Seth

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I WENT UP TO GUELPH A FEW WEEKS BACK TO TRADE SOME PHOTOS WITH MY FRIEND SETH for a portrait he'd done of me and my family. It was a hand-off we'd been trying to make for the better part of a decade, and it gave me a chance to take some new portraits of Seth. I'd first photographed Seth over twenty-five years ago, but I'd been sitting on this post until I could make my visit and get the new shots.

I have known Seth for over thirty years, if you count our first meeting, when he was in the throes of his youthful Goth phase, complete with bleached hair and a cane topped with a silver skull. When we met again several years later he had changed his look - the same hat and suits that are his trademark today - and begun making his reputation as a cartoonist on what was a new, thriving and terribly exciting scene that included artists like his friend Chester Brown, Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and others.

Seth, Parkdale, 1992

Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

Chester Brown, Parkdale, 1992

I had interviewed Chester as a young journalist, not long after meeting the Goth Seth, and around the time I dropped out of college. By the early '90s Seth and Chester were the linchpins of the Toronto graphic novel scene, and had become a trio when Joe Matt moved up here from the United States. I was a fan of all of them, and at some point renewed my acquaintance with Seth and Chet, somehow becoming part of their extended social circle.

It was around this time that I asked if I could do a portrait shoot with the three of them, together and individually. I was in the full throes of my Irving Penn fixation, and had in mind something along the lines of his portraits of H.L. Mencken with George Jean Nathan, or Willem de Kooning with Frederick Kiesler. I shot them in my Parkdale studio, asking them to sign the butcher paper covering the table top in front of them for their group portrait, and do drawings on the paper for their solo shots.

Seth, Chester Brown & Joe Matt, Parkdale, 1992

I remember it being a fun shoot, and was thoroughly pleased with the results. It might not have been much more than a straining homage to my biggest influence, but I felt I was close enough to touching the master's cloak to get some sort of satisfaction. At that point, it seemed the best way to deal with the anxiety of influence was to give in to the urge to imitate completely.

Not long after I did this shoot, Seth asked me about doing a trade - a portrait for a portrait. I eagerly agreed and asked for a drawing of me, as I imagined myself at my best in the mid-'90s - in an old suit, playing guitar, with my cats at my feet. (I was never really much of a guitarist, so that was just so much fantasy, but I did wear the suits and I'm grateful to have my much-loved and dearly-missed cats, Keebler and Nato, immortalized in a Seth sketch.)

Portrait of Rick McGinnis by Seth, 1994

McGinnis family by Seth, 2015

Time passes and life moves on, so when Seth asked for another portrait shoot with his then-fiancee (now wife) Tania in exchange for some more art, I asked him to make a sketch of my family. (Actually, I'm not sure we even had kids when Seth and I first talked about the trade, which gives you some idea of how long it took us to make this happen. Oh well - neither of us were obviously in any rush.)

Seth, Guelph, July 2018

I was curious to visit Seth in Guelph, where he's gone about creating a world around himself in the shelter of small town Ontario - the place where he was raised and where he seems to find much of his inspiration. We walked around and talked each other's ears off and compared notes on modern society (not favorable) and the peculiar experience of getting old (not without its difficulties, but still far better than youthful idiocy.)

Mostly it was nice to renew an old friendship. I've found that friendships are improved with the passage of time, with familiarity providing precious context. It's also nice to find a friend from those years of youthful struggle and unfocused ambition and find them still at work and creating. Seth in particular has increased his ability to mine his inspiration for new work over the years I've known him. I can't say that the world has caught up with him - that would oblige the world to go into full reverse - but he's made it slow down and acknowledge his insights on how the past calls to us, if we're even remotely sympathetic to what it says.

Art Gallery

Art Gallery of Toronto, May 2017

IF YOU FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM, YOU'LL KNOW THAT I SPEND A LOT OF TIME at the Art Gallery of Ontario, mostly waiting for my youngest daughter to finish art classes. I began taking my camera with me to "practice," so to speak - taking pictures of the collection and the building at first, but then concentrating on my fellow gallery-goers as they took in the art, alone or in groups.

I spent a lot of Saturdays and Sundays at the AGO last year, attempting to make myself invisible while I tried to get shots of my fellow citizens taking in the exhibits. I probably never would have started doing this without my Fuji X30, with its nearly silent electronic shutter and a rear LCD screen that folds out and up like a waist level viewfinder.

Art Gallery of Toronto, Apr. - Dec. 2017

My pictures of gallerygoers were a personal challenge: Taking photos of people that weren't portraits, a sort of street photography with strictly limited variables. When I do a portrait, I try to force a relationship, however brief and one-sided, with the subject. With these photos, I have no relationship with the subject at all; most of the time I never see their face.

If they come in a group or even as a couple, people in art galleries are often, inevitably alone, reacting with the art or in some private drama. Sometimes they even echo the art. What started as a way to test my reflexes with the shutter and train my eye has slowly become a cumulative portrait of my fellow citizens in contemplation and reflection. I can't wait to get back.

Art Gallery of Toronto, June - Dec. 2017

Three years

Selfie in front of Irving Penn's backdrop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, July 2017

IT'S BEEN THREE YEARS SINCE I STARTED THIS BLOG, after my wife noticed that I was moping around the house a bit too much. As a make-work project, she told me that I should start digging through my old negatives to see if anything was worth scanning and putting online. I frankly dreaded the thought, but my wife is usually right about most things, so I swallowed hard and got to work.

Three years later I'm shooting more than I have in a decade, and feeling a lot better about my work than I imagined I would when I cracked open that first binder full of negatives. I know, however, that I'm entering the home stretch with this blog project - there are only a few dozen worthwhile shoots worth digging up from my old negatives before I hit the dawn of digital photography, and once I've gone through whatever was worthwhile from my time shooting at the national free daily, the project of discovery and appraisal will be over. I'll be surprised if there's a fourth anniversary post in a year.

In front of framed Bjork print, Analogue Gallery, 2016. Photo by Steve Stober

In front of framed Patti Smith print, Analogue Gallery, April 2017

One of the milestones of the last year or two was my decision to enter my work in a juried competition and see what happens. In late 2015 I entered five shots into the Sound Image show at Analogue Gallery, a Toronto photo gallery that specialized in music photography. My portrait of Bjork made the cut so, when the next Sound Image show was announced after Analogue moved its premises, I sent in another five entries.

My Patti Smith portrait made the cut, and to my surprise won the Photographer's Choice award this year, which felt very gratifying. Neither print sold, however, which reminded me of something I learned over twenty years ago: Gallery shows are mostly pointless. The walls of our house are full of framed prints from gallery shows I've done since the early '90s, and I can count my sales from all of them on one finger.

Steve Lacy print, ready to mail, Dec. 2016

Montana print, framed, 2016

Which doesn't mean I haven't sold any photos. Far from it - thanks to this blog I've managed to sell a few prints, which is a big ego boost (and far more economical than shouldering the expense of printing and framing without a guarantee of a sale.) I should probably try and think of a way to sell prints more aggressively online, and maybe I will, but I do know that it will take a lot to convince me to do a gallery show again.

I've also returned to something I haven't done in at least twenty years - band photography. It began with a Facebook message from Joel Wasson, an old friend and compatriot from the Toronto music scene. He'd done something really remarkable and basically grown his own rhythm section - he'd started a punk band with two of his sons and wanted me to take the album and publicity photos.

I met Joel at Ian Blurton's studio in the Portlands and headed out for an hour of shooting in the August sun. There were a few shots I liked, but my favorite was the one at the top, shot by the entrance of the go-kart track just down the street from Ian's studio. In my mind, this would have been a fantastic picture sleeve for a 45, but people don't do that sort of thing much anymore. It was a pleasure working with Joel who, bless him, was the first person to actually bother to ask if I wanted to shoot their band in ages.

The biggest coup of the last year was getting a photo in the New Yorker, at least judging by the reaction when I announced it. It would never have happened without this blog, but I was loathe to tell anyone it was happening until the issue was in my hands, as this was the second time the magazine had wanted to use one of my photos.

Thea Traff, a photo editor at the New Yorker, had contacted me about a year previous about using one of my Spalding Gray photos but it had fallen through. She e-mailed me very soon after my Jay McInerney post had gone up, and after an anxious wait told me that she was pretty sure my shot had made the cut. I'd thought the McInerney shots looked like they belonged in a magazine like the New Yorker when I shot them; I only had to wait thirty years for it to happen.

A highlight of the year was Seth's Dominion, a graphic autobiography published by Drawn & Quarterly to go with a documentary on my old friend, the comic book artist Seth. My very Irving Penn-esque portrait of Seth with Chester Brown and Joe Matt has always been one of my favorite shots, and after the contact sheets from that shoot ended up forming a two-page spread in D&Q's 25th anniversary book, Seth asked if he could use one of the better frames in his new book.

As the project grew, a portrait I'd taken of Seth and his then-fiancée Tanya was added, as well as the wedding photos I'd shot for them. I was happy to help Seth out with the book, though everyone involved was shocked when the print run ended up stranded at sea in a container when the shipping line that was bringing it back from the printers went bankrupt.

Another big project this year was a set of photos for Natalie Merchant's career retrospective box set. It was another job that wouldn't have happened without the blog, and I spent several long nights scanning and re-scanning my portraits of Natalie, taken for the National Post almost twenty years ago, to get them to the quality she wanted for the package.

There's another box set I'm very excited about working on, but I don't have a finished product to show yet, so it'll have to wait, perhaps for that fourth anniversary post.

While I was hanging around Ian Blurton's studio with Joel and his sons, Ian asked if I'd be available to shoot a reunion of his old band, Change of Heart, for some shows organized around the 25th anniversary reissue of the band's most ambitious album, Smile. I met Ian and the core band who made that record (bassist Rob Taylor, keyboardist Bernard Maiezza and drummer Glenn Milchem) at his studio and after shooting inside, we headed out into the inclement April weather and the same go-kart track where I'd shot The Discarded.

The band ended up using the shot I did there with a fisheye lens, but my favorite was the one just beneath it, deep in the building's basement by the freight elevator. I can see why they might not have thought it the best choice for a publicity shot, but I can't help but like it as a portrait of four men I've known on and off for over three decades. I've since worked with Ian on another project, but the results of that collaboration will probably have to wait for that putative fourth anniversary post.

It's been a great year. I've traveled to some great places, worked with people I like and taken photos I'm proud to show here. There's some good stuff coming up just over the horizon, God willing, and I'm cautiously hopeful that, once I've exhausted my stock of old photos in my archives, I might continue to showcase what I'm still in the habit of referring to sarcastically as my career's "second act."

Selfie at Calgary Stampede with cowboy hat, July 2017

Michael

Michael Snow, Parkdale, February 1994

PERHAPS IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT CANADA that one of our major homegrown celebrities is an avant-garde artist; for me, whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on the day. In fact, I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Michael Snow was - in my fifth decade now, he's been part of the cultural landscape for as long as I can remember, alongside Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Pierre Berton and Margaret Atwood. The day he came to my studio felt like a very big deal, as he was only the second person from that quintet I'd shoot.

Snow had been the subject of a major career retrospective just a few months previous, with his artwork, films and music showcased at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant, and collected in a quartet of books. I'm not sure what subsequent occasion put him on NOW magazine's cover, but I got the gig and felt obliged to rise to the occasion.

He was in a playful mood when he stood in front of my camera. Noticing the circular stains on the old wooden tabletop I used to help frame the shots, he cupped them like breasts; holding up a cut out letter 'S' just in front of where the magazine's name would sit above his head. (We didn't end up using those shots.)

Michael Snow, Parkdale, February 1994

I was going through a bit of a classical phase at the time, and drapery ended up being a recurring device in my shoots, in and out of the studio. I hoped that this setup would come across as tongue in cheek - Snow's work ranged over time from suitably gnomic and obscure to iconic and even picturesque and crudely populist, and I wanted to depict him as a heroic old master, honoured and celebrated, and far from the baffling avant gardist he had once been.

For the cover shot I pared it all down to one colour, with a blue backdrop spotlit from below and a wash of low blue light filling the foreground, Snow picked out in a warm spotlight. I had moved on from my obsession with cross-processing and felt confident enough to shoot transparency, though I never felt comfortable with the format; clip testing made it easier to nail exposure, but I was always anxiously aware that there was only one original, easily damaged or lost.

Michael Snow, Parkdale, February 1994

I'd taken over the whole of the Parkdale loft by this point, moving the studio into the empty room where my roommates once lived. It was a luxury having a space devoted to shooting and I indulged it as much as I could, experimenting with lights and gels and trying to bring as much of my business into the studio as possible.

I was making my whole living from shooting by now, and while there wasn't much money left over for vacations or other luxuries, I had the consolation of feeling like I was in charge of my career for the first time in my life. I would turn 30 that year.