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.

Gen. Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie, Toronto, Sept. 29, 2005

SALMAN RUSHDIE'S STORY IS ONE THAT I'VE FOLLOWED NEARLY THE WHOLE OF MY ADULT LIFE, and it is one that contains nearly every issue I consider important to the time in which we live. Which means that I considered both my assignments to photograph and interview Rushdie to be of immense importance, and worth worrying about beforehand.

My first encounter with Rushdie was in the offices of his Canadian publisher, where he shared a room with a board table covered with enormous piles of his latest book, which he was tasked to sign. Sixteen years after the fatwa that changed his life, I don't recall him being under any of the security measures that were normally reserved for unpopular politicians or witnesses in mafia trials.

Salman Rushdie, Toronto, Sept. 29, 2005

We talked about his latest book, and about the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and how Rushdie's support for both - wholehearted for the former, conditional for the latter - had put him in conflict with fellow writers and friends on the left. (Two groups whose overlap is nearly total, to be honest.)

"In terms of responses to current events, there have been great mistakes on both sides," Rushdie told me, "and I think the mistakes of the left have to do with undervaluing the benefit of ridding the world of people like Saddam Hussein. I think if the left is not about overthrowing tyranny, what the hell is it about? And having said that I have been a very strong critic of the manner in which it was done. But I can't be a critic of the fact that it was done."

I did a very conventional author's-photo-taken-for-a-newspaper portrait of Rushdie at that first meeting. It wasn't terribly different from anything another newspaper photographer would have taken in a similar situation, and I'm glad I got it out of the way for my next assignment to photograph the writer, three years later.

Salman Rushdie, Toronto, June 10, 2008

I don't know if I interviewed Rushdie in addition to the portrait shoot - there's no story in my files for 2008 - but I definitely took more care with my photos the second time, which also might have had something to do with being back at work shooting portraits for four years by then, and tentatively grasping my way back to something like a personal style.

I did away with props and concentrated on finding the single spot of light in the room, and made my subject's face fill nearly the whole frame. I also managed to capture a frame of Rushdie with his eyes closed - something I've done so consistently across my whole career that I can't say it's accidental any more. It's probably my favorite shot; a record of Rushdie's features in what looks like - but definitely isn't - a captured moment of contemplation.

I can thank Salman Rushdie for helping me define for myself my own first principle, which is free speech absolutism, as the cornerstone of any and every civil liberty or truly enlightened society. At the time of the fatwa, I was encouraged by the support that Rushdie received from his peers and from his political cohorts.

I'm no longer certain that he could count on that today, and the retreat from robust support for free speech, not to mention the eager accommodations being made to religious fundamentalism, are reminders that history is not really fueled by the engine of progress - one of those words that we use but no longer share a common definition - but by capricious cycles of entropy and lurching motion whose goal is never predictably a truly better place.

eye weekly

Graffiti artist, Toronto, August 2000

THE MILLENNIUM ENDED WITH BIG CHANGES IN MY LIFE AND CAREER. While a lot of people around me - too many, it seemed, both now and then - were worried about Y2K, I was going to start a new century with considerable new circumstances in my career and personal life. I had left NOW magazine after a busy decade, and had moved out of the Parkdale loft where I'd had my studio for just as long.

Additionally, after many years as a lonely single, I was living with the woman who would become my wife. There were a lot of changes to deal with, prime among them - lesser but by no means insignificant - was a new client, eye weekly, to which I had jumped ship from NOW in the hopes of finding the same sort of home base.

It seemed a reasonable expectation - I had a lot of friends on the masthead at eye, and while I knew that the heyday of editorial work I'd enjoyed at the beginning of the decade was probably over, I felt optimistic. (As always, my first mistake.)

Gina Ocaranza Munoz, activist, Toronto, Nov. 1999

Andreas Siebert, lawyer, Toronto, Dec. 1999

My first few jobs for eye were promising - portraits for news features at the front of the paper, and very much the sort of thing that I had learned to do over my years at NOW. My first assignment was with Gina Ocaranza, a political activist and refugee from Chile, where she'd been imprisoned and tortured in 1975 by the Pinochet regime, a brutal story that saw her give birth in prison.

I photographed her in her apartment townhouse on Queen Street East, moving several table lamps into the dim room where we were shooting to give just enough light for my Rolleiflex, locked off on its tripod. I thought the shots had just the right mix of gravitas and humanity, and have always been fond of the results.

(Gina Ocaranza won an apology from the Chilean military in 2004, which opened the way for her to pursue a legal claim against the government. She died in Toronto in February of 2006.)

Andreas Siebert was a lawyer for a firm leading a class action suit against the big tobacco companies. I posed him in his office with some of the paperwork required for the case. I must have had my tripod extended to its maximum height to get this shot, which was obviously shot in another dim room with available light. (Siebert's suit would be thrown out by the Ontario Superior Court in 2004.)

Dr. Charles Tator, neurosurgeon, Feb. 2000

Graffiti artist, Toronto, August 2000

While I was working for eye, I tried moving toward a new look for my portraits - or at least a refinement of my previous style. Without access to a studio for the foreseeable future, I had to make the best use of available light possible. I also had to produce much better negatives, since my new darkroom - a dingy little room in the unfinished basement of the Victorian townhouse where K and I were renting a floor and a half - was nowhere near as pleasant to work in as the one I'd left behind in my studio.

I decided to pursue a flatter, less complex approach to composition and lighting, which are most obvious in the two shoots above. I photographed Dr. Charles Tator in his hospital office, and the young, unnamed graffiti artist - a rare colour shoot for eye - in a railway underpass beneath Dundas Street West near our apartment. All my work refining my studio lighting for so many years were on the backburner now, and in any case there seemed to be a trend away from that sort of work to something a lot more artless at the time.

I forced myself to embrace the change, but it was a difficult new direction to pursue after all that loving effort in the studio that had become my refuge.

Darren O'Donnell, writer & performance artist, Toronto, June 2000

Ben Hutzel, lawyer & political fundraiser, Toronto, Nov. 2000

Occasionally, when I knew that a shoot wouldn't be given the same play in a layout, I'd slip back on the sort of quick, 35mm portraiture I'd done at NOW for years. Darren O'Donnell was a playwright and performer who had adopted the persona of "boxhead" for a show, and I shot him "in character," working by the window of his apartment.

Ben Hutzel was a fundraiser - a "bagman" as the eye story described him - for the Liberal Party of Canada. As ever, when shooting someone connected to party politics, I opted to make them look as uneasy and even shifty as possible. Photos like these make me realize why my career at business magazines was so short and abortive.

Pico Iyer, writer, Toronto, May 2001

Niall Ferguson, economist & writer, May 2001

Toward the end of my scant two years at eye, work became even scarcer, so I started generating photo assignments by illustrating stories that I'd write myself. I had begun the '90s determined to move away from writing, but as the new decade started I was doing more of it than ever. I interviewed and photographed Pico Iyer in Hart House, once my favorite place during my brief university career. Iyer had been swept into prominence curing a vogue for a new school of travel writing, embodied in his book Video Night in Kathmandu.

My interview with him was combative; I began by pointing out inaccuracies in the chapter devoted to my hometown in his latest book, The Global Soul. He'd wrongly described Toronto as a city shaped in early years by the Anglican Church - it was really Methodists and Presbyterian merchants who transformed the city into a mercantile hub and promoted the Orange Lodge politics that gave it the nickname "Little Belfast." Working from this initial error, he misidentified the current Catholic archibishop of Toronto as an Anglican. We complain today about the inaccuracies of books and journalism in a world without fact-checkers and copy editors, but this was obviously already a problem nearly twenty years ago.

Despite the tone of our conversation, I think the portrait I took turned out remarkably affable. Re-reading the interview again today, however, is more than slightly embarassing; I couldn't imagine saying that "my city is worthy of his optimism" today.

I did my interviews and portraits with Iyer and Niall Ferguson, writer and economic historian, just months before 9/11. In hindsight this seems significant; the very much more open, free world that Iyer imagined and described in his books would look a lot less so by the end of that year, while Ferguson's vision of global history defined by empires and conflict turned him into an in-demand pundit, tasked with trying to explain how the old wars existed in a continuum with the new ones.

“I love that phrase ‘the untied nations’," he told me during our nearly twenty-year-old interview. "It seemed to capture what was going on in the last twenty years. It’s a paradox that the world is getting more integrated economically, and more disintegrated politically. Where does that end - in every little state being ethnically homogeneous? It seems highly unlikely. But some people dearly believe that’s the direction we’re going."

Ferguson was identified - then as now - as a "conservative" writer. (As if to underline this, ten years later he would divorce his wife and marry ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.) I was pleased that I was able to get an interview with him in eye, which might have been in competition with NOW but very much shared its left-of-centre politics, albeit slightly less stridently. That might explain the haughty, confrontational look I got from Ferguson for my favorite shot.

I never left eye weekly as definitively as I did NOW magazine. Ultimately I just drifted away from the paper as assignments dried up and my drive to keep suggesting story ideas evaporated. I remember it as a dispiriting time for my career, despite the upturn my personal life had taken. I might have misread the situation, but it turned out in the end that there wasn't as much enthusiasm for me to join eye's stable of photographers as I'd been led to believe. In any case, by the end of the year I'd get a job offer that would change the direction of my career entirely.

Politicians

Bob Rae, Toronto, Jan. 1997

I HAVE NEVER PHOTOGRAPHED A HEAD OF STATE. Neither a prime minister nor a president. Or a king. (Which would be a problem for me, as I'm a republican.) I have photographed a few mayors - if they count - and the people here, all of whom wanted to be premier of Ontario, the province where I live, though only one of them managed it. (And he lived to regret it.)

Bob Rae has the dubious distinction of being one of the few people I've ever voted for who actually won. (The other was Rob Ford.) When the provincial Liberal government led by David Peterson called a snap election and ran a poor campaign, Rae and the left-leaning New Democratic Party won their first ever provincial election in 1990. It was considered a miracle, and Rae managed to squander this historic opportunity by alienating his party's labour union supporters while trying to balance budgets during a recession. When he ran for re-election in 1995, his party was soundly defeated by Mike Harris and the Progressive Conservatives.

Rae was known after that as the man who blew it, big time. He resigned from the legislature and returned to practicing law - a big deal firm with offices in the Eaton Centre where I photographed him for NOW magazine a year before he finally resigned from his party altogether. NOW was a major supporter of the NDP, but its criticisms of his failed term as premier meant that the man who met me in the lobby of his law office was more than faintly hostile.

It was all I could do to get him to sit for a roll in a spot of very nice, flat light in a boardroom, and the eleven frames I have (the shutter on my Rollei misfired on the first shot on the roll) all capture him staring down my lens with the same, practiced half-smile he'd learned to give years earlier. It's a portrait of a man trying - and failing - to show a brave face in the aftermath of a severe humiliation. He'd compound that humiliation for many years afterward by trying - and failing - to win the leadership of the federal Liberals.

Frances Lankin, Parkdale, March 1996

Howard Hampton, Parkdale, March 1996

Peter Kormos, Parkdale, March 1996

Tony Silipo, Parkdale, March 1996

The race to replace Rae as the leader of the NDP produced four candidates. Frances Lankin, a cabinet minister in Rae's government, was The Front Runner and Heir Apparent. Howard Hampton, another cabinet minister, was The Challenger; Peter Kormos - the outspoken socialist on the ballot - was The Spoiler, and Tony Silipo was The Underdog.

I was assigned to shoot all four candidates for a feature story, and asked if I could do them all in my Parkdale studio. My argument was simple - I wanted to shoot them with the same setting and lighting, to give all four portraits an identical look. I also knew that, while pleading for support from party membership, they were at their most abject and vulnerable, and more likely to do the bidding of a magazine overtly identified with the party. I wasn't surprised when they agreed.

What I didn't say was that I had no intention of taking photos that were in any way heroic, or even particularly flattering. By this time, over halfway through my tenure at NOW, my distrust of politicians had become acute, on its way to the overt, principled hostility I feel for them today. I deliberately chose shadowy lighting and uneasy, off-kilter compositions. I didn't give much, if any, direction, and mostly let them react to the hard spotlight I'd trained on their faces.

(A historical footnote: The "No Justice, No Peace" buttons Lankin and Kormos are wearing were the pre-internet equivalent of a hashtag, a popular slogan that the party's union backers had adopted and were rallying behind in their opposition to the Harris government.)

Howard Hampton, Queen's Park, Toronto, May 1998

Howard Hampton ended up winning the NDP leadership, and moved into the office of the Leader of the Other Official Party, where I photographed him for NOW in 1998. It would end up being an embattled thirteen years as head of the NDP for Hampton, as the provincial Liberals under Dalton McGuinty steadily leached away his party's traditional support base in the declining labour unions, and built a strong new one in the public service unions.

I couldn't have known this when I took these pictures of an anxious-looking man in a big office. I didn't dislike Hampton, but I certainly didn't envy him his job, and if anything I felt a bit sorry for him. Pity is about as much of a friendly emotion as I'm willing to expend on a politician, and these days it's rare that I can find much of it for anyone, regardless of party affiliation.

Tony Silipo died on March 10, 2012.

Peter Kormos died in Welland, Ontario on March 30, 2014.

Ulster

Brown Street, Belfast, April 2017

MY FIRST TRAVEL GIG AFTER A WINTER AT HOME took me back to Ireland - to the north, this time, and the two Ulster counties straddled by the city of Belfast. It felt like a suitable way to start a new year's worth of travel, in a place that I had imagined vividly for so many years, but which bore little to no resemblance to the city I had in my mind.

It's been almost twenty years since the Good Friday Peace Agreement, and you'd have to look hard - or know where to go - to find evidence of the Belfast I saw on the news from the time I was a child and all through my youth and early adult years. I was, to be honest, grateful that it seemed to have disappeared, though that didn't stop me from trying to sniff out its remnants, or discover what sort of mood was left behind.

Ballintoy, County Antrim, March 2017

The Dark Hedges, County Antrim, March 2017

Giant's Causeway, County Antrim, March 2017

Portstewart Strand, County Antrim, March 2017

The actual purpose of the trip was a tour through the filming locations for Game of Thrones, many of which are scattered on either side of Belfast, up the Causeway Coast Route from Belfast to Londonderry, or south through County Down. It's was a picturesque journey, along dramatic seaside roads, through ancient woods and past castles and ruins. Pure honey for a photographer.

When I went to Ireland a year ago, I fought hard to avoid being seduced by the picturesque. This time around I knew it was pointless, and let myself embrace all the views and the references the sights I was seeing evoked, from Constable and other English landscape paintings to Victorian travel book engravings. I'll probably never lack for cityscapes and rough abstraction, but manicured views and storybook forests will likely be much scarcer.

Castle Ward manor house, County Down, April 2017

Inch Abbey, County Down, April 2017

Tollymore Forest, County Down, April 2017

We were based in Belfast, though, so I had almost two days of urban exploration to enjoy, in a city with tidy, finite borders and walkable distances. I was impressed by Belfast's revival in areas like the Titanic Quarter, built around the old Harland & Wolff shipyards, but I made sure I set aside a long Sunday afternoon to wander around West Belfast, up the Falls Road and over the A12 into the Shankill, two neighbourhoods that were once at war with each other.

I liked Belfast. I like any place with history, but I especially like a place that's proud of its history, troubling and unpleasant as it might be, and is willing to tell you about it. (The Falls and the Shankill are, like the Titanic Quarter and Queen's University, stops on the hop-on/hop-off bus tour.) Some people enjoy beaches or cathedrals; I like terraces, bookshops and political posters.

Falls Road, Belfast, April 2017

The Shankill, Belfast, April 2017

Belfast, April 2017

Titanic Quarter, Belfast, March 2017

Nelson Mandela, 1990

Nelson Mandela, Toronto, June 1990

AS I SAID IN YESTERDAY'S POST, THERE WAS A LOT OF HISTORY HAPPENING IN 1990, and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa was one example. Mandela wasted little time - after leaving prison in February, he traveled around the world meeting world leaders, and his world tour took him through Toronto. Really a series of epic photo ops, in retrospect events like these aren't real history as much as history taking a victory lap.

I was assigned to cover his appearance in Nathan Phillips Square, in front of Toronto City Hall, in front of what turned out to be a massive crowd, jubilant crowd. They wanted to see history happening as well, and it seemed like everyone from ecstatic Africans to beaming Italian grandmothers and schoolkids were in the square that day.

Crowds at City Hall for Nelson Mandela, Toronto, June 1990

As it always is at events like this, the crowd was the real event; shooting from behind the barricades, my shots of Mandela probably didn't look too different from what any other daily or wire service photographer would have gotten with a long lens, but the crowd always presents you with something unique from moment to moment.

The photo of Winnie Mandela I printed to go with the story over twenty-five years ago was more flattering - a shot of her with a beatific smile looking out at the crowd. It would be a few months before the story of Winnie's "football club" and the murder of Stompie Moeketsi became news outside South Africa, and longer before the details of her affair with Dali Mpofu while Mandela was in prison emerged.

Winnie Mandela, Toronto, June 1990

Nelson Mandela, Toronto, June 1990

All of this complicated the triumphant narrative, of course, and even if it made the newspapers it's doubtful whether anyone would have wanted to hear it when "Free Nelson Mandela" had suddenly become "Nelson Mandela Free." Obviously I knew that the paper wanted to happy ending, so it's only now that my shot of a more nervous looking Winnie, looking at her husband with what looks like uncertainty (it would be another two years before he divorced her) makes narrative sense.

Which proves, I suppose, that these victory laps by history are more spectacle than truth.

Crowds at City Hall for Nelson Mandela, Toronto, June 1990

None of this would have mattered to the crowd that day. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was over and Nelson Mandela was not only free but standing in front of them, in front of the building where you lined up for construction permits. The crowd was overjoyed, and even in retrospect it's hard to blame them for it - after decades when nuclear Armageddon and despotic governments were taken for granted, history had taken a positive turn, or so it seemed.

I didn't have much experience with shooting news, but I must have done a pretty good job with the Mandela event because the paper assigned me to photograph the Dalai Lama's appearance at city hall four months later.

Nelson Mandela died in Johannesburg, South Africa on Dec. 5, 2013.

Dalai Lama, 1990

Dalai Lama, Toronto, Sept. 1990

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETIES IT SEEMED LIKE WE WERE LIVING THROUGH A LOT OF HISTORY. The Berlin Wall had fallen the year before and a year later the Soviet Union would no longer exist. Maybe this is why I ended up shooting a lot of news stories like this for NOW magazine in 1990, when history looked like it was happening fast and we needed snapshots of it as it passed.

Toronto hosted two visits by famous political figures that year, both of which I was assigned to shoot. The second was the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet, whose fame and international profile grew exponentially during the following decade. He'd received the Nobel Peace Prize the year before, and his positive image has persisted: Just two years ago he was voted among the three most popular political leaders in the world (alongside Barack Obama and Pope Francis.)

Buddhist nuns at Dalai Lama event, Toronto City Hall, Sept. 1990

I can't speak to the popularity of the Dalai Lama as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism; I've tried to understand this very particular offshoot of Buddhist thought, mostly by reading books by Robert Thurman (father of Uma!) but they utterly stumped me. His political appeal, especially at the time, was easier to understand; with Soviet Communism and the Eastern Bloc on the way out - almost bloodlessly - there was a surge of optimism, hardly ever imagined during the Cold War, that authoritarian states could be defeated simply by being persistent and nice.

With China remaining the sole Communist superpower, it was hoped that this constantly smiling man, with his saffron robes and prayer beads, could shame China's leaders into relaxing their oppressive rule and perhaps even withdrawing from Tibet. Goodwill tours like this one - to a city with a growing population of Tibetans - were the beginning of years of Free Tibet concerts and fundraising campaigns, and even saw spiritually questing westerners professing to adopt the gnomic and baffling precepts of Tibetan Buddhism the way they'd once flocked to Yoga and Zen. If nothing else, you started seeing a lot of singing bowls showing up on coffee tables, and Buddha statuary showing up in "prayer gardens."

Crowd at Dalai Lama event, Toronto City Hall, Sept. 1990

The crowd at City Hall for the Dalai Lama's appearance certainly reflected this wave of popularity - a major show of numbers by not only Tibetan emigres, but also Vietnamese and Chinese Buddhist communities. They were only half the crowd, however, which was truly mixed and filled the square.

I think I might have softened my own habitual pessimism at the time as well, and I certainly remember the early '90s as a time when the dismal potential outcomes of the past three and a half decades of nuclear stalemate might actually have been forgotten. (At the same time, though, it made me wake up with a start to the possibility that I might live past thirty, and that the nihilism with which I'd lived my life for the past decade could have been a mistake.)

Buddhist monks, Dalai Lama event at Toronto City Hall, Sept. 1990

There was always something slightly absurd about Dalai-mania. His newfound fans and followers have always turned a blind eye to his less-than-progressive stance on homosexuality, for instance, and there is something curious - even disturbing - about all this support for a regime that's positively pre-medieval in nature, with church and state firmly combined.

At around this time I was sent to do a fashion shoot with a very cheerful Tibetan Buddhist monk who was being hosted by a wealthy woman who'd re-done her whole house in high Tibetan style, right down to the meditation garden out back. He seemed bemused by it all, but content to accept her largesse - a monk not terribly different from one you'd read about in Chaucer.

I also remember a New Yorker profile of the Dalai Lama where several of his lieutenants admitted that they were unimpressed with the vegetarian meals his supporters were constantly offering them; Tibet is, after all, a mountainous country where little can be grown; the diet is protein-rich, and they said they'd prefer a good steak any time. The Dalai Lama himself tried to switch to a veggie diet to please his western followers, but his doctor told him to knock it off.

I have never considered myself a news photographer, but early on in my time at NOW I was eager to please and up for the challenge of shooting a big story like this one, fighting for shots alongside photographers from the big dailies and the wire services. They're not bad shots, but I'm not surprised that I'd never have a job at Reuters or AP.