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.

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.

Chris Tucker

Chris Tucker, Toronto, July 17, 2007

I SUPPOSE I PHOTOGRAPHED CHRIS TUCKER IN THE MIDDLE OF A CAREER CRISIS. Perhaps that's why he was a more than usually tense subject, even for a big celebrity. Or perhaps Tucker just isn't very relaxed in front of some random newspaper photographer for whom he's obliged to make faces. I'm pretty sure I might be the same way, were I in his situation.

Tucker was in Toronto promoting the third film in the Rush Hour series. He'd had his breakthrough alongside Ice Cube in Friday, then become a celebrity with three films in 1997 - Money Talks, Jackie Brown and The Fifth Element. The first Rush Hour film was a monster hit, and for the next decade he didn't seem to do much but team up with Jackie Chan for its sequels.

An actor with his status should have probably been working much more often, which is why I interpret this period in his career as a crisis, but knowing the kind of money a hit franchise can generate, perhaps he was simply thinking "Why work if you don't have to?" (But then again, Tucker would end up settling a $2.4 million dollar tax debt seven years after I took these photos, so maybe I was right.)

Chris Tucker, Toronto, July 19, 2007

Technically, this was like much of 2007 - "another shoot, another camera." This time I was testing out the Olympus E-510, which was a bit of a shift in their DSLR line, from a Kodak CCD digital sensor to a Panasonic MOD sensor. Whatever that means, the result was a much more smooth and detailed jpeg than I had been used to working with up till then. It also marked a shift to a fixed 3:4 sized sensor from the more film-like 2:3 aspect ratio.

It has to be noted that digital cameras during this period were evolving pretty quickly, increasing in resolution with each new generation and improving their sensitivity in low light and at higher ISO settings. By contrast, digital photo technology seems to have plateaued a decade later, with only minor improvements being offered with new models.

I was a bit wrongfooted by Tucker's very reserved attitude as a subject, so I just went into a default look for much of this shoot and had him adopt an old Hollywood screen idol kind of pose - the result of which is the frame at the top of this post. The shot at the bottom is the result of looking at the jpegs again for the first time in over a decade and finding something interesting in the unnaturally smooth colour rendition the camera produced; pumping a bit more warmth into the image in Photoshop gave it a quality that I associate more with digital photos than film, where even the most basic portrait (like this one) takes on a plastic, processed quality that lends the image a faint strangeness I wouldn't have seen through the viewfinder.

Harry Shearer

Harry Shearer, Toronto, April 25, 2007

THE FIRST TIME I SAW THIS IS SPINAL TAP, AT A DOWNTOWN MULTIPLEX, a long-haired metalhead dude ahead of me on the escalator after the movie turned to his equally long-haired metalhead buddy and said, "I don't get it - why make a movie about a band that sucks?" Even if the movie wasn't as seminal as it is, this anecdote alone would endear it to me for all time.

Similarly, Harry Shearer would be a legend to me even if he hadn't co-wrote the film and played bassist Derek Smalls. So I was a bit overawed when I got the assignment to do his portrait when he was in town, promoting either A Couple of White Chicks at the Hairdresser (unlikely, as I don't think it was ever released outside the U.S.) or The Simpsons Movie (more likely, though he might have been in town for some completely different reason.)

Harry Shearer, Toronto, April 25, 2007

The assignment was at a hotel I'd never shot in before - the Grand Hotel & Suites at Jarvis and Dundas East, which I remembered from when the building was the RCMP headquarters. We did the shoot in a meeting room on the main floor instead of one of the suites, which probably explains the chair - hyperbole in the form of furniture - and the generous shooting space, not to mention the dismal lighting, from overhead fixtures and pot lights.

The mixed lighting sources means that this shoot is nearly unprintable in colour, so I've rendered these frames in black and white. I've also played with the focus in processing, subtly with the bottom frame, more dramatically in the one at the top, to give the look of a very wide lens with a very, very narrow aperture, or a view camera with the focal plane shifted.

I had my doubts about even posting these photos until after I'd managed - with considerable effort - to correct the shortcomings of the original images. Which is another reason for me to be grateful for the digital revolution.

Zach Braff

Zach Braff, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

WHILE RESEARCHING THIS POST, I LEARNED THAT ZACH BRAFF HAS OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER. This is not the sort of information about a living celebrity that would have been anywhere in their biography when I was a boy; I am not certain, in fact, that I would have known what OCD was before I was in my thirties. Knowing it now, however, makes me retroactively apply the information to my (scant) memory of this shoot.

Braff was nervous. I don't know why - it was the end of a press day and I can't have been his only photo shoot and, besides, Scrubs had made him a star five years earlier and he should have been at least a bit at ease in front of cameras by then. But he wasn't. His immediate urge was to mug, but I'd had enough of that at the festival by that point, so I did my best to try and channel his urge to make faces into something a little more focused.

Zach Braff, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

The light was terrible. I'm not even sure there was a daylight window in the room where I was shooting; the colour files are certainly a mess for colour temperature, which - now, years after I took these photos, and with much more experience in Photoshop than I had at the time - means abandoning realistic colour and playing with the sliders until something interesting happens. Or converting to black and white.

Braff was at the festival to promote The Last Kiss, a film he'd co-written (with Paul Haggis) in addition to starring in, alongside Rachel Bilson and Jacinda Barrett. Braff's career is full of multiple credits on films, writing, directing and producing in addition to acting. (He even produced the soundtrack compilation of his film Garden State a couple of years previously.) I imagine that being OCD would probably be an advantage for someone exercising that much control over a project, but this is a level of psychoanalyzing that I'm only tempted to do with shoots like this, where I never really clicked with my subject.

Fred Willard

Fred Willard, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

LIKE BOB BALABAN, WHO I PHOTOGRAPHED EARLIER THE SAME DAY, I have probably been watching Fred Willard in something all my life. As with Balaban, he was doing bit parts on shows like Get Smart, The Bob Newhart Show and Laverne & Shirley when I was a TV addicted pre-teen, before he came upon his avuncular but slightly addled onscreen persona on Fernwood 2-Nite as Jerry Hubbard - Ed McMahon to Martin Mull's Johnny Carson.

Like Balaban, he was at the festival to promote Christopher Guest's latest ensemble comedy, For Your Consideration. (I also did portraits of Jane Lynch the same day but, alas, they aren't worth sharing here, which is a regret.) I remember all of the talent from Guest's film being somewhat bemused by the ritual of press days, but none more than Willard.

Fred Willard, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

There's a smirk on Willard's face in nearly every frame I shot that day. It's one of the challenges of shooting comedians, which usually begins with their urge (I think some regard it as an obligation) to mug for the camera - "playing the clown" is often a full-time job, and it sometimes requires some magic combination of words or an intervention to head it off. Clearly, I had neither the time nor the words to do it with Willard.

Fred Willard is still as ubiquitous on the big and small screen as ever. He has the unusual distinction of playing one of the few live action roles ever in a Pixar movie when he was cast as the head of the Buy-N-Large corporation in WALL-E - the sort of glibly untrustworthy authority figure that he's made his specialty, and since authority of all kinds hasn't made itself any more trustworthy in the decade-plus since I took these photos, I don't imagine Willard will ever have a shortage of work.

Tracy Morgan

Tracy Morgan, Toronto, May 2005

THERE'S NOT A LOT YOU CAN DO WITH A PORTRAIT SUBJECT WHO MUGS FOR THE CAMERA except roll with it and hope they run out of steam. Which almost never happens, especially if your shoot is only supposed to last a couple of minutes. So when Tracy Morgan immediately started making faces as soon as I raised my camera to my eye, my only option was to keep moving him around until he'd run out of faces.

As far as I can tell, Morgan was in town promoting his supporting role in the remake of The Longest Yard starring Adam Sandler, but I could be wrong. He'd finished his career-making stint on Saturday Night Live a couple of years before, and it would be a year before 30 Rock hit the air, with Morgan playing a variation on himself. Which means I photographed Tracy Morgan when he was on his way to being a big star, which is usually when I got most of my celebrity portraits.

Tracy Morgan, Toronto, May 2005

I did my shoot with Morgan on one of the balconies of the old Four Seasons in Yorkville - the same sorts of spots where I'd taken portraits of Vince Vaughn and Ally Sheedy for NOW seven years earlier. The more I do through my old work, the more I miss the Four Seasons, which was easily the most photogenic Toronto hotel I worked in for nearly twenty years.

I had to work fast with Morgan, partly because the shoot felt like an echo of the Vaughn shoot, and I expected him to get up and walk away at any time. The shot below is one of the last I shot, and it's my favorite, because it's the closest moment to getting Morgan to stop mugging. He's sitting in the corner of the balcony - one of the few places in a Four Seasons suite that I'd never shot before. It's a great spot for a portrait, and it makes me nostalgic for a Toronto that only just disappeared a decade ago.

Tracy Morgan, Toronto, May 2005

Joe Flaherty

Joe Flaherty, Toronto, July 2004

JOE FLAHERTY WAS BORN IN PITTSBURGH AND BEGAN HIS COMEDY CAREER IN CHICAGO but he became famous on SCTV here in Canada, so we ritually expunge his American roots and claim him as one of our own. In our collective imagination, he was born in Scarborough and grew up watching Country Hoedown and Front Page Challenge and fiddling with the aerial to get the shows from Buffalo.

If you weren't there when it originally aired, it's hard to explain your reaction to SCTV when it began airing on the Global network in 1976. Canadian comedy shows tended to be gentle, even corny, but SCTV was sarcastic and cruel, a world of awkward hucksters and washed-up celebrities jammed together in the confined space of a crummy regional TV station. You suddenly sat up on the couch in the living room and realized that so much of the entertainment you'd been watching since TV went colour was so close to self-parody that it only took a nudge to push it over the line.

Joe Flaherty, Toronto, July 2004

I photographed Joe Flaherty at the Second City Theatre on John Street - now demolished, its facade incorporated into a luxury hotel and condo - for reasons now forgotten. I didn't care; he had been part of a group that had made Canada seem hip and edgy, even if only in fits and starts. (It took three years for SCTV to produce the first two seasons, and new seasons would appear haphazardly, with different names and formats, on different channels.) That's important to someone who grows up in a provincial culture like Canada.

The light was awful for the shoot, and I either couldn't find or didn't have the time to scout out a better location in the building, so I stuck to a tight head shot in what was the least flattering spot under the big window in the lobby. They're not great shots, and I wish I'd either had more time, better light or both. Considering how much I admired Flaherty, I'd even have contemplated trying to do something conceptual with him, using a costume or props - in an ideal world, and not one where I probably had five minutes and a deadline in three hours.

If my affection for Flaherty hadn't already been established with Sammy Maudlin and Count Floyd, he also played Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks, one of my role models as a father (alongside Robert Duvall in The Great Santini.) When my kids finally saw the show and heard one of Flaherty's dinner table rants in the first few episodes, they looked at me and said "Oh my God, dad, that's you."

John C. Reilly

John C. Reilly, Toronto, Dec. 1999

JOHN C. REILLY WAS KNOWN MORE AS A CHARACTER ACTOR WHEN I SHOT HIS PORTRAIT for the National Post just before the turn of the millennium. I had worked for the paper since its launch - a relationship that I had hoped would turn into something more than it did. These photos were taken just when that relationship was diminishing.

Reilly was in four films released in 1999, but I'm guessing he was in Toronto for Magnolia, one of the big buzz films of the year. I'm pretty certain I interviewed him in addition to writing the story - one of the privileges of working for a start-up newspaper where editorial roles weren't as written in stone and keenness was rewarded.

John C. Reilly, Toronto, Dec. 1999

Since Reilly was more known as a character actor, I went in a more dour direction with these photos than I would have several years later, after he'd become as a comedy star with roles like Dewey Cox in Walk Hard or Cal Naughton Jr. in Talladega Nights. I've become a big fan of Reilly's since then - he occupies a rare position between straight man, comic foil and holy fool, often moving between the three easily, as he does in Talledega Nights.

John C. Reilly, Toronto, Dec. 1999

My daughters know him as the voice of the title character in Wreck-It Ralph, which he's reprising in a sequel this year. I suppose my fondness for Reilly is why I'd nearly forgotten about these photos - they're merely OK, taken when I was struggling for inspiration with my portrait work (and so much else besides.)

I began work at the Post with a lot of hope - I got in on the ground floor and had bylines and photo credits in the paper right from the first weekend edition, which was run as a separate entity from the daily paper at the launch in 1998. The Post blew through a ton of its start-up money during its first couple of years, and would be sold on to new owners the year after I shot Reilly.

By this point the weekend edition had lost its autonomy and the people I'd worked under during the launch had moved on. Additionally, the Post began functioning like a "normal" paper by now, and staff photographers began edging out freelance assignments. This might have been the last job I did for the paper, at least until nearly a decade later, when I was back to freelancing and the Post briefly took me on again after my time with the national free daily had ended.

But that's a whole other story.

Kenny Robinson

Kenny Robinson, Parkdale, 1998

I LOVED MY STUDIO, BUT WHEN I TOOK THESE PICTURES I HAD BARELY A YEAR LEFT TO ENJOY IT. Not that I knew it at the time. This probably explains why I've been loathe to scan and post this shoot until now: It reminds me of the last time I still felt like I had the means and the opportunity to do the work I really wanted to do.

Kenny Robinson is an actor and comedian, and I was assigned to shoot him for a NOW cover on short notice. My schedule was hardly overbooked, but with just enough time to set up the studio, I quickly put together my favorite lighting setup at the time - a tight cluster of small soft boxes on either side of my camera, aimed directly at the subject - and grabbed the blue seamless backdrop.

Kenny Robinson, Parkdale, 1998

We were both surprised when Robinson arrived at my studio dressed in a suit almost exactly the same shade as the backdrop. Commercial photography is really just graphic art with a few reasonable variables, and even before I had my first Polaroid I knew these shots were going to look great no matter how they got cropped by the layout people.

Kenny Robinson, Parkdale, 1998

Robinson was a great subject, striking just the right balance between comic mugging and a more subtle performance for the camera. I'm sure it helped that he was able to imagine how he looked so easily, his face the only patch of colour in what was an essentially monochrome setting. You might have imagined a week's worth of planning with a stylist and a wardrobe person to get something this clean, instead of a moment of pure luck.

While I remember this stretch of my career as mostly frustration and waning inspiration, shoots like are evidence that when circumstances were right, I was able to draw on over a decade of experience and rise to an occasion. It has taken me nearly two decades to get back creatively to where I was that afternoon.