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

Liane Balaban

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

I'M VERY FOND OF SAYING THAT PORTRAITS ARE THE HARDEST KIND OF PHOTO TO TAKE - in fact I said it to someone just the other day. Not coincidentally, I've spent most of my career taking portraits - alongside concert photography, news stories, street photography, landscapes, travel photography and still life work. Which means that I think I have some authority to make this sort of statement, but your mileage may vary.

The weak point in this idea is the fact that you can't take a bad photo of some people, thanks to their physical beauty or - back to the Duane Michals rule - the simple fact of their fame. The combination of the two explains why paparazzi were able to make money in publishing when editorial portraiture (my specialty, unfortunately) had effectively died. I'm reminded of this when I look at shots like this one, of Canadian actress Liane Balaban, the last one I did at the 2004 film festival.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, 2000

I had photographed Balaban before, just after her breakout role in New Waterford Girl, when she was just twenty years old. (I have no idea who I did this job for - it might have been the National Post - but I do know that that this might have been one of the last portrait shoots I did with my beloved Rolleiflex.)

I was a big fan - of her, and of the film, which was that rare thing: A Canadian movie I didn't hate. Balaban put me in mind of Winona Ryder, and her role in New Waterford Girl was like the ones Ryder would take at the beginning of her career. She came off as pretty and smart - the sort of combination that I loved in my favorite actresses of the '30s and '40s, like Jean Arthur or Rosalind Russell or Myrna Loy.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Balaban showed up for my shoot with her at the festival done up for photos - hair and makeup and clothes. As I wrote in an earlier post, she immediately put me in mind of Cecil Beaton's photos of Audrey Hepburn, posing with a similar gamine confidence. After just a few frames I knew that this was going to be a good shoot.

But I can't take too much credit for the results, or with any other shoot where my subject brings some mixture of beauty and glamour and charisma to the room. Liane Balaban was ready, willing and able to be the subject of a captivating portrait; I don't know that I've seen any other shots of her taken that day, but I'm sure a few of them might be as nice as mine, which is a good reason to be humble even when you're feeling proud of your work.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley, Parkdale, Aug. 1997

THE ACTRESS SARAH POLLEY WAS JUST EIGHTEEN when I photographed her in my Parkdale studio for the cover of NOW magazine. She was, notwithstanding, a celebrity in Canada, having been a child actress for years before I got the assignment to take her portrait for the cover of the magazine's film festival issue. (She had a prominent role in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and was at the festival promoting Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, The Hanging Garden and The Planet of Junior Brown, I think.)

She was tiny, very pretty, and a bit nervous, despite her long experience. I was in the throes of my "Victorian studio photographer" period and managed to rent a suitable backdrop for the shoot, the sort of painted scenery you'd find in the studio of someone who shot carte de visites for middle class customers in any city.

I'd borrowed a few other props, including an old Mitchell cinema camera, hoping to get something that played with the film festival theme. I was clearly ambitious that this session turn out well, as I shot a lot of film.

Sarah Polley, Parkdale, Aug. 1997

My ambition got the better of me at the time, because the shoot never really seemed to measure up to my hopes for it. Still, when Vogue magazine in New York did a small feature on Polley, she apparently declined to do a shoot for them and told them to use my photos, so it couldn't have been a complete failure. Getting a shot in Vogue felt like a big deal, but if it was, I never did much to capitalize on the credit.

I like these shots a bit more today, probably because experience has given me the tools to print them a bit more as I imagined them. I especially like the shot of Polley in her orange jacket, looking a bit wary and hostile - a frame I would definitely have overlooked back then.

They were the kind of studio portraiture I was desperate to do much more often, but this shoot with Sarah Polley was probably the last time I had anyone really notable in my studio. Less than two years later I'd end up moving out of my Parkdale loft.

Sarah Polley, Parkdale, Aug. 1997

I was a little let down with the rolls I shot with Polley amidst my studio detritus and the borrowed Mitchell camera, but this frame in particular struck me while I was going over my contacts, mostly because of something Polley wrote for the New York Times recently, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

Barely two years after I took these photos, Polley's career had taken off in the U.S. and she found herself working on a Miramax film and called in to a meeting with Weinstein that played out, depressingly, much as any meeting a young actress would have with Weinstein. She wasn't quite twenty, had a publicist with her the whole time, and turned down his "offer." By this point Polley already had ambitions away from acting toward directing, and according to the Times piece, this incident played no small part in her later decision to make her career more in Canada than Hollywood:

Harvey Weinstein may be the central-casting version of a Hollywood predator, but he was just one festering pustule in a diseased industry. The only thing that shocked most people in the film industry about the Harvey Weinstein story was that suddenly, for some reason, people seemed to care. That knowledge alone allowed a lot of us to breathe for the first time in ages.

Sarah Polley, Toronto, Sept. 2005

I'd end up photographing Polley one more time, eight years later, when she was at the film festival doing press for a Wim Wenders film in which she had a role. It was in the middle of the "hotel room" period at the free national daily, and while I'm sure I must have mentioned the NOW shoot, I don't recall if she remembered it at all. I positioned her in front of a window with the light behind me and shot a couple of dozen very, very tight frames.

A year later Polley would release her second feature as a director, Away From Her. In the Times piece she says she hasn't taken an acting job in ten years. (Her last credit is Abigail Adams in the HBO miniseries John Adams.) She recently directed a film about her discovery of her birth father, and has written and produced a TV miniseries based on Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.

Polley has, I think, done well with her decision to move away from acting and Hollywood, but I can't help but wonder what she might have done with the roles and resources available south of the border, in an industry (almost impossible to imagine, unfortunately) without its Weinsteins.

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

Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader, Toronto, Sept. 1998

THERE'S AN ASSUMPTION YOU MAKE DOING CELEBRITY PORTRAITURE that every shoot is the only chance you'll get to capture a subject. This is probably a good thing - you might not strive to get the best in whatever time or circumstances you have if you know you'll get a mulligan at a later date. Which is why it's always interesting when chance puts someone in front of your camera more than once.

I shot Paul Schrader the first time at the film festival in 1998, when his career had one of its cyclical revivals with Affliction, a movie based on a novel by the then very fashionable Russell Banks and a critical hit. The film was shot in Quebec, and one of my best friends was its cinematographer, so I had that, at least, to break the ice when I set up my Rolleiflex and tripod in the hotel room (the old Four Seasons, I think) after draping a hotel curtain over a floor lamp to create a backdrop for what was obviously intended to be a NOW cover. (One of my last, it would turn out.)

Paul Schrader, Toronto, Sept. 1998

The setup wasn't a million miles from the one I'd used to photograph Bjork a year previous, though the subject couldn't have been more different. Anyone who's ever used a Rolleiflex knows that it has a minimum focusing distance, and that if you want to get tighter, you have to fit it with one of a trio of close-up lenses. I own a couple of these lenses, which makes me wonder why I didn't reach for them to get a more intimate portrait of Schrader.

The truth is that I was intimidated by him. Schrader has done a lot of things in his career, but he's probably best known for writing the script for Taxi Driver, in addition to a raft of other films as either director or writer (Raging Bull, Blue Collar, Hardcore, Mishima, Bringing Out The Dead) of uncomfortable intensity and pitiless subject matter. His preoccupations always suggested a rather tortured psyche, and even while he sat, visibly basking in the warm glow of a festival hit film (I think there's more than a hint of self-satisfaction in his expression in these photos) I still felt moved to keep my distance.

Paul Schrader, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2016

Nearly twenty years later I met Schrader again, at another film festival with another violent and intense film to promote. Dog Eat Dog arrived in Toronto with advance word that it was a pretty grim piece of work, and some of the early reviews were equally grim, but Schrader's reputation was such that there was a lineup of critics and interviewers who wanted to talk to him, regardless of what they might have thought about the film.

I set up in an upstairs room in a building converted into a media lounge for the festival. He seemed to be at a table in the restaurant downstairs most of the day, dealing with an endless lineup of interviewers, and I was told to get ready and hang on until he had a break in his schedule. I put up the black backdrop - it seemed appropriate - and positioned the two umbrella bounces to create the bubble of light and waited.

Paul Schrader, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2016

I am an older man than I was when I took the photos at the top of this post, and the gulf in age today between Schrader (70) and myself (52) feels a lot narrower than it did when I was 34 and he was 52. I might not be able to sit through a Paul Schrader film nowadays, but I certainly feel more moved to get up close to the man with my camera and try to see if I can get a glimpse of something behind his eyes that gives a key to what is often a harrowing vision of the world.

These are much simpler portraits than the ones I took eighteen years ago. They're also much better ones, I think, and not just because I didn't have an obligation to fit a client's cover format, or an urge to pursue a photographic style that seemed germane to my career. When I sat Paul Schrader down on the ottoman between my lights and my backdrop, I was getting that rarest of things - a second chance to take a better portrait of a person whose work has made an impression on me (although not always a pleasant one.) At this point in my career I can't help but cherish these opportunities.

Toronto: Port Lands

Toronto Port Lands, November 2015

IT'S BEEN A WARM, ALMOST SNOWLESS WINTER HERE, but that doesn't mean I've been leaving the house much these days. Which means that, except for an hour or two every week while my daughter's at art class, I haven't been out on the streets with my camera much. Which is fine. The city will still be there in the spring.

I definitely haven't been down to the Port Lands in a couple of months now, a chilly and windswept place even on nice days, and pretty brutal on the rest. It's a grim, charmless precinct of the city, but I've come to realize that it's where I go for inspiration, and have for many years.

I went to the Port Lands with a camera for the first time almost a quarter century ago, on assignment for NOW magazine. I was illustrating a story - not the first ever written, or the last I would shoot - about the city's plans for this big tract of post-industrial brownfields on the far eastern edge of the city's harbour, a place that I'm sure a lot of Torontonians have never visited, or even know about.

Port Lands, Toronto, March 1992

Port Lands, Toronto, November 2015

I shot a roll or two of 120 and one of 35mm black and white film, though I couldn't tell you what NOW ended up printing. Late last fall I decided to scan my favorite shots from the shoot and try to find the locations of three of those shots. Mostly it was an excuse to go for another wander around the Port Lands, which is once again being talked about as a site for redevelopment now that the adjacent area between the Distillery District and the mouth of the Don has been revived.

Port Lands, Toronto, March 1992

Twenty-five years ago there was a much more active industrial presence down in the Port Lands, but there were signs that it was on the wane. The city has always had big plans for the Port Lands, which never really worked out - it never turned into the major shipping hub it was supposed to be when the piers further west below the downtown core went empty, and grand plans to move retail and residential development down into the area have been stalled mostly because, out of sight and out of mind, the soil has been contaminated by years of illegal dumping.

Port Lands, Toronto, March 1992

Port Lands, Toronto, November 2015

Railroad spur lines that once trailed off into the Port Lands from the main lines parallel to the lake have also been torn up in the quarter century since I took my photos for NOW. The railway crossing sign that marked the site of the photo above disappeared, which meant it took two trips to the area for me to find precisely the right telephone pole again. (The helpful "Healthy Orgasms" poster was also long gone, and I needed to find the little metal plate just above it to be sure I had the same pole.)

Port Lands, Toronto, March 2010

I returned to the Port Lands on assignment again almost six years ago, to illustrate yet another piece on the fate of the area for blogTO. I can't be certain, but the oil tanks I photographed in 1992 were probably the same ones I shot through a fence, being decommissioned. It was oil companies like Esso who had the run of the Port Lands for decades, and when they left they simply abandoned their claims on the land to avoid liabilities.

I think these photos give some idea of the bleak but striking nature of the area - the "ugly beauty" that I always look for when shooting cityscapes, and which the Port Lands has in abundance. 

Port Lands, Toronto, March 1992

Port Lands, Toronto, November 2015

I wasn't able to get to exactly the same area across from the (now-empty) Hearn Generating Station where I took my first photo in 1992. The shot just above was taken over the top of a fence, across the Ship Channel, where the abandoned Hearn sits today, its oil storage tanks gone as it awaits its re-invention. 

I'm not sure what the future holds for the Port Lands. A lot of the city once looked like this - huge stretches of former industrial and railway land that's been mostly redeveloped in the wake of a years-long real estate boom in my hometown. The soil contamination will probably hold the condos at bay for quite a while, and the hydro corridors that cross through the area will be an impediment to gentrification as long as they stand, so it looks like I'll be able to head down there for inspiration for quite a few years to come.

Port Lands, Toronto, November 2015

 

Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

I'VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT SECOND CHANCES LATELY, both in terms of my career as a photographer but also when I look back on the scant handful of subjects I had in front of my camera more than once. If you take away friends and acquaintances, it's a tiny group, but I'm terribly grateful for them, since they give me some sort of yardstick for how my competence and that slow, painful crawl toward a personal style evolved.

I shot director Todd Haynes for the first time over a quarter century ago, when he showed up at the film festival to promote a film that, ultimately, no one would be allowed to see. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was a legend more than a movie - a 43-minute dramatization of the life of the late Carpenters' singer and drummer made with Barbie dolls. It had gotten Haynes a lot of press in addition to a lawsuit that forced him to withdraw it from exhibition two years after I took these photos.

Todd Haynes, Toronto, Sept. 1988

My then-girlfriend was terribly excited about Haynes and his movie; a film and semiotics grad, he was coming from what was, in the late '80s, a very fashionable place for young artists, and seemed to have cracked the formula for making an actually entertaining picture using cultural theory as an inspiration. It would turn out to be a launching pad for a directing career that's occasionally been successful with more than just critics, and has brought him remarkably close to an Oscar.

I have no idea who commissioned me for the photos I took at the 1988 film festival, but I was apparently quite busy. I'll take a flyer and guess that I shot Haynes in a suite at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, in a room that had apparently been stripped down for press interviews.

I had a lot more confidence in my work as a photographer than as a darkroom printer at this point; these two very clean, stark frames were a challenge to get from my Spotmatic to photo paper, the shot below a particular challenge that I remember failing at the time. I've only now been able to produce something workable from the negative; I particularly like the flickering lady on the TV behind him.

Todd Haynes, Toronto, Sept. 1988

Haynes' first couple of films after Superstar didn't do much for me, but he caught my interest again with Velvet Goldmine, a rock biopic/romance inspired by David Bowie and Iggy Pop. I liked Far From Heaven, his homage to Douglas Sirk's torrid '50s melodramas, even more - a well he's returned to with his latest film, Carol, which has likely gotten star Cate Blanchett an Oscar nomination.

My favorite Haynes film, though, is I'm Not There, an equally fanciful rock biopic of Bob Dylan that put him in front of my camera again when he promoted it at another film festival, nineteen years after I first did his portrait.

Todd Haynes, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

The shoot took place in yet another hotel room - it may even have been the Four Seasons again - in yet another sweet spot of available window light. I was shooting for the busy layouts and tight spaces of the free national daily, which had pared down my already no-frills portrait style to simple headshots. I was using the paper's Canon EOS 30D, and had just begun to get really comfortable with shooting digitally.

My second shoot with Haynes is less ambitious, but far more intimate, since I'd been forced to make up for the loss of any attempt at creative composition with the forced interaction you get from a subject in just a minute or two, aided by putting on a short lens and getting as much into their personal space as instinct allowed. I would never have submitted the frame at the top - my favorite - to the paper; it's the most interesting one, and (based on long experience) inevitably the one that photo editors reject.