Village Voice

Voivod, Montreal, December 1989

THE VILLAGE VOICE IS DEAD. If you've never read, or even heard of the Village Voice, I doubt that you care; one more newspaper gone in an age when newspapers go out of business every month. Even for people who care, it's hardly news - for fans or readers or former employees the paper essentially died last year when it ceased print publication and went completely online.

My first proper assignment for the Voice was nearly thirty years ago, when photo editor Edna Suarez phoned me and asked if it would be too much trouble to hop up to Montreal to shoot the Quebec prog metal band Voivod for the paper's next Rock & Roll Quarterly supplement. I'm not sure Edna was aware of the distances involved getting from place to place in Canada, and even before I did the math in my head I knew that whatever I made probably wouldn't cover the cost of a return ticket on the overnight train.

But I didn't mention that and of course I said yes. This was my first real gig shooting for an American publication and I couldn't blow it, so I packed nearly my whole studio - my ProFoto strobe kid and light stands and two cameras - and hauled it all down to Union Station and onto the VIA Rail train. I arrived in Montreal the morning after a blizzard and went upstairs from the Gare Central to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for breakfast, stowing all my gear by the wall next to my table in the fancy restaurant across from the Marie, Reine du Monde Cathedral, where I waited for the band's manager to meet me. The cost of breakfast ate up the last of whatever I'd make from the shoot.

Aki Kaurismaki, Toronto, Sept. 1988

I think I sold my first photo to the Voice nearly two years earlier. Preparing for his big move to New York, my friend Chris Buck had already started doing work for them, and he arranged for me to send the Voice a print of my shoot with Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (a big deal at the time, at least in film fest circles) on spec. They might have used it, but I can't be sure; I've never been good at keeping tearsheets, so what got sent and what got printed is sometimes hard to match up.

Another big assignment for the Voice was one of the only examples of sports photography I've ever done. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had been a gold medalist at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but had the medal taken away when he tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. He attempted a comeback three years later, which began at the Hamilton Indoor Games. Edna called me up and asked if I'd do the shoot. I had never shot a sporting event and knew I'd have to rent something like a 300mm/2.8 lens to pull it off, but of course I said yes.

Ben Johnson, Hamilton, 1991

I only remember a couple of things about the shoot. The first was Johnson's visible disappointment when he learned that he'd finished second, which I was lucky enough to capture in a few barely-sharp frames. (I actually think the slight camera shake enhances the shot of that heartbreaking moment, and in any case strict focus and sharpness is overrated.) The other was a phone call from Edna.

I was working with a local writer on the gig - a friend I'd known for a few years. A few days before the Hamilton track meet Edna called me to firm up details, then said "I thought you said the writer was a friend of yours." I insisted that he was, but Edna told me that he'd been calling the paper trying to get me taken off the job so his sister could shoot Johnson.

"Of course I said no," Edna told me.

I never said anything about it to him, not in the car there and back to Hamilton, and not in the decades since, but I don't think I was ever able to trust him again. It was a sobering moment for me - the  first time I realized that loyalty is situational for many people.

James Tenney, Toronto, January 1989

Ice Cube, Toronto, 1990

Sonic Youth, Montreal, 1991

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, 1991

Much of the work I sold to the Voice was reprints - portraits from my files bought to illustrate stories. I could see why they might turn to me for a portrait of James Tenney - an American composer who lived in Toronto and taught at York University. What I never understood was why the Village Voice would have needed my pictures of a New York band like Sonic Youth, or someone like the writer William S. Burroughs, who must have been photographed by the Voice countless times since the paper was founded in 1955.

I liked to think it was because my shots were good, but I was probably flattering myself. In retrospect, it might have been because they were different - nobody in New York or the U.S. had seen them since they'd appeared in whatever publication assigned them up here. Getting assignments to shoot for U.S. media like the Voice was difficult in Canada - almost anyone would either live or perform or do something in New York City before they'd show up in Toronto. But work done up here at least had the advantage in the pre-internet age of being obscure and unseen by art directors and photo editors in Manhattan.

Joe Kramer, Toronto, 1991

This shoot with gay erotic massage therapist (and former Jesuit seminarian) Joe Kramer is a pretty good example of the sort of work I might get assigned by the Voice. It's really the kind of subject anyone who shot for an alternative weekly might find themselves shooting back in the '80s and '90s. I'd photographed people like Kramer for NOW - no surprise since the alternative weekly probably wouldn't exist if there was no Village Voice.

I don't know when I started reading the Voice - probably since before I owned a camera. I know that I bought it religiously every week for over a decade, which is why this shot of Joe Kramer is of a piece with the kind of work the Voice printed. It's not too different from something James Hamilton might have shot at around the same time - a piece of mimicry, for a client I desperately wanted to impress.

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May 1993

The last assignment I ever did for the Voice were portraits of the writer Vikram Seth. By this point Edna Suarez had moved on to the New York Times and Tom McDonough was photo editor. I don't know why I never got another shoot from the Voice, but it's not surprising - I was no longer making trips to New York City with my portfolio to push my work and I never had the same personal connection with Tom that I had with Edna.

My Voice connection was probably the key to whatever success I had outside Canada; when Edna moved to the Times she assigned me whatever work she had that could be done here. It was through Edna that I met art directors Robert Newman and Jesse Reyes, who were responsible for assignments I got for outlets like Guitar World and Entertainment Weekly. The brutal truth is that, despite the size and competition, people in New York publishing were far more helpful and friendly than almost anyone in Toronto, which helped keep the illusion alive that I might one day have a career down there - at least for a while.

Vikram Seth might have been my last Voice assignment, but he was not the last portrait of mine published by the Voice. Late last year, after the last print edition of the paper had hit the newsstands, the Voice website ran a story about the new Fela Kuti box set featuring my 1989 portrait of Fela from the cover of the booklet. They obviously got the shot as a handout, so I didn't see money for it (though I was, thankfully, credited.)

Ironically, it was Chris Buck who told me about the photo being used, three decades after he got me my introduction to the paper. Ultimately, this is my only tearsheet from the Voice.

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow, Toronto, September 9, 2008

I WAS STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WENT TO MY FIRST FILM FESTIVAL. I can't remember any other film I saw during that festival except one - a weird, almost campy biker film starring a then-unknown young actor named Willem Dafoe and the rockabilly singer Robert Gordon, who was probably the big draw of the film for me. (I was - and remain - a huge fan.) The Loveless was the sort of film where a character would say something like "We're goin' nowhere. Fast." with just enough irony to make it both hilarious and awesome. It remains one of my favorite films.

The film was co-directed by a recent Columbia University graduate named Kathryn Bigelow. I filed the name in my mind and was not surprised when, six years later, she made Near Dark, a really clever vampire film that didn't let its intelligence get in the way of being a vampire film. I felt very proud that I'd noticed her talent early on, and felt that strange pride and almost possessiveness that a fan feels when I watched her move from one project to another, working with bigger names on each film.

Kathryn Bigelow, Toronto, September 9, 2008

So I was thrilled when I was assigned to interview and photograph Bigelow by the free daily during the 2008 film festival. Bigelow had endured a bit of a career slump; it had been seven years since her last film, K-19: The Widowmaker, but there was a lot of buzz around her new film - an Iraq war film about a suicidal bomb disposal technician played by Jeremy Renner. I was on my own at this festival because Chris Atchison had left the paper - part of a slow exodus of staff inspired by our almost universally unloved new editor. I didn't mind having the job of interviewing someone like Bigelow, though I missed being able to concentrate wholly on the portrait shoot. Still, I think I got decent quotes, like this one:

"The war is, certainly as I understand it through his eyes, searching for IEDs. That's the signature of this conflict - it's like the jungle in Vietnam. And I think it's really unique - that's the war. There's no air power or other engagements - you're constantly seeking out this invisible threat, and it's insidious and it's futile, and I think the futility of it is what kept coming across to me. And my feeling is that if I could share that without polemics, or without being dogmatic, if we could just somehow humanize the experience for an audience then we've certainly done our job."

Still, I wish I'd had more time to think about the portrait. They're competent shots - I was certainly able to do something at least competent after four years of steady shooting at the free daily - but it wasn't inspired, and I wanted to do something inspired with Bigelow, a director whose work I knew well, and who had certainly inspired me with The Loveless all those years ago, back when I was looking for art that looked like something I imagined in my own head.

In any case, this would be one of my last portrait shoots at the free daily, and my last film festival for almost a decade. For a while, it looked like it was my last one ever, which made my shoot with Kathryn Bigelow seem appropriate - a kind of closure.

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.

Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

WHEN I SHOT THIS PORTRAIT OF PAUL HAGGIS, it was confounding to me that the man was a Scientologist. He was accomplished and successful, to be sure, but that was in Hollywood, in an industry where L. Ron Hubbard's cult has it's highest profile followers, recruited and sustained within the cult because of their fame and success. But he was also clearly intelligent, and that was baffling: How could anyone possessed with some clarity of insight remain in a cult whose core cosmology could be parodied effortlessly in an episode of South Park?

The Oscar-winning writer and director became, ultimately, one of the highest profile defectors from Scientology - two years after I took these pictures. This made him a target of the harassment that famous ex-Scientologists inevitably endure, and which reinforces the organization's status as a cult - for anyone on the outside of the cult, at least.

A 2011 New Yorker story about defectors from Scientology ends with the Canadian-born Haggis wondering, as much to himself as to the interviewer: "I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't." In the decade-plus since I took these photos, I've learned how perfectly intelligent people can hold contradictory, untenable beliefs that they'll cling to despite - in fact, often because of - their intelligence, or more precisely because of their perception of themselves as more intelligent than most people.

Paul Haggis, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

I know that my puzzlement at Haggis' position in a cult was on my mind when I took these photos, but I'm not sure how they affected my approach to him as a subject. I knew that, as a non-performer but a creative, it would be easier to get past any projection he might have of his public image; if there was one thing I'd learned in the previous two decades it was that photographing writers and directors was usually more rewarding for this reason.

I doubt if Haggis would remember this brief portrait session. I doubt if any of the people whose portraits I've taken in a minute or less in the middle of a press day in some hotel room have any memory of our meeting. But I asked him to hold the gaze of my camera lens precisely because I was hunting for some evidence of misgivings or doubt in his expression. And it's probably because of my bafflement at Haggis the Scientologist that I framed him askew in nearly every frame, and why I keep projecting some glimpse of that turmoil into these portraits. But that might just as well be my own self-flattery in action.

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.

Ang Lee

Ang Lee, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007

THIS SHOOT WAS MY SECOND ATTEMPT AT GETTING A PORTRAIT OF ANG LEE. A decade previous, back when I worked at NOW magazine, a request for a shoot with the director had been denied at the last minute, and I had felt frustrated ever since. I had been a big fan of Ang Lee since his Austen movie adaptation Sense & Sensibility had been a breakout hit, and had proved that he was more than just a director of particularly Chinese stories.

Since then, The Ice Storm and Ride With The Devil had confirmed his remarkable versatility, and made me an even bigger fan. There aren't a lot of masterful directors working today, but I'd put Lee among their small number, even though I still think his Oscar nominations (with two wins out of three) are for the wrong pictures.

Ang Lee, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007

By 2007 I'd figured out how to use the very dim, peculiar light in the rooms at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor. The extreme drop off into shadow and necessity of using the adjacent walls of the very small, dark rooms pushed my style even further away from the Penn-inspired work I'd done for NOW in the '90s.

These shots are probably as perfect an example of whatever typifies my "hotel room" style as I'll find in all the work I did for the free daily, and the fact that they're really just small variations on a single pose underlines the unvarying conditions of those shoots: They were usually done under intense pressure, and often in less than a minute.

Lee was in Toronto promoting Lust, Caution, one of his periodic returns to Chinese stories that seem to be the only constant in a career that's included a superhero film (Hulk), his "gay cowboy movie" (Brokeback Mountain), a docudrama about the Woodstock Music Festival (Taking Woodstock) and a metaphysical fantasy film based on a book by an annoying Canadian (The Life of Pi). His Wiki bio teases future projects that include a sci-fi film and a movie about the 1975 Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier match that was supposed to be filmed in 3-D. It's a mark of Lee's talent that even his failures are more interesting than most blockbusters.

John Cameron Mitchell

John Cameron Mitchell, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2006

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW FROM THESE VERY SIMPLE, EVEN FORMAL PORTRAITS just how outrageous Shortbus was - the movie that the subject was at the festival promoting. Maybe that's for the better - I'm not sure what I could have done in two minutes to tease that director John Cameron Mitchell's film contained a scene where a man sings the American national anthem into another man's asshole. And I'm not sure if that was the most outrageous scene.

Mitchell, an actor and writer in addition to being a director - had made his name with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a film about an East German post-op transsexual touring America with her punk band seeking revenge against the rock star who stole her songs. It's a bit Warholian and a bit Rocky Horror and has a cult following, which includes one of my most adamantly conservative friends. Which just goes to show that, in the end, the persistence of personal taste makes us all individuals, united against everyone else.

These portraits of Mitchell are pretty much where my work in the digital era finally started to coalesce around something like a new personal style - albeit one dictated by the brute circumstances under which I'd been working. It's simple and (often) symmetrical and all about the subject staring down me and my lens in the brief moment we had to make a portrait.

John Cameron Mitchell, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2006

The rooms are dark and so are the pictures - although I doubtless tried to lighten up the versions I sent into the free daily, since newsprint hates shadows. Which means that the photos that I'm posting now, over a decade since they were shot, are being seen as I imagined them for the first time ever. I'm making some kind of point about delayed gratification, which is suitable, I suppose, when talking about a film featuring a character desperate to have their first orgasm.

In my capacity as DVD columnist at the free daily, I ended up reviewing Shortbus when it came out on disc. I dug up the review the other day, and ended up quite liking this sentence:

Almost everybody ends up doing someone else during the course of the film, in varying combinations, but as John Cameron Mitchell’s film wears on, it becomes obvious that no amount of sex will cure their problems, and a thick sadness starts to saturate what started out as a gleefully outrageous tale, complete with a snide transvestite, a surly dominatrix, and a dim but beautiful male model.

The really funny thing is that my review reads as far less prudish and put off than the one that ran in the Guardian around the same time, where reviewer Philip French quotes Bertrand Russell's cringing dismissal of D.H. Lawrence's celebratory sequence of poems about his sexual liberation. Which seems noteworthy when you remember that I'm supposed to have a reputation as a social conservative. Once again, taste is what makes us individuals, not ideology.

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Toronto, Sept. 9, 2006

I USED TO SEE A LOT OF MOVIES. At some point in my twenties I went from enthusiastic moviegoer to cineaste, and the time I used to spend in clubs seeing bands shifted to cinemas, rep houses and video rentals. I've been paid to write about movies for almost as long as I've been taking photos professionally, so I've always had a lot of respect for movie directors, mostly because they have a job that I think I'd hate.

Filmmaking is a collaborative art - everybody knows that - but what that mostly means is that if you're really good and live with the certainty that you know what a movie should look like better than any producer, writer or actor, you're essentially at war with everyone you need to help you make that film. I have a lot of respect for directors who can maintain a personal vision - an aesthetic brand, the mark of the auteur - when they could just as easily choose compromise and have a journeyman career, for which they'd get paid just as well, and probably work more often.

They keep saying that the idea of the auteur is dead, but a handful of working directors still get tagged with the word - like Alejandro González Iñárritu. Part of a wave of visually distinctive directors that came out of Mexico in the '80s and '90s - his peers are Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro - he's made the shift to Hollywood without losing his identity, and along the way has won pretty much every award worth winning: Oscars, BAFTAs, Independent Spirits and Golden Globes, and awards from the DGA, AACTA, the AFI, the PGA and the National Board of Review, and from Venice, Cannes and Palm Springs.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Toronto, Sept. 9, 2006

Iñárritu had made his breakthrough with Amores Perros, and was at the festival with Babel, his second Hollywood film after 21 Grams. He was a big deal, which meant that it was implicit that he didn't have much time for my photos. (Well, nobody ever did, really, but PR and handlers never seemed to tire of letting you know it.) I panicked when I realized that I was in one of the suites in the Intercontinental on Bloor without any usable windows, so I took a quick run around the suite (three small rooms, basically) and found a blank wall behind a door in a room where there seemed just enough light.

There is a level - don't ask me to tell you where it begins - where portrait photography might be about revealing something about your subject (or yourself. Or both.) But on the most basic level, a portrait shoot is much like this one, where you stand there and try to figure out what to do with a good-looking man wearing an expensive-looking grey crewneck sweater and a corduroy bucket hat. It's a matter of colour and texture and geometry, and with years of experience your mind immediately flips through a file of references and short cuts looking for somewhere to start.

The great thing about most photography that isn't advertising or high level editorial is that it isn't really collaborative; you're alone with a subject who, since they can't look at themselves through the viewfinder, doesn't really know what you're doing. You make some decisions based on instinct, like composing vertically with the rule of seconds, letting the texture of that nice sweater take up half your frame.

You make others based on an assumption of technical skill after the fact - like how am I going to balance the colour in this shot that I'm taking in a room with mixed light sources, most of which are hotel bulbs bouncing light all around the walls? A couple of days later, you're on deadline so you just hit the white balance button in Photoshop and let the software give you a rough approximation of proper skin tone. Twelve years later you say "fuck it" to correct skin tone and play with the CMY sliders till you get that burnished golden tone in the highlights you like so much right now. I often think it's a shame no one would ever hire me to teach photography, but then it occurs to me that it's probably not very useful to tell young people that the best creative decision you can make is likely to be "fuck it."

World Trade Center

Oliver Stone, July 17, 2006

THE RUBBLE WAS STILL SMOKING ON MY TV SCREEN on the morning of September 11, 2001 when I wondered to myself how long it would take Hollywood to start turning out 9/11 stories. It wasn't the most noble or profound thought, I'll admit guiltily, but I had been shooting and writing about entertainment for over fifteen years and I thought that this was the sort of history that would be irresistible as a subject or just a setting.

As the response to the attacks resonated over the days and weeks that followed, I anticipated the stories that I assumed were already in production. I imagined several movies, told from the perspectives of everyone from a passenger on one of the flights or a worker in the towers to an Afghan farmer or a shop owner in Kabul. There would, I thought, be at least one miniseries, attempting to tell the whole, long story of how such a thing could happen, or just anatomize the events of that morning from every possible angle, like an exploded diagram of a timeline that turned minutes into hours.

Sure, there were films that came out in the next year or two that reflected the stunned, anxious mood of the time, like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his better films, and one that pauses for a moment in its build-up to let the camera linger as it looks out a window over the former site of the towers in Lower Manhattan, which seemed like they'd be a crime scene and a construction site forever. But I was surprised when almost five years passed before I found myself in a hotel elevator on my way up to a press junket for the first real attempt at a 9/11 movie.

Michael Pena, July 17, 2006

World Trade Center was, along with United 93, one of two films about 9/11 that would come out that year. It's some measure of the stunning weight of the actual event that both films are straightforward depictions of the events of that day, told from either the land or from the air, without any political editorializing. Even more shocking was that the former film was made by Oliver Stone, a filmmaker happily given to politicized projects and hardly immune to paranoid or even conspiratorial takes on history.

Stone was in Toronto with actor Michael Pena, who played (along with Nicolas Cage) one of two police officers, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, who were buried alive under the rubble of the towers but survived thanks to the efforts of other first responders and rescuers. Scott Strauss was also there - one of those rescue workers who helped find the handful of survivors in the wreckage (and was played in the film by Stephen Dorff.) The one thing that shocked everyone was how straight Stone had played the story, and when I interviewed him that morning he explained that he was simply trying to respect the viewpoints of the living people he was portraying:

"I did not make this movie pro-American, or anything like that. I made it international. I want to make a movie that works for the world. I want people to respond to people ... Certain people took that day and made it into anger. Other people like John (McLoughlin), in the end, in the voiceover, he made it into a different reaction. He called it goodness."

I took very simple, straightforward portraits of the men in that hotel suite (I'm guessing it was the old Four Seasons in Yorkville), using three different bits of daylight. Pena is usually cast as a sympathetic sort of everyman, a character defined by either naivete or inherent morality, while Stone is a famous contrarian, an intelligent man, but one with an infuriating sympathy for anyone - even despots and dictators - who shares his skepticism about America. I figured they could present themselves to my camera without much direction.

It was my portrait of Strauss that I worried about the most. He wasn't famous, like Stone, or used to facing cameras, like Pena. He was an ordinary man caught up in an extraordinary story, asked to join the film's press junket to provide quotes from someone who was there, on the day, where history made an ominous footfall. It was a sign of how much the film's producers wanted to show that they were treating that history - still very raw five years later - with due respect, and I tried to do the same with my portrait of Strauss.

Scott Strauss, July 17, 2006

Jason Reitman

Jason Reitman, March 7, 2006

MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT. Some of the reasons are obvious, while others are simply a matter of custom - like how so many of the shoots I've done with actresses or other female entertainers will be preceded by the ministrations of a hair and makeup person. I've written before that I think at least a few of the men I've photographed might have liked the same cosmetic advantage - I never did his portrait, but I can't imagine that anyone did a portrait session with Prince without one person each to deal with hair and makeup, with a stylist at work as well.

This got me thinking when I found these photos of director Jason Reitman in my files. As a "behind the camera" personality, someone like Reitman would never have the services of hair and makeup people for anything but a shoot to go with a feature in a high end glossy mag like Vanity Fair or Entertainment Weekly, while almost any actress I shot for the free daily had a professional with a black canvas apron loaded with hair brushes, styling spray and makeup wedges in attendance.

Jason Reitman, March 7, 2006

These are very middling photos, to be sure, so I thought it would a worthwhile experiment to give Reitman the same treatment I might give an actress of a certain age in Photoshop, after the fact of the shoot and even with the cosmetic assistance provided and paid for by the movie distributor. For the top photo in particular, I went to town with the full battery of retouching, dodging, burning and digital burnishing that I'd feel obligated to employ if some flattering light and a generous application of concealer didn't quite do everything they needed to do on the day.

They look pretty strange, I have to admit.

I'm not exactly sure why Reitman - a Canadian by birth, but a Hollywood kid by upbringing, the son of director Ivan Reitman - was in town doing publicity. His hit debut film as a writer and director, Thank You For Smoking, had come out the previous year, and it would be another year before he released Juno, the film that established his reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the industry. I'm not even sure what hotel he was in, since the best spot of light I could find - and it wasn't a great spot, to be sure - was by the bed. Whatever the circumstances, here's what he looked like if he'd been Charlize Theron on a bad day.

John Madden

John Madden, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2005

MOVIE DIRECTORS ALWAYS SEEM MORE GRATEFUL TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED than the stars of their movies. This might be speculation, or perhaps even projection - if I spent my life behind the camera making other people look smart or glamorous, I think I'd be grateful for a moment of recognition. But then, I think being a movie director is probably a lot more interesting than being a movie star.

John Madden is one of those products of the London TV and theatre scene who find their way to Hollywood to feed the movie industry's voracious appetite for talent. He's known for directing literary and historical properties - he started his Hollywood career with an adaptation of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, then had a huge hit with Shakespeare In Love. He was at the festival with Proof, a film about madness and academia starring Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis.

John Madden, Toronto, Sept. 12, 2005

I try to make movie directors look good - or at least interesting. As ever, I had barely a minute for this portrait, which I'm pretty certain was taken at the old Four Seasons. Helpfully, Madden showed up wearing a dark blazer and a white shirt - probably the most helpful wardrobe choice a male subject can make for a portrait, if time is of the essence.

The white walls of the hotel suite meant that enough light bounced around the room to soften the shadows and create the sort of clean lighting scheme that I'd need a big soft box and a couple of small modifying lights to create in a studio. That part was luck.

As for the composition, I simply rewound back to the sorts of shots I remember photographers like Anton Corbijn and Kevin Cummins would do for the New Musical Express back in the '80s - tight shots that were basically one or two lines cutting through the frame at an angle. When you don't have any time for a portrait, you have to rely on this sort of shorthand.