Colm Feore and the Lay-Off

Colm Feore, Toronto, Jan. 27, 2009

THESE WERE THE LAST PORTRAITS I DID FOR THE FREE DAILY. I didn't know they were, but I must have had some idea that my days were numbered, because I had started looking around for a new job at the time. I didn't want to get surprised; other newsroom staffers had been planning or making exits at the time and it seemed the more dignified way of leaving. But that's not what happened.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, fellow staff writer and photographer Chris Atchison had already left and I was taking up the slack, doing interviews and photo shoots. Colm Feore was in town promoting his role on the latest season of 24, as the husband of the first (fictional) female U.S. president. We did a lot of coverage of 24 back then - it was a monster hit and probably one of the last must-see series produced by a U.S. network.

Colm Feore, Toronto, Jan. 27, 2009

What I remember most about the shoot was that Feore didn't seem terribly interested in talking about his role on 24. Michael Ignatieff, an esteemed writer and academic, had recently been made interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada - then the official opposition - and would soon be elected its leader. Feore was incredibly excited about him. He spent much of the interview and shoot talking about how fortunate Canada was to be able to vote for a real intellectual as its leader.

Feore had made his reputation in Canada playing legendary figures like pianist Glenn Gould and Pierre Elliot Trudeau - longtime prime minister and father of our current PM - and I suppose he felt his opinion about who should lead the country was important. Mostly, though, he reminded me of another actor, Ted Danson, at a movie junket I'd been to in Santa Monica a year previous. Danson also didn't want to talk about the movie he was promoting as much as his friend, Hillary Clinton. If only we could sit down for a beer with Hillary, he told us - we'd know how great she was and why we needed to vote for her. That most of the table at the junket were foreign journalists didn't seem to register with Danson.

In any case, Michael Ignatieff's only election as head of the Liberals didn't work out so well. In 2011 the party - unofficially known as "Canada's Natural Governing Party" - came third in the polls, losing its status as the official opposition. Ignatieff himself lost his seat in parliament. As subsequent events have proved, Canada does not want an intellectual for a leader.

The Feore portraits are alright, I guess. They're stark and simple and part of the new direction my portrait work had started going since I'd been coaxed back into shooting by Jodi Isenberg at the free daily five years previous. It seems suitable that they were shot at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville; I'd done so much work in its rooms since the '90s, and I'd always appreciated the big, bright windows that looked north and west over the city. It wouldn't be long for the world - the hotel would close three years later and move two blocks east to a new building.

________________________

I WAS LAID OFF BY THE FREE DAILY on the morning of February 10, 2009, two weeks after I'd done the Colm Feore shoot. I had come in late that day - I had a job interview at the Toronto Star for the Queen's Park reporter position, though of course no one at the office knew that. Our new editor had insisted that I be in the office that day for a meeting, and I followed her all the way to the door of the publisher's office before I spotted Glen, our managing editor, out of the corner of my eye, being escorted out of the building with a box of his stuff. The shoe dropped just as she opened the door and I saw that the assistant publisher and our union rep were already waiting inside.

I'd been sandbagged. The editor said something about a "new direction" for the paper - one that required laying off all the writers (plus the managing editor.) We have called a cab for you. Don't return to your desk - its contents will be packed up and sent to you. They were about to take away my cellphone when I pulled it out to call my wife and I had to remind them that the phone was mine.

If I'm honest, once the anger and humiliation had passed I was grateful. The free daily hadn't been much fun to work for since Bill, the new publisher had taken over, and definitely since Jodi had been fired as editor-in-chief. Jodi was my friend, and almost anything positive that came from my time at the free daily had been because of her decisions and support. Even before she moved into the editor's chair, she had been a big supporter of making me the paper's senior writer after my contract as interim photo editor ended. It's hard to say definitively, but I might not have found my way back to photography today if Jodi hadn't asked me to go back to work nearly fifteen years ago.

At the Four Seasons Yorkville Avenue Bar photo show, Sept. 2007. Photo by Chris Atchison.

My first reaction when I realized what was coming in the publisher's office on that February morning was anger. I am not a team player by nature - another one of Jodi's great gifts was letting me work from home instead of holding down a desk in the office up in Don Mills, a 90-minute commute each way. (One of the first things the new editor did was to enforce an edict from the publisher ordering all the writers back to a desk in the office. I think he'd seen All The President's Men too many times and wanted to preside over a bustling newsroom. As anyone who's worked in one can tell you, newsrooms don't bustle.)

But there was a sense of camaraderie among the staff at the free daily; it developed slowly under P.J., our first editor, and really flourished when Jodi took over. I had worked harder for the paper than I thought myself capable, writing daily and weekly columns, reviews, interviews and features in addition to taking pictures. I had turned a daily TV column that I was only supposed to write for a week when someone else was on vacation and made it something more than just rewritten press releases and gossip cribbed from entertainment websites. When Jodi gave me the job I told her up front that I didn't really watch much TV because I didn't like it that much. I ended up writing over 1,100 daily columns.

I had invested more into working for the free daily than I had put into any job I'd had, and being laid off felt like a betrayal as much as a loss of income. (The wages at the paper were well below what any other paper in the city paid. I remember describing my workload to a friend who was an editor at the Globe & Mail; he told me that he had people who were paid twice as much to produce a third of my work.)

Sometimes it didn't seem like management really wanted to acknowledge our successes. Before he left, Chris had talked to the people at the Four Seasons, who said they'd be interested in putting on a show of our movie star portraits in the hotel's Avenue Bar during the film festival. It was a really big deal - an opportunity I wouldn't have dreamed of when I was a freelancer. He took the proposal to the publisher, who turned it down before Jodi talked him into changing his mind. But they didn't want to spend any money, so Chris and I ran around trying to get deals on printing and framing with just a week or two before the show was supposed to open.

The show happened, but the paper said they didn't want to spend any money on promotion or an opening reception, so it all came off like a wasted opportunity - a damp squib. No wonder I look so miserable in the photo Chris took for the story the paper ran - the only publicity our show ever got. Another reason why I have no enthusiasm for gallery shows any more.

Shooting an AK-47 for a James Bond story, Oct. 2008. Photo by Frank Monozlai.

It took the paper quite a few months to find a replacement for Jodi after they forced her out. They ended up hiring exactly the sort of person I was afraid they would - the Respected Industry Professional, complete with J-School teaching gig and a network of fellow professionals at her fingertips. Exactly the sort of person who hadn't built up the free daily from a start-up run out of a hotel room into a national chain of free dailies.

The free daily was no New York Times, and that was its great virtue. In an age of falling readership and failing confidence in the news media, Jodi had figured out that people wanted something light and entertaining to read on their commutes to work, and had delivered, filling the paper with TV and movie stories and unconventional personalities like Enza Anderson, a local trans celebrity who had run for mayor as Enza Supermodel and turned out to be one of the most professional writers I'd ever worked with.

Jodi knew who our demographic was, and delivered content to them without pandering. So my heart sank when the new editor took over and drove up in what I've come to call the Annex Clown Car. First she began canceling all the features that readers liked - TV recaps, movie and celebrity coverage, shopping and gift guides and, ultimately, much of what we produced in-house. Then she enlisted friends of hers - more Respected Industry Professionals - to write editorials and introduce politics into the paper.

It was an awful mistake. Politics - the hectoring, biased, often sneering op-ed political content that the news media has decided to favour since the budgets and staff that once researched features and covered beats were gutted from newsrooms. Jodi had made the free daily a success by avoiding it, and had made the paper grow as a result. It was one of the great errors of the passengers in the Annex Clown Car that their names and reputations attracted readers, and the new editor was intent on making the free daily resemble all the other failing papers and their op-ed shape-throwing. But falling readership at the big dailies was proof that the opposite was true, and nothing that's happened in the decade since I was laid off has reversed the trend.

It was, in all likelihood, time for me to go anyway, but I'm not grateful for the push out the door. I wouldn't be the last to go; in the months that followed there was an exodus of staff, and almost exactly a year later the new editor was fired, followed by Bill, the publisher. The free daily still exists and its competitors are all gone, but the name has been changed and it barely resembles the paper I worked on with Jodi, Tina, Jonathan, Fermin, Chris, Nate, Liban, Jen, Brian, Sarah, Saleem, Kasia, Steph, Mike, Christine and everyone else who I annoyed constantly when they were forced to share a newsroom with me.

Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

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

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

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

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

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

Ben Stein

Ben Stein, Toronto, June 19, 2008

I HAVE VERY NICE MEMORIES OF THIS SHOOT. Which is worth noting, because I don't have a lot of good memories of my last year at the free daily. It was an anxious time; my editor (and friend) Jodi Isenberg had been pushed out by management and the direction of the paper was doubtful, so a few people who I'd worked with closely for years had left or were preparing to leave. I ended up having to cover a lot of bases, including more combined shooting/writing gigs - like this one, interviewing and photographing Ben Stein, who was in town promoting Expelled, a documentary he'd co-written and hosted.

I didn't see Ferris Bueller's Day Off until a few years ago, so most of what I knew about Stein came either from his years in the Nixon and Ford administrations as a speechwriter (I have been fascinated by Nixon since the Watergate hearings preempted my favorite afternoon TV shows as a boy) or from Win Ben Stein's Money, which ran in syndication when I was watching a lot of TV while writing a daily column for the free daily. I mostly remember his thinly-concealed distaste for Arianna Huffington, one frequent guest, and a just as thinly concealed crush on Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.

Ben Stein, Toronto, June 19, 2008

It would be an understatement to say that Expelled was controversial. A documentary defending Intelligent Design and asserting that Darwinism was ideologically complicit in the rise of eugenics and the Holocaust was going to piss off a lot of people. I personally think Creationism is ridiculous but I was impressed by Stein's willingness to get behind the film and its thesis, even if I didn't agree with most of the message.

(For the record, I consider the theory of evolution is broadly correct, but that it's going to see a lot of revisions in the decades to come, as more evidence is uncovered and research is done. A hundred years from now our current understanding of evolution will probably seem as basic and misconceived as public health was before germ theory and antibiotics. Which is why we shouldn't treat it as dogma.)

I was open about my opinion, but told Stein that I supported what he was doing as a free speech issue, and we ended up agreeing that academia in particular (and the media in general) had become remarkably hostile to anyone challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo. We got along so well that Stein asked his publicist if he could just blow off the next few interviews and keep talking with me. Naturally, this made him a more pliable subject when it came time to take my photos.

By 2008 it had been four years since Jodi had pushed me back into portrait photography. By then I had cautiously begun to imagine myself as a professional photographer again, and years of regular work had forced me to search for a new style. The portrait of Stein at the top was a stab at that, formed in the circumstances in which I'd been working for the last few years - hotel rooms like this one at the Royal York, where I had to look hard to find my light and my background and discover something usable, fast.

The result was something a lot more artless than the work I'd been doing a decade earlier at NOW magazine - direct and symmetrical and somewhat clinical takes on the subject in front of my camera. I was shooting with something in mind beyond what would run in the paper a day or a week later, and the shots I'm posting now are probably a lot closer to what I had in mind on that day. Not necessarily flattering portraiture, but I'd finally let myself downplay that obligation, which felt a lot stronger when I started shooting again for the free daily.

Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

MARK RUFFALO WAS STILL IN HIS ROMANTIC LEAD PERIOD when I took these portraits - five years before his first appearance as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. This makes me wonder if I'd ever have a chance of taking his portrait today, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has changed the ordering of the star system so completely.

I'd been seeing Ruffalo in a lot of films while I was at the free daily, doing film and DVD reviewing among my many other duties. He was having a good career - his filmography is pretty thick, but I mostly remembered him for his role in the erotic thriller In The Cut, co-starring with Meg Ryan. It was notable for some somewhat graphic sex scenes, and in retrospect it was the moment when their career paths crossed - his on the way up, her on the way down from her peak as America's Sweetheart.

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

For his part, Ruffalo didn't seem to have settled on his "photo face" - the expression (or mask, if you will) that many actors and other personalities learn to put on after their first few dozen photo shoots. There's a nice range of expression - something it's always nice to be able to hand in to your editors at the end of the day.

This was my final shoot of the 2007 film festival, as far as I can tell. Another room at the Intercontinental on Bloor, another warm spot of light by a wall; there was, if nothing else, a consistency to the work I did at the time that might be mistaken for a style, if you were feeling generous. I didn't know it at the time but this would be my last big festival for almost a decade, as some big changes were about to take place at the free daily.

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

Leelee Sobieski

Leelee Sobieski, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

IT'S ALL ABOUT LIGHT. And yes, about your subject and your bedside manner and your skill and perhaps a little bit of luck, but if you can't find - or create - the light, you'd might as well shoot everything in a bus station photo booth. (Do they even have photo booths in bus stations any more?) Which might actually work, in some situations, but real photographers spend their lives chasing the light.

Like a moth.

I actually felt a bit like a moth when I found this light in a hotel suite at the Intercontinental at the end of a long week of film fest shooting. It had taken me three years to find the elusive quality of light in that hotel after the luxury of shooting at the Four Seasons around the corner, so when this undistinguished suite of rooms managed to catch the late afternoon light and wrap it around my subjects, something in me went a bit weak and buzzy.

Leelee Sobieski, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

It helped, of course, to have a lovely subject. I know a lot of people who've never been sure if Leelee Sobieski was a really good actress or simply utterly beguiling to look upon. (And to be honest, major movie stars have built whole careers on little more than this.) Frankly, this sort of beauty can be something of a curse, since it will obscure talent, like anything backlit by the sun turns into a hazy shadow.

I love these photos. I'll probably put them in my new portfolio as a way of selling myself as a glamour shooter. (Good luck with that.) But I can only take so much credit for them. Off the top of my head, I'd say 55% Sobieski, 35% light and 10% me. Maybe 40% light. Even at the time I remember thinking that I was just the guy lucky enough to be holding the camera in that room, at that time, and I haven't changed my mind.

Leelee Sobieski, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

Tricia Helfer

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

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

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

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

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

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

Tricia Helfer, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

Emmanuelle Seigner

Emmanuelle Seigner, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

I WON'T LIE - I REMEMBER SOME VERY STRANGE CHEMISTRY HAPPENING DURING THIS SHOOT. Perhaps I imagined it; I might have been projecting my own very conflicted feelings about my subject and her circumstances into an otherwise normal situation. Perhaps. But as I'm someone who struggles to remember much about the thousands of shoots I've done, any memory at all has to be significant.

Emmanuelle Seigner was at the film festival promoting her role in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a big critical success and directed by the painter Julian Schnabel. (Another shoot with some weird chemistry, but more about that here.) Seigner wasn't a household name here but she was a major one in France, where she'd probably have been a celebrity even if she wasn't married to the (in)famous Polish director Roman Polanski.

Emmanuelle Seigner, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2007

Perhaps it was because she was French. I'm not the first person to observe that cultural differences accelerate once English-speaking people cross eastward over the English Channel. But Seigner walked into the room acting both wary and wired at the same time, like she had some sort of agenda in mind for her photo shoots, though she wasn't going to let any photographer know what that might be. I honestly can't remember anyone who'd given off a similar vibe since my shoot with Bjork, a decade previous.

It's not like Seigner was flirting with me - though the broad wink she gave my camera might suggest otherwise. But she definitely had an image of herself - former models-turned-actors have that extra level self-possession that normal people never have enough practice to formulate - and it felt like she was seeing if I was able to catch it on the fly. It was a situation where her English and my French were probably never going to provide the common ground where we'd come to a mutual understanding. And whereas I often imagine that a little bit more time might have moved us toward that goal, I'm not sure if that would have been the case with this shoot.

Evan Rachel Wood

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

IT WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THAT EVAN RACHEL WOOD was prepared to have her photo taken. At the film festival and elsewhere, most actresses will arrive for interviews and photo sessions with hair and makeup people on hand. Most of them seem to regard this as a somewhat regrettable necessity, and usually present themselves with a carefully put-together "natural" look.

Wood, on the other hand, had clearly thought about how she wanted to be seen, and had collaborated with whoever did her hair and makeup on a look that wouldn't have been out of place in the studio of a portrait photographer working for one of the big studios in the '30s and '40s. As someone who'd spent a lot of time studying the work of people like George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull, I was both surprised and grateful when she walked through the door of the room at the Intercontinental.

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

I didn't, of course, have the benefit of a barrage of fresnels with barn doors providing spot and kick lighting. All I had was whatever big, soft light made its way into the room through a window - an uncommonly large one for the Intercontinental, looking at these shots - and a big black curtain that had somehow made its way into the room.

Just as she had put a lot of thought into her look, Wood also knew how to pose without much direction from me, and I was pretty pleased with the results even as I was shooting. But just as with Hollywood glamour photography, I've done a lot of careful retouching in Photoshop after the fact to give Wood's skin an even more flawless finish. The free daily's Canon EOS 30D only put out an 8.2 megapixel image uncompressed, and I was shooting compressed jpeg at ISO 800, but the resolution was still remarkable, and needed to be smoothed out to achieve the look that I'm sure Wood wanted to deliver that day.

Evan Rachel Wood, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

Hayley Atwell

Hayley Atwell, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

TOWARDS THE END OF EVERY FILM FESTIVAL you find yourself in ever more unfriendly spaces to take photos. The spacious hotel suites with convenient windows give way to the patios of busy restaurants of the corners of windowless boardrooms. I'm not sure just where in the Intercontinental on Bloor I shot these photos of Hayley Atwell, but it was definitely a room without a view.

The original colour jpegs from this shoot were a mess - a mix of two different light sources with clashing colour temperatures that must have made providing a serviceable image or two to the free daily a nightmare. Thankfully I can revisit this shoot in black and white today, which lets me paper over the colour issues by pretending I was shooting for a newspaper at least a decade previous to the actual date these photos were taken, when spot colour was expensive and even the front pages of a paper might have featured a black and white shot.

Hayley Atwell, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2007

I have posted portraits of Atwell here before - a session I did at the film festival a year after these were taken, when she was in town promoting a film of Brideshead Revisited with Matthew Goode. In 2007 she was still fairly unknown - a young British actress whose credits had mostly been on television, but who had made a splash with a role in Woody Allen's latest film earlier that year. Now, of course, she has had become part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and play's the wife of the grown-up title character in Disney's Christopher Robin this summer.

The room where I took these must have been particularly unpromising - besides the lighting issues, there wasn't a wall or corner worth considering as a backdrop, so I went very, very close for these portraits. Atwell - just twenty-five at the time - was obviously able to handle the scrutiny, and met my camera with confidence admirable in someone whose career was really only just beginning.

Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

COMEDIANS HAVE A STRANGE ENERGY. More than any other performer I've photographed - actors, musicians, you name it - comedians (in general - there are, of course, exceptions) have a compulsion to be "on" all the time, to project something at the camera that has the curious effect of revealing very little about themselves.

I can't help but see that happening in this shoot with Simon Pegg, done at the film festival when he was in town promoting his role in Run Fatboy Run. On one hand, shots like the one above, despite its technical shortcomings (sharp focus is overrated, to be honest), telegraph the most basic facts about the subject, or at least those fact that they want known before anything else. He fast; he's funny; he's too much for the camera to capture.

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Nearly every comedian I've shot has this "come out with guns blazing" attitude for a photo shoot, and I can see why some photographers would be happy to work with it, to simply treat the session as a kind of wildlife photography. This isn't very satisfying to me, so I tried to wait Pegg out as he sat in front of me with the window in the suite at the Intercontinental behind me, providing a direct, unbounced north light.

The result was a stand-off; eventually he got tired of making faces, but when he relaxed (sort of) and simply faced my camera, it was hard to push past that hint of defiance in his eyes that seemed to say either "I will not show you what you want to see" or "I have no idea what you expect to see." This stand-off is where most shoots with comics ends for me, unless I have a little more time to wear them out and maybe even boss them around. It's also the reason why I always let out a little inward groan when I learn that I've been assigned to photograph a comedian.

David Schwimmer

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

IT HAD BEEN JUST THREE YEARS SINCE FRIENDS AIRED ITS LAST EPISODE when David Schwimmer arrived at the film festival with his debut film as a director. That would make him a big star, but he was strangely subdued when I photographed him - as low key and eager to please as a young actor here with his first feature.

I understood his reticence; typecasting ruins careers, and after ten years playing Ross Geller, Schwimmer had to manage his next moves carefully to avoid playing high-strung nerds for the rest of his working life. I thought he'd already been terribly brave taking a role on the HBO WW2 miniseries Band of Brothers as the martinet Lt. Sobel, a character likely hated by viewers more than Hitler.

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

All of this - Schwimmer's uneasy career moment, his unprepossessing attitude that day - made me feel more than usually sympathetic to him as a subject. I'm not saying that I approach every subject as an adversary (though it's not a bad tactic when circumstances demand it) but I had an empathy for Schwimmer at that moment which I rarely feel at a portrait session. Perhaps that was his tactic all along.

Looking over the photos I shot at the 2007 festival, I'm amazed at how much I'd relaxed into the initially difficult lighting I found in the rooms at the Intercontinental on Bloor. There's a flattering softness to the room light that I'd have a hard time replicating in a well-equipped studio. I didn't know it at the time but I was passing through another steep learning curve, a challenge that I neither sought nor imagined when I had a camera put back in my hands just three years earlier.

Thandie Newton

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER BEAUTY. I suppose I could rank my film festivals by the number of leading actresses I was able to photograph, since you can measure your access and status by how many movie stars you photograph who come with hair and makeup people to make sure they look their best. If you don't have a reputation for taking flattering portraits of these people, it's likely your access will be more restricted, even for shoots that barely last a minute. In retrospect, 2007 would be my biggest year.

Newton had made her reputation over a decade earlier with films like Flirting, Interview with the Vampire and Jefferson in Paris, where she played Sally Hemings to Nick Nolte's Thomas Jefferson. If she was typecast as anything, it was the "smart beauty" - the love interest as defined by her native intelligence as her looks. (She would play Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone's W. a year later.)

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Newton was at the festival promoting Run Fatboy Run, a comedy co-starring Simon Pegg and directed by David Schwimmer of Friends fame - another smart beauty, whose love Pegg has to win back at the end of a story full of physical and emotional humiliation. Like many of the actors I photographed in my heyday, she has moved to premium cable for better roles, like the sentient robot Maeve on HBO's reboot of Westworld.

The combination of room and light at the Intercontinental on Bloor gave a monochrome effect to the portraits I shot there for the free daily, so I'm grateful to the makeup person who decided to put purple eye shadow on Newton. I've accentuated it in Photoshop to accent Newton's eyes - the sort of detail work I could only have dreamed about doing in the days of film photography, and as I said earlier, shoot like this are probably the peak of my portrait work for the free daily.

Thandie Newton, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Gen. Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly MacDonald

Kelly MacDonald, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

YESTERDAY I WROTE A POST ABOUT TAKING PHOTOS OF REALLY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. As soon as I wrote the word "beauty" I was aware that the word is a subjective one, and that there is no one, definitive, empirical concept of beauty. I also wrote about how taking photos of beautiful people can be a dispiriting exercise for a photographer because the subject's apparent, intrinsic attractiveness will register with viewers almost equally in a technically great photo or a mediocre one.

I wrote about Great Beauties - those women (and men) who by some huge popular consensus set a standard for what we consider beautiful in a human being. I didn't talk about my own conception of beauty, and who I consider to be beautiful, since it's so often divergent from that consensus standard. There are women (and men) I consider to be beautiful who might not register at all with a majority of viewers, and Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald is one of them.

Kelly MacDonald, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

I was given the assignment to photography MacDonald and Monica Bellucci on the same day. I've said that I was nervous about photographing the Great Beauty, Belluci; I was just as nervous with MacDonald. I also remember that the reaction of the men waiting in the crowded hallways of the hotel was the same for both Bellucci and MacDonald. The former was glamour distilled, the latter a modestly dressed woman in sensible summer shoes, but this reminded me that the beauty standards of movies and magazines don't usually matter much to most men, whose concept of beauty is more about the impression of freshness and health and intelligence than imposing mystique.

The light I found in the room at the Intercontinental was much better for MacDonald - the sort of flat but focused light that it had taken me quite a few shoots to discover in those rooms, and a few more shoots to learn to work with from the moment I clicked the shutter to the finished digital file. She seemed a little nervous, so I remember giving a little more direction than I liked, mostly to get her to relax just enough for me to capture the very particular, approachable loveliness that I thought was at the heart of her appeal onscreen in roles from Trainspotting to No Country for Old Men to Boardwalk Empire.

Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

THERE IS A BASIC - AND CONSIDERABLE - PROBLEM WITH SHOOTING REALLY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. This can be summed up with the maxim that the quality of the photo you take and the skill you've acquired on the way to taking it is largely immaterial, since most people will react to even a mediocre photo of a really beautiful person by saying "Oh, that's lovely."

They're responding more to the subject than the photo, basically, and it might bother other photographers less than it bothers me, but it's perfectly embodied in this shoot I did with actress Monica Bellucci at the film festival in 2007.

It has to be understood that Bellucci isn't merely an attractive actress - there are plenty of those - but one of cinema's Great Beauties: An actress whose beauty has often been the defining characteristic of roles she has played, much as it would have been with previous Great Beauties like Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and others. And as soon as I was given the assignment to photograph Bellucci I felt a wave of panic wash over me.

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

I've written about this shoot before but it's worth describing one more time. I showed up at the suite at the Intercontinental for the shoot to discover it was one of the rooms without much in the way of window light, but that a television crew had set up in the space. I politely asked one of the techs if it was possible to use their lights for my shoot as the room's ambient light was far from sufficient (or attractive.) He said yes, and I set up a couple of quartz heads in a crossfire next to a light wall; it wasn't the loveliest light ever, but it was bright and directional and just soft enough and I hoped that I could make it work.

Bellucci showed up with hair and makeup people in tow, and while they had no doubt done their job well, the light I chose was just harsh enough that I have done some considerable Photoshop work to smooth out the original photos. I was desperate to keep my subject looking as neutral as possible - I wanted something at least a little glamorous but I didn't want to encourage her to adopt any of the poses she might have learned over hundreds of previous photo shoots, so I gave her even less direction than I would normally. (Which is to say almost none at all besides "look at me" and "look away.")

The results are stark - I've tried to make them starker with considerable retouching - but still not quite where I'd have got them with a bit more time and preparation. Nonetheless, the shots I posted to this blog nearly three years ago have been shared around online with the expected reaction - look at these beautiful photos of a beautiful woman. Which just confirms my suspicion that a really beautiful subject requires a photographer concerned about their style over just taking glamour photos to work much harder. Mind you, it's a challenge I'm more than happy to accept.

Sam Riley

Sam Riley, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007

SAM RILEY WAS THE CLOSEST I EVER GOT TO PHOTOGRAPHING IAN CURTIS. I was a huge Joy Division fan, so it goes without saying that a biopic about the man and his band - directed by Anton Corbijn, the photographer whose work with the band I idolized - was a very major deal for me at the 2007 film festival.

So is it fair to say that I went about photographing Sam Riley, the actor who made his debut in Control playing Curtis, much the way I might have imagined shooting Curtis, had I ever got the chance? Judging by these pictures, I don't think there's much doubt about that.

Sam Riley, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007

To be fair, Riley was virtually unknown when he arrived in town with Corbijn and Control. (Fun fact: Riley played Mark E. Smith, lead singer of the Fall, in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 masterpiece 24 Hour Party People, but was left on the cutting room floor.) Curtis was the only material I had to work with trying to pre-visualize his portrait (and I did spend some time trying to imagine how to pull this off.)

In the end, I did just what Corbijn himself had told me to do twenty years previous, when Chris Buck and I interviewed and photographed him: I found the spot in the hotel room where the light from the window dropped off to something low but flat and took photos that I knew I'd process with as much contrast as they could bear. You could say that it took me that long to fully digest that lesson, and that - like many of my influences - I was finally free to move beyond their circumscribed orbit.