Success

Rick and camera, August 2018. Photo by Rod Orchard.

I DON'T WANT TO END THIS BLOG TALKING ABOUT FAILURE so this post is about the very positive - and unexpected - changes that have happened in the last four years. I'm not an optimist by nature; I didn't expect much to come out of this project when I opened my first box of contact sheets, or that the end of the blog, when it arrived, would come with such a mixture of relief and gratitude.

The first people I need to thank are my family, and especially my wife, Kathleen. It was her idea that I should start digging up my old work and posting it online, but I don't think even she thought it would have such an effect on our lives. She has supported and encouraged me all along the way, especially when I might have just dropped this thread and let my old work continue to languish.

Kathleen McGinnis (née Hickey), 1998.

I'd also like to thank my friends for their interest and encouragement. I have a truly varied and idiosyncratic circle of friends, a few of which I still have yet to meet outside the virtual world. Some, however, go back to college, or high school, or even to Mount Dennis, where we all grew up near the old Kodak plant. There are too many to name, of course, but I hope you know who you are if you're reading this; I've felt alone and isolated at many different times in my life, but this hasn't been one of them, and for that I'm grateful to you.

If I have to single out anyone whose support has been germane to the evolution of this project, it's my dear friends Kathy and Arnie, who generously - and very unexpectedly - gifted me the Fuji X30 camera I was planning to crowdfund over three years ago. I was becoming interested in shooting again and was looking for a small, light and high quality camera that approximated what my beloved Rolleiflex used to do, and with the X30 they gave me I found my way back to not just portrait work, but the landscapes and street photography I'd had in my mind's eye for years.

Taking pictures, July 2018. Photo by Jonathan Castellino.

I didn't imagine I was a photographer any more when I started this blog. Four and a half years later I'm able to call myself one again, partly thanks to a network of fellow photographers - the circle of peers I never really felt I had, even when I was shooting for a living, twenty years ago. There are old photographer friends like Paul Till and Rod Orchard, and new ones like Sean McCormick, Steve Stober, Vince Lupo, Gunar Roze, Franco Deleo, Mark Peavy and Stuart Forster. Jonathan Castellino has brought a sense of fellowship to the work, while my very old and dear friend Chris Buck - so often the subject of posts on this blog - has provided criticism and encouragement whenever it's been needed.

And then there are the people who commissioned so much of the work that's appeared on this blog. That list starts with Nancy Lanthier and Dave MacIntosh at Nerve magazine, who published my first, dark, dubiously focused photos. Irene Grainger, Edna Suarez, Jesse Marinoff Reyes, Peter Dako, Brad McIvor, Tim Powis, Elizabeth Grubaugh, Marianne Butler, Bob Newman, Tom McGovern, Steve Waxman, Barry Harvey, Jane Bunnett & Larry Cramer, Carol Moskot, Richard Bingham, Jodi Isenberg, Tina Costanza, Tim Shore, Derek Flack, W. Andrew Powell, Rikki Stein, Jennifer Bain, Joel Wasson, Ian Blurton, Don Pyle - some of these people are friends, some I haven't heard from since I sent them my last invoice, but they helped create the images here by giving me an assignment, and I'm grateful.

I am, of course, always looking for new names to add to that list, and I'm re-launching myself out into the business with a curious mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. The specialty with which I made my reputation - editorial photography - seems to have declined almost to insignificance, but I remain cautiously optimistic.

This is, after all, the only thing I've ever been really good at, and it's rather pitiful to admit that it took me this long to discover the joy of shooting for the simple pleasure of creating images - something I try to do nearly every day now. It's shameful that it took me so long to realize that, in the end, the work is really its own reward, and I'm looking forward to doing as much work as I can with the time left to me.

But this isn't the end - there's one more post to come.

Failure

Self-portrait for passport photo, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blogTO

Chris Hadfield, Pearson International Airport, Toronto, August 2009

THE YEAR I WAS LAID OFF WAS A BAD ONE FOR NEWSPAPERS. The Rocky Mountain News, which had published since 1859, closed for good, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. in business since 1863, ceased print publication and went online only. They were just the big names. According to this story, 105 newspapers closed that year in the U.S. and 10,000 jobs in the industry were lost.

It was a bad time to be looking for a newsroom gig and while freelance opportunities were still available, word rates and assignment fees had either stagnated or declined severely. After the shock of the lay-off subsided, I realized I had to do something - anything - to keep myself writing and shooting, so I contacted the editors of blogTO, a city news and entertainment website that had been started five years earlier.

It was a practitioner of what was being called "hyperlocal journalism," which I'd been vocal about praising in my column at the free daily. Initially Tim and Derek, the editors, were skeptical about why I was approaching them for work - it was usually the sort of venue recent j-school grads and youthful urbanist types would work for to build a resume of work. I was - and would remain - the oldest person on their staff the whole time I worked there.

Building 9, Kodak lands, Toronto, June 2009

It took me a while to get up to speed with my posts. It had been years since I had gone out several nights a week or knew what the best new places to eat or shop were. Working for the free daily and raising two small children, my world had shrunk to a few well-worn routes and a few square blocks of the city I once knew so well, and I had to make an effort to reacquaint myself with my own hometown.

My first really successful post was about Building 9, the last remaining part of the Kodak Canada plant where my family had worked since the '20s. The then-owners had left it unguarded and it was inevitably broken into, wide open for vandals, renegade club and event promoters and urbex types. I made my way in with my camera and recorded the damage, then wrote a post about my own history with Kodak and the neighbourhood. It was probably one of the most popular things I wrote for many years.

Beach Motel, Toronto, April 2011

Beach Motel, Toronto, Nov. 2012

Another ongoing story I attached myself to was the final days of a strip of venerable but run-down motels on Lake Shore Boulevard that was being redeveloped into a thick cluster of condominium towers. I lurked around the area for about a year or two, interviewing the last people trying to make a living there before the inevitable. I was there on the morning the last motel was demolished, my post just one of a bunch of elegaic stories about the city's relentless transformation.

Canary Restaurant, Toronto, 2010.

Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto, 2009.

There were a lot of stories like this, like the closing and gutting of the Canary Restaurant, a worn-out greasy spoon in an old industrial area in the east end that was being turned into an athlete's village for the Pan-Am Games. I also got a look at the Don Valley Brickworks when it was being turned from an abandoned industrial relic into a eco/foodie destination.

Rotman's Hats final sale, Toronto, 2009.

China House neon re-lighting ceremony, Toronto, 2010.

China House contents auction, Toronto, 2011.

Valhalla Inn contents auction, Toronto, 2009.

Sutton Place Hotel contents auction, Toronto, 2014.

And there were more stories about the passing of an older Toronto, like the final sale week at Rotman's Hats, one of the last remnants of Spadina Avenue's Jewish merchant history. I wrote several stories about China House, an old-school Chinese food restaurant that seemed to get a new lease of life for about a year before it was inevitably closed and demolished for more condos.

I also covered the contents sales of two closed Toronto hotels. The Valhalla Inn was one of the first really glamorous airport hotels, opened in 1963 and designed in a style that took Scandinavian contemporary to its roots with a Viking theme. The Sutton Place was another modernist high point, and a hotel I knew intimately from shooting musicians and movie stars there for nearly twenty years. I didn't have much history with the Valhalla Inn, but watching the Sutton Place disappear actually gave me a pang of loss I didn't expect.

Imperial Oil Building, Toronto, 2011.

I also had an opportunity to tour the old Imperial Oil headquarters in midtown - an imposing tower built on the highest point in the city from plans reputedly rejected for Toronto's city hall. I had always wanted to get inside, and blogTO's credentials were enough to allow me a guided tour as workmen stripped out the offices and boardrooms to make way for - yes, big surprise - more condos. I was particularly taken with the gold tiles on the walls of the sky lobby outside one of the big main boardrooms - an unusually luxurious expression of midcentury modernism, I thought.

Looking back, I shot a lot of ruins and wreckage and demolition in my years at blogTO. It's not a surprise - my city was undergoing the latest in a series of radical transformations, with construction cranes all over the horizon and whole districts either being changed utterly or created out of parking lots and abandoned buildings. It's a boom that still hasn't wound up, and I'd be lying if I said I had unmixed feelings about watching - and documenting - the erasure of the city where I grew up.

Portlands, Toronto, 2010.

Corso Italia Festival, Toronto, 2013.

Working for blogTO forced me to concentrate on street photography, a style that I had never explored much in all my years of shooting portraits and news for NOW, eye, the Globe & Mail, the National Post or the free daily. Their posts featured photos as much, if not more, than words, and I had to learn to produce shots that could stand alone on a web page.

Ripley's Aquarium opening, Toronto, 2013.

BlogTO's credentials also got me into events like the media day before the opening of Ripley's Aquarium, a major tourist attraction right next to the CN Tower. I relished these opportunities, not only for the photos they allowed me to take, but for the sense that I was still part of the media, showing up and providing my coverage. Being laid off had felt like a sort of banishment from the profession I'd laboured in for so many years, so I was happy for any chance to hang a press pass around my neck and do my job.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 2009.

Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 2014.

In many ways, working for blogTO wasn't terribly different from working for a daily newspaper. We'd still cover news events like the opening of the Canadian National Exhibition at the end of every summer, and I was given that assignment for several years running. I had never done those ritual news calls before, so ironically it was working for the all-digital "new media" - which was supposedly speeding the decline of print dailies - that saw me covering stories like the annual Air Show, or interviewing and photographing the mayor at press conferences.

Helio Castroneves, Honda Indy, Toronto, 2012.

Honda Indy, Toronto, 2013.

Pit crew, Honda Indy, Toronto, 2014.

Honda Indy, Toronto, 2015.

One of those annual stories was the Honda Indy - the weekend long summer car race that takes over the CNE grounds. I'm a motorsport fan, but I had never shot a car race until blogTO gave me the credentials and I began spending a whole weekend at the track with my cameras. It was an opportunity I cherished, and a chance to ascend yet another steep learning curve as a photographer, learning to execute all the standard shots required for car race coverage, and perhaps even try something new.

World Cup celebrations, Etobicoke, 2014.

Rob Ford, election nght, 2014.

The funny thing was that blogTO made me more of a straight news photographer than I'd ever been before, assigning me to cover stories like fans reacting to Germany's World Cup win, or the end of the Rob Ford era in city politics. I even got the assignment of writing Ford's obituary for the site - a post that I'm still proud of today as a relatively objective assessment of his legacy in a time and place where nobody (especially in my business) was anything other than rabidly partisan.

Which reminds me of the worst thing about blogTO, at least in the early days: The comments thread on posts was famously vicious, a hangout for trolls and keyboard warriors who obviously thought they could do the job better than you could. I made the mistake of engaging in my first year or two posting there, and it was never a wise or prudent move. On the worst days, it was as ugly as the comments section on a YouTube clip, and eventually they found a way to make commenting less visible or encouraged. So much for the dream of "online communities" and reader engagement.

Hotel bartenders, Toronto, 2010.

Crazy Steve, Kensington, Toronto, 2011.

The one thing I didn't do much of at blogTO was portraiture - my specialty as a professional photographer. I had been forced to strip down and reinvent my style at the free daily, and had just arrived at something intriguing when the lay-off made me drop that thread and, one more time, start all over again.

I ended up doing something more like environmental portraiture, shooting people in a setting or context, like astronaut Chris Hadfield by the tail of the vintage F-86 Sabre he flew in the 2009 Air Show, or "Crazy Steve" Goof of local punk rock legends Bunchofuckingoofs by the entrance of what was once Fort Goof, the band's stronghold in Kensington Market. Or the series of portraits I did for a story on the 12 best hotel bars in Toronto, where I photographed each bartender in the same position behind the bar - a time-consuming assignment that I conceived mostly as a challenge for myself.

The pay at blogTO was ridiculously low, and I'm not sure that the time or effort I put into most of my stories ever made much economic sense. I'm not complaining - I definitely didn't do it for the money as much as a chance to keep working and publishing at a time when nobody seemed interested in hiring me, either in a newsroom or as a steady freelancer.

BlogTO let me test myself and my capabilities as a photographer and journalist, and if what I earned per post was essentially a nominal fee or honorarium - there's no way that the $40 I got for covering a whole weekend at the Honda Indy covered even a fraction of my time - at least I was working, at a time when many of my peers were (quite sensibly) leaving the business.

There was no definitive end to my time at blogTO. I had always felt like mutton dressed as lamb working there, and knew that the particular skill set and enthusiasms of an old journalist would sooner or later be superfluous to their needs. Eventually the assignments got as occasional as my story pitches and a redesign/revamp of the site moved away from long form stories to more lists and short pieces - exactly the sort of work that interested me the least. I knew it was probably time to go the year they said they weren't interested in covering either the auto show or the Honda Indy any more.

I'm not bitter - blogTO was a flag of convenience for me at a time when I just needed to keep working and shooting until whatever next move I needed to make made itself apparent. I'm grateful for the chance to do as much as I did under the banner Tim and Derek provided for me, and for hitching a ride into the world of online media that seems more like the future now than it did when I was jettisoned from the world of newsprint.

Graeme Kirkland

Graeme Kirkland, Parkdale, March 1989

THE PHONE RANG EARLY AND I DIDN'T WANT TO ANSWER IT BUT I DID. It was Graeme Kirkland telling me he wanted to come over and do a photo shoot, right away. I tried to talk him out of it; it was early, I was tired, and I frankly wasn't feeling that inspired on that particular chilly morning caught between winter and spring.

"No, I just got out of the hospital," Graeme insisted. "I got beat up pretty bad at Sneaky Dee's last night by a bunch of skinheads. I want to get a photo of myself like this."

I don't think I thought about it much.

"Come right on over, Graeme."

Graeme Kirkland, Parkdale, March 1989

He was a mess. It's a shame I only shot these in black and white because Graeme's bruises were a really intriguing spectrum of purple and red and blue and yellow. (Colour film and processing cost money and I doubt if I had any sitting around the studio in those early, very penniless days.) I don't know how he saw through eyes that were swollen shut. He had a fat lip and stitches and tape holding his skin together and crusts of blood clinging to his face where the nurses in emergency hadn't cleaned it off.

I set up the light - my only light, probably - to give a stark effect, like a police evidence photo. We shot for two or three rolls - long enough to have Graeme shed his bloodstained jacket and shirt and finally wrap the shirt around his head like a turban. I can't remember whose idea that was. I asked him how it happened and he said that he was drunk and hitting on girls and he probably said the wrong thing to the wrong one and that the skinheads waiting for him by the bathroom at Sneaky Dee's were definitely not drunk and knew what they were doing.

Graeme Kirkland, "Clock Destruction," 1990

I photographed Graeme a lot back when he was the jazz drummer who knew how to get noticed in a city that didn't especially notice jazz musicians in general. He'd do shows like "Clock Destruction" - a performance piece as much as a show where he played in body paint and briefs and set about a big wooden clock with a chainsaw and a flame thrower. The inspiration, he recalls, was all the deadlines he had to deal with managing his own career. "What if I could be free of it?"

Looking back, it's a miracle he didn't burn down a club.

He also took to busking in a big way, and you'd find him out in the streets playing in all weather - like the snow storm where I photographed him in the shot below. Look closely and you'll see a copy of Sleep Alone, the record with a cover featuring my portraits of him after his skinhead encounter, taped to his tom. It wasn't the most audacious thing that Graeme did by a long shot, and those photos ended up being my own ticket to an encounter with the music industry legend that is Michael Alago, but that's a story for another day.

Graeme Kirkland plays in a snowstorm, Toronto, Winter 1992

Graeme Kirkland, Toronto, August 2018

By the late '90s Graeme felt that he was doing more work setting up shows - booking venues and getting grants and finding players and doing publicity - than actually playing music. "I didn't feel like a drummer any more," he told me. "This is marketing. I had become a businessman."

So if playing music had turned him into a businessman, Graeme quietly decided to pursue that path, and got himself an entry-level job at a securities trading firm. Nearly twenty years later he's a senior investment advisor who's been on teams that have managed over $850 million dollars at a variety of banks and firms. I visited him at his new office in a leafy and venerable west end neighbourhood and convinced him to sit for some new photos after over twenty-five years.

"That was always my deepest goal," he recalled. "I wanted to live something so intense that you wanted to die from it. I still have that in me very deeply."

"I had experiences nobody else has had," he told me. "Doing exactly what I wanted to do." The only thing he regretted, if only for a while, was that he'd never gotten an MBA like all the other struggling traders at that first securities job. He hasn't had a drum kit in years.

Graeme Kirkland, Toronto, August 2018