lucky enough to capture in a few barely-sharp frames. (I actually think the slight camera shake enhances the shot of that heartbreaking moment, and in any case strict focus and sharpness is overrated.) The other was a phone call from Edna.

I was working with a local writer on the gig - a friend I'd known for a few years. A few days before the Hamilton track meet Edna called me to firm up details, then said "I thought you said the writer was a friend of yours." I insisted that he was, but Edna told me that he'd been calling the paper trying to get me taken off the job so his sister could shoot Johnson.

"Of course I said no," Edna told me.

I never said anything about it to him, not in the car there and back to Hamilton, and not in the decades since, but I don't think I was ever able to trust him again. It was a sobering moment for me - the  first time I realized that loyalty is situational for many people.

James Tenney, Toronto, January 1989

Ice Cube, Toronto, 1990

Sonic Youth, Montreal, 1991

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, 1991

Much of the work I sold to the Voice was reprints - portraits from my files bought to illustrate stories. I could see why they might turn to me for a portrait of James Tenney - an American composer who lived in Toronto and taught at York University. What I never understood was why the Village Voice would have needed my pictures of a New York band like Sonic Youth, or someone like the writer William S. Burroughs, who must have been photographed by the Voice countless times since the paper was founded in 1955.

I liked to think it was because my shots were good, but I was probably flattering myself. In retrospect, it might have been because they were different - nobody in New York or the U.S. had seen them since they'd appeared in whatever publication assigned them up here. Getting assignments to shoot for U.S. media like the Voice was difficult in Canada - almost anyone would either live or perform or do something in New York City before they'd show up in Toronto. But work done up here at least had the advantage in the pre-internet age of being obscure and unseen by art directors and photo editors in Manhattan.

Joe Kramer, Toronto, 1991

This shoot with gay erotic massage therapist (and former Jesuit seminarian) Joe Kramer is a pretty good example of the sort of work I might get assigned by the Voice. It's really the kind of subject anyone who shot for an alternative weekly might find themselves shooting back in the '80s and '90s. I'd photographed people like Kramer for NOW - no surprise since the alternative weekly probably wouldn't exist if there was no Village Voice.

I don't know when I started reading the Voice - probably since before I owned a camera. I know that I bought it religiously every week for over a decade, which is why this shot of Joe Kramer is of a piece with the kind of work the Voice printed. It's not too different from something James Hamilton might have shot at around the same time - a piece of mimicry, for a client I desperately wanted to impress.

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May 1993

The last assignment I ever did for the Voice were portraits of the writer Vikram Seth. By this point Edna Suarez had moved on to the New York Times and Tom McDonough was photo editor. I don't know why I never got another shoot from the Voice, but it's not surprising - I was no longer making trips to New York City with my portfolio to push my work and I never had the same personal connection with Tom that I had with Edna.

My Voice connection was probably the key to whatever success I had outside Canada; when Edna moved to the Times she assigned me whatever work she had that could be done here. It was through Edna that I met art directors Robert Newman and Jesse Reyes, who were responsible for assignments I got for outlets like Guitar World and Entertainment Weekly. The brutal truth is that, despite the size and competition, people in New York publishing were far more helpful and friendly than almost anyone in Toronto, which helped keep the illusion alive that I might one day have a career down there - at least for a while.

Vikram Seth might have been my last Voice assignment, but he was not the last portrait of mine published by the Voice. Late last year, after the last print edition of the paper had hit the newsstands, the Voice website ran a story about the new Fela Kuti box set featuring my 1989 portrait of Fela from the cover of the booklet. They obviously got the shot as a handout, so I didn't see money for it (though I was, thankfully, credited.)

Ironically, it was Chris Buck who told me about the photo being used, three decades after he got me my introduction to the paper. Ultimately, this is my only tearsheet from the Voice.

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

Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate

Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate, NYC, July 1996

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

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

Toumani Diabate, NYC, July 1996

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

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

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

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

Toumani Diabate & Bassekou Kouyate, NYC, July 1996

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

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

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

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

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

Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle, New York City, Aug. 1992

WE WERE IN FRONT OF ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL ON FIFTH AVENUE when I stopped and said we had to get a picture. Roddy Doyle - Irish writer, professed atheist and my subject for the afternoon - shrugged and said "Of course." It might have been the second most obvious spot to take his portrait in New York City (the most obvious would have been a bar with a name like Kelly's or O'Hara's but there were none of those on this stretch of Fifth) but sometimes you have to bow to inevitability.

I'd flown in to New York that morning to take Doyle's photo for the cover of NOW magazine. The Van, his lastest novel and the third book in the Barrytown trilogy, had come out the previous year and he was passing through Toronto to promote it. The hit movie version of The Commitments had also been released and he was a literary star, though I doubt if anyone on the streets of Manhattan would have recognized him. 

Roddy Doyle, New York City, Aug. 1992

We began our walk around midtown by Central Park in the rain. I had packed light - as much as I could carry in a camera bag - and had decided to try something outside my usual style. Daylight candid shooting with fill flash is the sort of thing I associated with newspaper photographers looking to get evenly-exposed shots without shadows or blown-out highlights, and with a maximum depth of field. I put a wide lens on my Nikon and a diffuser on my Metz flash and off we went, starting by the horse and carriage rides on West 59th.

It was around noon and I guess we were hungry. The pretzel stand was there so I bought one for both of us. I tucked mine in my bag and took a half a roll of Doyle eating his in the rain, a bemused look on his face. This, I thought, at least won't be the standard author's photo.

Roddy Doyle eats a pretzel, New York City, Aug. 1992

Doyle and I continued our walk through midtown, past the Plaza and down Fifth where I took out my Rolleiflex in front of the Cathedral. I must have shot a roll or two of colour film for the cover at one point, but there's nothing to be found in my files and it's no great loss, considering the strict template we had to shoot our NOW covers into at the time. We ended our walk by Radio City Music Hall, by which point the rain had stopped.

I'm still trying to understand why I took such a light approach to this shoot. Perhaps I was feeling less than inspired; I'd enjoyed what I'd read of Doyle so far but I was hardly overawed by him. Perhaps it was because we were close in age or maybe, considering my own background, it was that I've always been less than susceptible to the peculiar charms or "Oirishness," in movies or on the page. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could execute the strict technical requirements of a certain kind of photo.

Looking at the date, though, it also might have been simple mental exhaustion and depression; this was near the end of an agonizing year-long breakup with my ex-girlfriend and I was probably so distracted by the end game as it played out that I couldn't muster the emotional or creative investment to really get something unique from my subject. It would end - in tears, as they say - a few weeks later, but I was bracing for it all summer. Considering my state of mind, I was probably just happy taking a walk through New York City in genial company, even if it was raining.

 

Twin towers

West Broadway looking south from West Houston, NYC, 1989

I KNEW THAT I'D CAUGHT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER with my cameras while shooting Manhattan streetscapes, but my memory has been so faulty lately that I couldn't be sure. I intended to run this shot a year ago but it took me longer than I thought to excavate this frame from behind the analog wall.

This is the only shot I have of the twin towers, even though I spent the better part of a day in lower Manhattan shooting within blocks of where they stood. At the time, I'm sure I reasoned that the towers were a New York City visual cliche, and while I was aiming to take shots that said "NYC!" without being too obvious about it all, anything that featured them thrusting out over the skyline was just too picture postcard.

It also has to be remembered that the towers weren't well loved during their brief lifespan. Architecture fans didn't have much nice to say about them; they were a monumental expression of a late modernism that isn't given the same warm backwards glance we've used to celebrate postwar midcentury modernism like the Seagram Building, Googie diners or Richard Neutra houses.

They were big and hard to miss, which is probably why I worked to avoid them in my Rollei viewfinder when I was in their shadows, and only deigned to include the towers in my frame when they were far away, nestled in the long crease of a street of brick tenements and commercial buildings, varnished over by late afternoon mist.

There have been only two moments in my life when I knew viscerally that I was witnessing history. The first was the week I spent at my sister's place in Caledon watching the Berlin Wall fall on her TV. The second was the morning my friend Scott called me unusually early and just said "turn on your television." I watched the second plane hit and knew the towers were going to fall before they did.

Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it all. The world certainly doesn't look the way I imagined it would in the anxious, gut-sick weeks that followed. I know people who think it was some kind of conspiracy. I know a lot of people who act like it never happened, or think that remembering it with horror and anger is an overreaction, and that whoever hijacked those planes had a reason that we can understand, or even sympathize with.

I don't know who frightens me more.

My daughters have some vague understanding that something happened in New York City not long before they were born, but unlike the weeks and months that followed that day, they've lived in a world where images of low banking planes and fireballs and leaping bodies and collapsing skyscrapers and lethal dust clouds have been scrubbed away. They have a better idea of what trench warfare was like than an event that set the tone for the century they will call their own.

I have books and videos sitting on shelves and in hard drives, ready to show them when curiosity pierces the amnesiac fog that has, increasingly, drawn a curtain over the last decade and a half.

But the towers were there, once. Even I have proof.

 

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.

Spalding

Spalding Gray, New York City, Feb. 1990

I MIGHT HAVE FORGOTTEN A LOT OF MY SHOOTS, but I have never forgotten the morning I spent with Spalding Gray in his Soho apartment. I was on assignment for NOW magazine and Gray was coming to town touring his Monster In A Box monologue. Shooting in New York gave me an excuse to stay with my long-distance girlfriend, and I remember walking from her apartment in the West Village to Gray's place, excited about my subject.

I recall walking up a set of stairs that looked on the vast tar paper roof that Gray describes as the view from his loft, while bemoaning the lack of scenic views in his life during Monster. I might be misremembering, but in my mind's eye his loft was within sight of the door of the Performing Garage, home of the Wooster Group and the venue where he would workshop his monologues.

I was met at the door by Renee, the girlfriend Spalding would mention constantly in his monologues. She was on her way out, but told me that he'd just woken up and that I should try to get him to eat something. I had left the emotionally fragile New York of my almost monthly visits and entered Spalding Gray's world.

Spalding Gray, New York City, Feb. 1990

Gray emerged, bleary-eyed and bed-headed, and asked me what I had in mind. I was grateful to see white walls everywhere in the loft, and chose one by the sort of solid wooden table that was his constant stage and prop in his shows. I asked him if we could get some other props - the glass of water, for instance, that he constantly sipped from. He came back with the glass and the massive manuscript of the novel he was supposed to be writing - the "Monster."

Gray was happy to play for the camera, giving me frames that jumped back and forth between mere posing and mugging. I had to shoot a cover for NOW, and decided to switch between warm- and cold-toned colour stocks. Spalding was a generous subject, and I clicked away, knowing that I was getting a lot of shots to choose from. The morning was going well.

Spalding Gray, New York City, Feb. 1990

When I was done Spalding asked if I was hungry, and took out some bread and cheese, which we ate at the table where I'd been shooting. We talked about our mothers. His had committed suicide when he was young and had become - this is obvious now and probably was even then - his muse. Mine had died a couple of years previous, and I was still nursing a mix of grief and guilt.

Thanks to Swimming to Cambodia, Gray had become an unlikely hero for a lot of my generation. Unlikely because he was so many of the things we weren't and strove not to be - a Boomer, outspokenly neurotic, uncritically fascinated with the New Age and its spiritual and pseudo-medical panaceas. But he lived his life tossed on eddies of doubt and fear, and that was an setting we could recognize.

Spalding Gray, New York City, Feb. 1990

I shot a roll of Gray with my Rolleiflex, but only recently decided to make a scan of the shot above. I don't think I could have produced this result in the darkroom a quarter century ago; my skills were still fairly rudimentary, but it has to be said that Photoshop helped me pull a lot more from this frame than I saw through the viewfinder on that morning in Soho. If I do say so myself, I kind of Steichened the fuck out of it.

I met Gray one more time, just after he'd finished Monster In A Box on its opening night in Toronto. I'd told everyone how well we'd gotten along when I'd photographed him, and my girlfriend told me to go over and say hello when we spied him emerging though the backstage door into the lobby. I went over and re-introduced myself, then told him how much I'd loved his performance.

"Was that a performance?" He asked me, his voice suddenly panicked. "Did you think it was a performance? I didn't want it to seem like some kind of performance..."

I frantically backtracked, trying to find a better word to calm his anxiety, but he was abruptly surrounded by a group of people who whisked him away. I never saw Spalding Gray again except onscreen.

Spalding Gray killed himself on Jan. 11, 2004.

   

Jane

Jane Bunnett and Don Pullen, New York, Aug. 1989

NINETEEN-EIGHTY-NINE WAS A BIG YEAR FOR JANE BUNNETT. I know because I was there for most of it, camera in hand. She played her first major date in New York City and produced the record that ended up breaking her out of the (very small) Canadian jazz music market.

It was also a year where the pace of work forced me to sharpen my skills and upgrade my very rudimentary equipment. Thankfully, that was the year I ended up inheriting a bit of money from my mother's estate and the sale of our family home, so I upgraded my Spotmatics to a Nikon F3 and my Mamiya C330 with a Rolleiflex. With all this fabulous new gear, I just needed to up my technical game, and shooting Jane's very busy year would provide me with plenty of challenges.

Jane Bunnett, Toronto, Jan. 1989

The year began with a quick shoot around the corner from my Parkdale loft, in the house Jane shared with her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer. A new 8x10 was needed for the year's gigs and especially an upcoming booking with Don Pullen at a jazz club downtown.

I still hadn't moved up to a roll of seamless paper for my backdrops, so I shot Jane using what had been for at least a year or two my standard portable background - a white painter's drop cloth I carried around with a roll of gaffer tape in a gym bag. Using my Metz flash bounced into an umbrella, it was a pretty basic portrait setup; the sort of thing a first-year photography student would produce in the school studios using a classmate as a subject. I was sure I could do better.

Locked out of East 85th, April 1989

The booking - at East 85th, one of a handful of jazz clubs in Toronto at the time (there are fewer now) - turned into a debacle. With Don Pullen co-headlining on piano, it was supposed to be Jane's follow-up to the gig that produced In Dew Time a year before, but it ended with a note and a padlock on the door and drummer Barry Romberg's kit locked inside the darkened club.

It had been a tense gig up till that point - as I mentioned in a previous post - and after a call from Jane and Larry I took the streetcar down there to shoot the band waiting outside in the rain. That's my camera bag on the sidewalk, and one of the headshots from the January session pinned to the marquee board behind the band.

If everyone in this shot looks miserable, they had good reasons. Beside's Barry's drums, there was the matter of unpaid wages for the band and the balance of Don's airfare and accommodation. The prospect of being out of pocket for an as-yet-unknown amount of money was a potential blow to Jane and Larry's plans for the rest of the year.

Jane Bunnett, Toronto, July 1989

Still disappointed with my work on January's shoot, I was grateful when, early that summer, Jane asked to do another session for a promo shot. By this point I'd invested in a roll of gray seamless and set it up in my loft, with the big north-facing windows in the bedroom providing light to fill the shadows from the umbrella flash. The results were much more satisfactory.

By this point Jane knew she was booked to play the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival in August, and had rented studio time in the city to record her second album - a duets record with Don Pullen. A shot from the July portrait session would end up in the CD booklet for New York Duets, but we needed photos of Jane and Don together for the package, which I had convinced Jane to let me help design.

In a rare coincidence of timing, my girlfriend was moving to New York at the end of that summer to study film at NYU, and we'd be driving her down just in time for Jane's gig at Sweet Basil. At some point in the afternoon, probably between the soundcheck and dinner, I posed Jane and Don against a white wall in a cramped corner of Jane's room at the Washington Square Hotel and shot six rolls of 120 film on my new Rolleiflex, desperate to get at least one good shot.

Don Pullen & Jane Bunnett, New York, August 1989

"Don had my back," Jane remembered when I asked her about the recording sessions for New York Duets, "and that gave me a lot of confidence." She remembered the portrait session in her hotel room better than I did, and recalled looking at Don as we shot, hardly believing that she was actually making a record with someone whose work she'd admired for years.

I like to think that my shots reflect the bold but nervous step Jane was taking, and Don's generosity as both a musician and a friend. They're hardly technical masterpieces, and tasked with doing them again a year or two later I'm sure I'd have done something much more ambitious, but in this case their utter artlessness ended up helping show the relationship between the subjects in bolder relief.

Don Pullen & Jane Bunnett, Top of the Senator, Toronto, 1990
(please click on the image)

With a record to promote, Don and Jane shared a bill again the next year at the Top of the Senator, and I decided to shoot the matinee gig as a technical challenge to myself, leaving my F3 at home and bringing the Rollei on a tripod and a rented Widelux panoramic camera. Knowing that there would be plenty of bright afternoon light streaming through the Senator's big west-facing window, I guessed that I wouldn't have an opportunity like this again.

The year ended for Jane with two records either released or recorded. Personally, it left me a slightly better photographer with a few better tools and a long-distance relationship that, despite all the grief it would lead to, gave me a brief base in New York to pursue my career outside Toronto. For both Jane and myself, there were even bigger challenges ahead.

NYC, 1989

NYC 1989, Mercer Street looking south toward Prince

SOHO DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THIS ANY MORE. They've pulled up the asphalt to reveal the cobblestones and the ground level retail has gotten a lot pricier; there's a Balenciaga store just a block or two south of where I shot this in 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. Needless to say, the real estate is worth a lot more now than it was when I took this photo.

In early fall of 1989 my friend Jane Bunnett recorded her second album in New York City - a set of duets with pianist Don Pullen. Jane asked me to take the photos and I upped the ante by asking her if I could come up with the design concept for the record, which was being put out by a small, non-profit CD-only label in California.

The result was fairly primitive - a relic of the Macintosh II era of digital design. The cover photo, shot in Rockefeller Center, was a great example of what photographers did before Photoshop; the sky in the top left corner was blown out on the original negative, but I was able to burn it down in the darkroom with a couple of pieces of cardboard as a mask. Printed with the rebate on a filed-out negative carrier, it's the artifact I'd pull from my files if asked to show what analog photography looked like.

By the late summer of 1989 my girlfriend had moved to Manhattan on a scholarship to study film at NYU, and thanks to a bit of money I'd inherited I was able to afford to visit her regularly. On my first trip down after helping her move into her West Village shared apartment, I brought along my Rolleiflex and set to work trying to get a cover image for Jane's record.

NYC 1989, Con Ed steam on 7th Ave. S.

NYC 1989, Wall Street

NYC 1989, Midtown deco

I was desperate to get a single image that said "Manhattan" without a shot of the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, Times Square or the arch in Washington Square Park. What I did shoot was probably what nearly any non-New Yorker set loose with a camera in the city will produce - a lot of photos rubbernecking up at the forest of skyscrapers.

I had been here before, and like that time, the reason was a girl. In the intervening four years, though, I'd become a better photographer, but what those years hadn't given me was the sort of experience that helps you make original decisions, so it's not surprising that my New York photos from the late summer of 1989 work better as graphics than photographs.

NYC 1989, Card players in Washington Square Park

This is probably the only exception. On my way up from Soho to Rockefeller Center I came across these men playing cards at one of the chess tables in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I circled around them with Rollei and they didn't take much notice of me; I'm not sure if it's true any more, but the marvel of taking photos on the street in New York City was how blithely you'd be ignored, as if the city was after all just a big stage set and being documented was part of your daily routine.

I imagine that there are still men playing cards at the chess tables in Washington Square Park, but a quarter century later I doubt if most of these men would still be found there. Some are dead, I'm sure, and some have moved on, perhaps away from the Village and even Manhattan as the cost of living on the island has gotten so steep.

These are men at leisure in a New York that has ceased to exist. Some are retired, some are unemployed, and all of them are probably enjoying that fine summer day thanks to rent control. What I do know is that you probably couldn't re-create this photo today without someone to take care of wardrobe and hair. It's a bit of a shock when your photos alchemically transform from leftover work into historical records.

NYC 1989, cable

NYC 1989, Graffiti

The shot of the cable snaking along the stone paving at the base of a midtown office block could probably have been taken in any big city, which is probably why it's the most timeless frame from the shoot - and the one take out of contention first for the cover shot. A New York photographer wandering about the city with their camera would probably gravitate toward something this abstract, but that wasn't my job - at least how I'd assigned it to myself.

A neighbouring frame of the graffiti shot ended up on the back of the CD booklet. I'm not the sort of person who thinks graffiti and tagging is a sign of a city in full civic health, but as a photographer I can appreciate the texture and graphic zip they add to a shot.

The odd thing is that even this graffiti seems dated - the syntax and vocabulary of the medium (I'm still loathe to call it an art form) has moved on, and to a connoisseur's eye this would be New York graffiti in its classical period. Even in black and white I'm reminded that New York especially and the world in general was a lot more colourful and graphically adventurous in the '80s; whole stretches of the Manhattan streetscape looked like a Basquiat painting.

NYC 1989, Fire escape

NYC 1989, Rockefeller Center

I have an awful lot of frames of fire escapes. It's not that Toronto doesn't have them, but New York made them an architectural feature; they've been stripped from some of the tenements they once adorned in the last decade or two, and the buildings always seem unfinished without them, a century after they were built. They're quintessentially New York to me, but I never got that definitive shot that would have delivered an undeniable cover shot.

I finally ended up in Rockefeller Center, where I found the image I ended up using for the cover of Jane's record. For budget reasons we had to discard the option of a colour cover, but I imagine the shot above would have served just as nicely as the one we used.

A number of artists designed the deco flourishes that make the GE building and its neighbours a masterpiece - the one above is Lee Oskar Lawrie's "Light" - but using art deco as a shorthand for jazz is a bit of a cliche. It was a useful one for me, though, as I tried to create what would be my first album cover, and a major milestone in my career.