Motorama

Chevy truck, Motorama, Toronto, March 2016

THERE ARE FEW THINGS I ENJOY AS MUCH AS A CAR SHOW. I spent a day helping out a friend at his t-shirt booth at an auto show out by the airport, and I couldn't help but bring along a camera, so forgive me if I bore you a bit with what I saw that day.

If you love cars - and I'll forgive you if you don't love cars as much as I do - you probably find yourself entranced by little details: a stretch of chrome detail, tarnished or buffed up; a riot of racecar liveries; the bloom of rust on an old junker; the spectacular care lavished on a hot rod engine. Walking the convention hall floors, it was hard not to go into a fugue state every now and then.

Motorama, Toronto, March 2016

There was a lot to see: Dragsters! Rat rods! Stock cars! Restomods! Billy Gibbons! One thing that struck me this time around, though, was the room devoted to tuner cars - hot hatches and '80s sleds and ricers, dropped and stanced and loaded with LED lights and speakers. Not normally my cup of tea, but it was where I saw the youngest crowd, and a lot of kids.

And then it occurred to me: You can love the old Chevys and Ford trucks and Mopar monsters all you want, but this is the future of these shows; in twenty or thirty years the crowds will be milling around restored Civics and Fiestas and low-end BMW coupes with the same reverence they have for Camaros and GTOs today. Hard to believe, I know, but I'll put money on it.

Motorama, Toronto, March 2016

 

Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker, Toronto, Oct. 1988

I MISS TAKING PORTRAITS. Where it was once nearly all I did it's now something I only rarely manage, and even if the market for editorial portraiture is effectively dead, I'm hungry to have any excuse to get people in front of my camera. Perhaps one day I'll try to understand why I enjoyed it so much; in the meantime I can only speculate that it got me to interact - with brief, forced intimacy at the best of times - with people like writer Kathy Acker.

I shot Acker early in my career, when I was desperate for subjects and experience. Back then it seemed so much easier to arrange access, which is how I found myself set up in the lobby of the Harbour Castle underneath a generous skylight while a helpful publicist led a parade of guests from the Harbourfront Author's Festival down the elevators to me.

I'd made up my list of requests carefully, after going through the itinerary with my friend Nebojsa Vasovic, a poet back in his native Serbia (then still Yugoslavia.) On a handful of contact sheets I shot half a roll each of a strange mix of writers: Jerzy Kosinski and Jay McInerney and Marianne Wiggins (then still married to the fatwa-stricken Salman Rushdie,) as well as Milorod Pavic and the Russian Andrei Bitov.

I was dubious about Acker but my friend Nebojsa insisted - she had quite an international following, he said, which included countries in the Soviet bloc. In any case she looked incredible, and that would mean good pictures at least.

Kathy Acker, Toronto, Oct. 1988

Acker came down from her room, a tiny woman with a fierce New York accent in a t-shirt dress with sleeves pulled up by safety pins. I tried framing tight, author headshots of her face but her whole demeanor - the clothes, her attitude - demanded I pull back. Luckily the walls of hotel lobby were covered in richly grained wood paneling, so my background was neither too dull nor dark nor distracting. It's early work, simple and a bit timid; if it works at all it's more to do with the subject than the photographer.

There was something almost vulnerable about her, despite her spiky personality. My friend Nebojsa knocked on her hotel room door later that day. He introduced himself as a writer from Serbia, she invited him in, and they carried on a lively, candid conversation while she changed in front of him quite unselfconsciously. This was, I understand, normal for Acker.

Kathy Acker, Toronto, Oct. 1988

I always found Acker's books too much for me - too raw, too crazed, too perverse - though I liked how outrageously she wrote, and how her work always seemed to make the right people either angry or confused. Her life played out like one of those long, careful acts of self-destruction, and when the end came she didn't fight death as much as prolong its embrace.

Diagnosed with cancer, she initially accepted medical treatment but opted for "natural remedies" when it was discovered to have spread. (Like so many "punks" of her generation, I'm struck by how much of a hippie she turned out to be.) Throwing herself into the care of naturopaths and faith healers, she tried to beat the cancer with diet and powders and meditation, and ended up dying in a new age hospice in Mexico.

I can't imagine the last twenty years would have been kind to Kathy Acker; the culture has taken on a puritanical edge that's wholly hostile to someone as habitually provocative. If her further books were anything like the ones she left behind, they'd be considered "problematic" and full of "triggers." In retrospect - and I can't believe it when I say this - the '80s and '90s were a freer time, and one more sympathetic to someone like Acker.

Kathy Acker died of cancer in Tijuana, Mexico on November 30, 1997.

   

Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle, New York City, Aug. 1992

WE WERE IN FRONT OF ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL ON FIFTH AVENUE when I stopped and said we had to get a picture. Roddy Doyle - Irish writer, professed atheist and my subject for the afternoon - shrugged and said "Of course." It might have been the second most obvious spot to take his portrait in New York City (the most obvious would have been a bar with a name like Kelly's or O'Hara's but there were none of those on this stretch of Fifth) but sometimes you have to bow to inevitability.

I'd flown in to New York that morning to take Doyle's photo for the cover of NOW magazine. The Van, his lastest novel and the third book in the Barrytown trilogy, had come out the previous year and he was passing through Toronto to promote it. The hit movie version of The Commitments had also been released and he was a literary star, though I doubt if anyone on the streets of Manhattan would have recognized him. 

Roddy Doyle, New York City, Aug. 1992

We began our walk around midtown by Central Park in the rain. I had packed light - as much as I could carry in a camera bag - and had decided to try something outside my usual style. Daylight candid shooting with fill flash is the sort of thing I associated with newspaper photographers looking to get evenly-exposed shots without shadows or blown-out highlights, and with a maximum depth of field. I put a wide lens on my Nikon and a diffuser on my Metz flash and off we went, starting by the horse and carriage rides on West 59th.

It was around noon and I guess we were hungry. The pretzel stand was there so I bought one for both of us. I tucked mine in my bag and took a half a roll of Doyle eating his in the rain, a bemused look on his face. This, I thought, at least won't be the standard author's photo.

Roddy Doyle eats a pretzel, New York City, Aug. 1992

Doyle and I continued our walk through midtown, past the Plaza and down Fifth where I took out my Rolleiflex in front of the Cathedral. I must have shot a roll or two of colour film for the cover at one point, but there's nothing to be found in my files and it's no great loss, considering the strict template we had to shoot our NOW covers into at the time. We ended our walk by Radio City Music Hall, by which point the rain had stopped.

I'm still trying to understand why I took such a light approach to this shoot. Perhaps I was feeling less than inspired; I'd enjoyed what I'd read of Doyle so far but I was hardly overawed by him. Perhaps it was because we were close in age or maybe, considering my own background, it was that I've always been less than susceptible to the peculiar charms or "Oirishness," in movies or on the page. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could execute the strict technical requirements of a certain kind of photo.

Looking at the date, though, it also might have been simple mental exhaustion and depression; this was near the end of an agonizing year-long breakup with my ex-girlfriend and I was probably so distracted by the end game as it played out that I couldn't muster the emotional or creative investment to really get something unique from my subject. It would end - in tears, as they say - a few weeks later, but I was bracing for it all summer. Considering my state of mind, I was probably just happy taking a walk through New York City in genial company, even if it was raining.

 

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard, Toronto, Sept. 1990

CELEBRITY IS A DIRTY WORD. Considering how much of my career was spent doing what's called celebrity portraiture, I have never been comfortable with the idea that someone is inherently interesting based on some their fame, deserved or not. For one thing, it puts you in an unequal, even subservient position when you have to take their portrait as a photographer; you're hobbled by deference and even trapped by their public persona and find yourself working harder to create something fresh.

Sometimes it's hard to ignore a subject's stature when they're assigned to you. Tom Stoppard was one of the first people I photographed whose reputation overawed me; I remember thinking when I put down the phone after my editor gave me the job that I had - to me, at least - reached a kind of career milestone.

First of all there's my dirty secret: Before I even owned a camera or knew I wanted to be a photographer I was a budding actor and theatre minor in college. Which means that I was more than familiar with Tom Stoppard and his work before I knew who Irving Penn or Richard Avedon were. Stoppard was part of a pantheon of living legends in the theatre alongside Beckett, Ionesco, John Osborne, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter, and a season didn't go by without a local production of The Real Inspector Hound, Travesties, Jumpers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth.

His plays were - still are - smart and challenging and cleverly structured. He'd married well, but his profile was enhanced even further by work on Hollywood screenplays like Brazil and an Indiana Jones movie. In 1982, the debut of his latest play, The Real Thing, was a major event surpassed only by the Broadway production two years later. In 1990, even with my theatre ambitions long behind me, getting Stoppard in front of my camera felt like a very big deal.

Tom Stoppard, Toronto, Sept. 1990

It seems a long time ago now. It's really just over a generation ago but serious theatre - like art films, literary novels, classical music and painting - has fallen far from the cultural mainstream, joining opera, ballet and poetry. A guilty admission: When I decided to post these portraits to the blog, I had to do a quick Google search to see if Stoppard was still alive.

My search turned up a recent article where Stoppard complains that he'd had to re-write jokes three times during previews for his latest play, The Hard Problem, to get them to the point where they'd get a laugh from the audience. It's been this way for a while, he said, citing a reference to Goneril, Lear's daughter, in his play Travesties:

"In 1974 everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed," he recalled. "In about 1990 when the play was revived maybe half knew [who she was]."

Tom Stoppard, Toronto, Sept. 1990

Think about it: a British audience in an English theatre watching a Tom Stoppard production who didn't know the name of a character from one of Shakespeare's most famous plays. There was once a common body of knowledge that was shared and is now being jettisoned. Having a portrait of someone with his stature in my portfolio once felt like quite a coup. Today I'd have to explain who he was, and even then I'm not sure if there are enough shared references to bring it off.

When I was growing up comedians made jokes based on Waiting for Godot; I can only imagine the blank looks a reference like that would cause today. Tom Stoppard has certainly seen them.

Stoppard was in town promoting the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the film festival. While it looks like this was shot in some stately home, it was actually in the drawing room off the lobby of the now-defunct Sutton Place hotel. Shot with my Rolleiflex, I'm fairly certain, with a tripod and shutter release. I approached my subject with no small amount of reverence and I think it shows in the results.

    

Helena Bonham Carter

Helena Bonham Carter, Toronto, Jan. 1996

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE LUCKY DAYS. Thanks to a combination of disorganization and depression, some key photo shoots from my archives have partly or entirely gone missing. Last year, while putting up my portraits of Helena Bonham Carter on the occasion of her split with director Tim Burton, I noticed that one of my two negative sheets wasn't in the binder where it should have been. I cursed my carelessness and hoped that it would turn up one day.

Last month, during a whirlwind post-holiday clean-up around the house (instigated by my wife) I was forced to go through a box full of bags. Tucked into a binder in a messenger bag I once used for darkroom gear, I found the missing Bonham Carter negatives. I was especially elated as they were the ones with what I considered at least one or two of the best frames from the shoot. And to celebrate, here's a selection from those once-missing negatives.

Helena Bonham Carter, Toronto, Jan. 1996

As I recalled in my previous post, this was one of my favorite shoots from my time at NOW magazine, because my subject - a notorious eccentric - responded to my camera with a real performance, a tiny woman in baggy clothes, running through a gamut of expressions while sunk in the depths of an enormous hotel chair.

Helena Bonham Carter, Toronto, Jan. 1996

Her essentially pre-Raphaelite persona is on show in at least two of these shots. I'd like to take more credit for these portraits, but Bonham Carter really met me more than halfway with this shoot, underlining the importance of trying to get a performance out of your portrait subjects. It doesn't have to be quite as nearly melodramatic as these shots, but for the brief period when you and your subject are facing each other in a little bubble of concentration, you'll have more to work with in the end when you direct them just a little to put on a little show.

 

Havana 1991, again

Centro Havana, Sept. 1991

I GUESS IT WAS A VERY PRODUCTIVE COUPLE OF WEEKS. I've been working on a new anniversary edition of my friend Jane Bunnett's Spirits of Havana record and it's given me a chance to really revisit all the film I shot there twenty-five years ago. I remembered it as a creative trip, but I never ended up printing most of the shots I liked - until now.

My previous post on the trip got me to scan the most obvious frames, but having to go back again to find new shots for the CD package made a few more stand out, so I thought I'd put them together as a little feature.

There were the cityscapes, of course, and that fantastic sign that I'd shoot whenever I passed down that street between my hotel and the studio. I don't think I ever really got something I really loved. Perhaps I needed to shoot it from the balcony next to the sign, up close, with the street below. I wonder if it's still there?

Havana, Cuba, Sept./Oct. 1991

And then there were the people. Apart from a brief moment in New York City several years previous, I'd never really done street photography. I suppose I had to leave Toronto to feel liberated enough to do it, away from the routine and the familiar.

As I've written before, the kids I saw every day were the most natural, responsive subjects whenever I put my camera to my eye. I was utterly charmed by them, and can't help but wonder where they are today, now past the threshold of middle age. I wonder how many are still in Cuba?

Habaneros, Sept./Oct. 1991

(If you're tempted to buy a copy of Jane's record - and you really should - you might want to hold off on clicking on the Amazon.com button below; the new edition should be out by the summer, and it looks like it'll be well worth your money.)

 

Car show

Honda booth, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 11, 2016

MEDIA DAY AT THE AUTO SHOW has become my film festival lately - a chance to turn my cameras on captive subjects. I brought along a trio of cameras this year (four if you count my cellphone - and increasingly these days you should) on my annual assignment from blogTO.

I fed my cellphone shots into my Instagram feed as I worked, while shooting the bulk of my photos for the paid post. I also shot with my X30, using it as a stand-in for my much-loved Rolleis, to try and capture the sorts of graphic details that car nuts love.

Details, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 11, 2016

This year, though, I decided to give as much attention to the people at media day, standing as they were under the same careful lighting that's meant to make the cars look good.

Media Day, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 11, 2016