Restaurants

Flowers & vase, Toronto, Oct. 1995

ONE OF THE BIGGEST PARTS OF MY JOB AT NOW MAGAZINE - alongside thankless tasks like shooting local theatre and live music - was illustrating our weekly restaurant reviews. The food section is a staple of any free weekly, and reviews by our resident restaurant critics - first Byron Ayanoglu, then the late Steven Davey - were at the core of the paper, up there with the live music listings and personal classifieds.

As with any regular gig, though, it can get tired fast. Portraits of chefs in their whites can start to look the same after a while, and photographing food in black and white is a brutal challenge that no one wants to take on every week. After a few years of struggling with shooting the restaurant section, I hit on triptychs. I wasn't the first person to shoot triptychs at NOW, but once I started making them I couldn't stop. (Something else I can blame on my Catholic upbringing - altar pieces are usually in triptych form, and don't forget the Holy Trinity.)

Restaurants, Toronto, 1994-1998

I might still try to shoot a portrait of a chef or a server, but that didn't have to carry the weight of illustrating the story, which I could fill in with still lifes of table settings or details of the restaurant interior. I found my best shots in the kitchen, though, among the prepped ingredients and chef's tools. As fancy as a restaurant might be, the kitchen always presented a pleasing contrast - everything spare and utilitarian and well-used.

Restaurants, Toronto, 1994-1998

I had my obsessions as well - chairs and tables and the tanks where live seafood was kept, especially in Chinatown. A lot of money was spent on restaurant interiors - money I knew would barely get recouped if the place managed to survive till the time came to renew the lease. Most of the places I photographed are gone now, victims of the churn and pitiless economics of the business.

Restaurants, Toronto, 1994-1998

I was eternally grateful to Irene Grainger, our photo editor, who made it possible for us to experiment with things like triptychs and - for me especially - restaurant still-lifes that were almost abstract. My food section triptychs became a highlight of my work at NOW, so much so that when they arranged a group show for the paper's photographers to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, I (perversely) ignored my portraits entirely and set up a display of my triptychs, framed in heavy arts and crafts style wooden frames and hung salon style on the gallery wall.

As with every other gallery show I've ever done, none of them sold, and with the exception of one I traded with my sister for money to cover my rent one tough month, I still have them all.

Selfie at Gold Stone Noodle, Chinatown, 1996

Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May, 1993

I PHOTOGRAPHED THE WRITER VIKRAM SETH FOR THE VILLAGE VOICE just after the publication of A Suitable Boy, the book that made his reputation. I didn't know much about him except that he was Indian but lived in the the UK, but wasn't what I would later know as an "Anglo-Indian." I also knew - from a glance - that his book wasn't the sort of thing you undertook reading lightly; the library paperback edition I have on my desk is almost 1500 pages long. It's a good thing that photographers weren't expected to do much research before a shoot.

Reading him today at leisure, I'm impressed by how very old-fashioned he is, as a writer. A Suitable Boy is almost Victorian in its epic scope and cast of characters, its careful concern with social status and that very particular place where real life particularities harden into historical detail. There's just as much concern with detail and specifics in An Equal Music, his later novel - blessedly much shorter - about a doomed affair between two classical musicians in modern London. The long gaps between his books are apparently due to the careful research he does, even when he's dealing with a subject (caste in India, classical music and musicians) he knows well.

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May, 1993

I don't need to guess where I took these photos - the upholstery on the chair and the view out the window tell me it's the old Four Seasons in Yorkville. The Voice was an important client for me - hardly regular, but my most reliable one in the American market, so I did as much as I could in the brief window I had for the shoot. Adjusting the ratio of light between the window outside and my Metz flash on its stand, I filled the background behind Seth with a high key white and a swirling backdrop of clouds (slightly touched up in Photoshop to eliminate the reflection from the Metz in the window.)

I don't know if I printed and submitted the shot below to the Voice, but it's the one that - with hindsight - sums up the writer and his work best of all. He seems deep in thought, with the city and its people spread out behind him. I can't imagine Vikram Seth making Toronto the setting for one of his books - I'm sure he'd consider it insufficiently complicated, especially compared to any European capital or town on the Ganges - but it'll stand in for any of those jostling social milieus, pressing in on his characters, conditioning their expectations, containing the path of their lives as palpably as a riverbank directs a river.

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May, 1993

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.

Burke & James 4x5

IT WAS PROBABLY THE RED LEATHER BELLOWS THAT GOT ME. I wasn't in the market for a view camera at the turn of the '90s, but the Burke & James with the gray painted wood, probably built before I was born, was hard to miss among the used equipment at the back of the camera store on Queen Street East. It was an impulse purchase, but the focusing screen was cracked and it was cheap - and it had that fantastic red bellows.

As I said in an earlier post, film technology was in its mature stage when I started my career, so you could use gear built decades earlier. View cameras were really the first cameras, mostly unchanged for a century. In the decade after Richard Avedon used a Deardorff to shoot his American West series, they were being returned to use by portrait shooters after decades as the landscape photographer's camera of choice.

James Tenney, Parkdale, 1991

Lowest of the Low, Parkdale,1993

I didn't go to school for photography, so I guess I was drawn to the challenge of learning to use a whole new type of camera. I was also a budding Luddite, intent on going into full reverse through the decades for inspiration, so it was probably inevitable that I'd be drawn to this horse and carriage of a camera.

My first shoot with the Burke & James saw me make a classic rookie mistake, failing to compensate for the image circle on my Ilex 165mm/6.3 lens when I'd tilted the lens plane to get the focus shift with my portrait of composer James Tenney. I didn't see the ring of light drop off on the focusing glass at the back of the camera, and wouldn't until the film came back from the developer. A dumb mistake, to be sure, but I didn't really mind it that much then, and have come to like it even more now.

I'd finally figured out lens coverage and tilt shift by the time I shot local band Lowest of the Low in my new, dedicated studio space after my last roommate moved out. Effects like this were precisely why I'd bought the Burke & James, and why I persevered with the technical challenges of shooting with a view camera, prime among which was the mathematical formula required to figure out exposure compensation with the long bellows draw - the distance light had to travel from the lens to the film plane when you shot focused at anything less than infinity. The view camera forced you to work slowly and methodically, taking just a few exposures and planning out compositions carefully beforehand.

Which is why it was such a great camera for still life work. It got used most of all when I shot my fruit and veg series throughout the decade, and this shot of a bundle of leeks was probably the first (and only) photo I ever sold off the wall at a solo photo show - to the chef/owner of the restaurant that hosted the show.

The apple still life was also in that show, and remains a personal favorite. When I saw this bright green Granny Smith glowing and blurred on the ground glass of the camera I froze; racking back and forth, it always looked better out of focus than sharp, an echo - in my mind at least - of the Apple Records LP labels I remembered in my older siblings' record collections. I still have that framed 30" x 40" inch framed print today, hanging in our living room.

Leeks, Parkdale, 1995

Apple, Parkdale, 1995

I never used the Burke & James as much as I would have liked. It never left the studio, and only got used for portrait work on those rare occasions when I had the luxury of time and pre-planning. The ultimate workout for the camera - and test of my technical ability - came when I was assigned to shoot the drummer and conga player of a local band for the cover of one of NOW's music supplements.

I sketched the shot out ahead of time and, while I did use my Bronica to shoot back-ups in case it didn't work out, the real work was done with the Burke & James. The final shot threw in everything - corrected and uncorrected strobe and tungsten light, flash and burn, tilt shift focus and even diffusion, helpfully provided by stage smoke that came in aerosol cans. The only unplanned part of the shot was the detail that really makes it - the oval corona of lens flare that radiates out from the cymbal like a sound wave. I didn't see that until the film came back from the lab.

Percussionists, Parkdale, 1994

I don't think I'd looked inside the camera's case for at least a decade, until I opened it last weekend to shoot it for this post. Everything was just as I left it, including a half-finished box of Polaroids, the film holders, a tape measure for measuring bellows draw, my notebook for exposure calculation and the dark cloth I had sewn up by the tailor across the street from my studio - the same one who made my bespoke trousers.

It's unlikely I'll get rid of the Burke & James - I'm too sentimental - but of all my old cameras, this is the one that still feels like it holds some untapped potential. You can still buy sheet film, and while a digital back would easily slip into the film stage of a view camera, the technical challenges and sheer expense of manufacturing such a thing means that it's unlikely that anyone will ever offer one for sale.

And while you can roughly approximate tilt shift focus in Photoshop, the Burke & James still offers unique creative possibilities impossible with any other digital camera. I can imagine struggling to load those film backs again one day. I might even get the cracked focusing screen fixed.

Rolleiflex

THE THING YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER ABOUT FILM PHOTOGRAPHY IN ITS FINAL DECADE OR TWO was that it hadn't seen any really major technological change since the '50s or early '60s. Film emulsions had gotten faster and autofocus lenses would become standard on 35mm SLRs, but a working photographer could - and did - continue using cameras bought at the beginning of their careers or built before they were born without losing any competitive edge.

I don't know precisely when I bought my first Rolleiflex, but it was somewhere around the turn of the '90s, when I got tired of the limitations in the primitive parallax correction system in my Mamiya C330, the first medium format camera I owned. The Rollei was a more elegant, compact piece of equipment, and it was much used by everyone I admired, from Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn to Richard Avedon and David Bailey.

I was also a committed Luddite in that first real decade of digital technology, home computers and the early internet, holding back the tide of transformation as long as I could in my studio full of gramophones and old records, vintage tailored suits, antiques, rotary dial phones and cast iron typewriters. It was a lifestyle I could manage as long as Macintosh computer systems for digital imaging cost as much as a new car and the first really usable digital cameras were somewhere on the other side of 9/11.

Helena Bonham Carter, Toronto, Jan. 1996

Robert Altman, Toronto, Sept. 1990

I had three Rolleis briefly, but my mainstay portrait cameras for most of the '90s were a pair of 75mm/3.5 models - a Schneider-Kreuznach Xenotar and a Zeiss Planar. They made their home in a very sturdy Pelican case with their lens hoods and a collection of bayonet filters, a Sekonic light meter and a cable release. Along with a lightweight Manfrotto tripod, they went with me into nearly every hotel room portrait session during that decade.

Most of my best portraits were taken with the Rolleis, either locked off on the tripod with a cable release or held close to my subject in a patch of nice window light. Working with the waist-level finder, with its dark, vignetted focusing screen and left-to-right reversed image, became second nature. The Rolleis were my babies, my comfort zone, my weapon of choice.

Their one major flaw was a minimum focusing distance of around three and a half feet, but that could be overcome with a close-up set - a pair of bayonet mount lenses, one for the taking lens and one with parallax correction for the viewing lens. If Irving Penn didn't have a problem with the slight distortion they created (very visible in my portrait of Robert Altman, above) then I wasn't going to complain, and I made them part of my shooting style.

If my Bronica SQ studio camera was a precision instrument, the Rolleis were like paintbrushes, and I always felt much more creative with them. They inspired me to do outlandish things, like the year or two I spent shooting a favorite local band with them, eschewing the fast shutter speeds and telephoto lenses most concert photographers favour for wild blurs and multiple exposures on the big, square negative of the Rollei.

Pure, Toronto, Oct. 1990

Most of all, I adored the square format of the Rollei, and found composing in it intuitive and satisfying. I didn't really feel at home with digital cameras until very recently, when I switched to the Fuji X series, which allows me to frame and shoot in the 1:1 ratio of the Rollei. I'll even use the tilting rear LCD screen on my Fujis like a waist-level viewfinder, swinging them around like the Rollei when I'm doing candids and street photography.

When editorial portraiture hit the rocks at the end of the '90s, I turned to my Rolleis for comfort, taking them out into the parks and streets and in my luggage when I traveled. Without a studio or steady clients, I went back to groping for that elusive image of the world I'd had in my mind's eye ever since my mom bought me a Kodak Instamatic for Christmas, long before I ever imagined anyone made a living taking photos.

High Park, Toronto, 1999

Hotel Place Bonaventure, Montreal, 2000

It goes without saying that I could never part with my pair of Rolleis after all we've been through together, and they still reside in their Pelican case, as if waiting for me to take them along the next hotel room portrait session.

I did dust off my "A" Rollei - the Xenotar - last year and took it along to my portrait shoot with the legendary conga player Candido Camero. It seemed appropriate - this was the sort of camera you'd have used to take his portrait back when he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and Stan Kenton.

To my dismay, I found it awkward to use - dim and difficult to focus and even counterintuitive. I had, in the decade-plus since I last ran a roll of film through it, lost the knack of the camera. The shoot was a success, but I still felt depressed when I got home and unloaded the Rollei. I felt like I had somehow let an old friend down.

Bronica SQ-a

GEAR CAN BE THE DOWNFALL OF A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER. Acquiring and upgrading it will siphon off the profits of anyone with a less than thriving business. Luckily, I invested in most of the gear I really needed early in the '90s, and used it hard pretty much until my business finally collapsed and the digital revolution made much of it obsolete - whichever came first. This post is the first of a trio devoted to the stalwarts of my camera gear during that decade.

Last week I featured three posts shot in my Parkdale studio during the heyday of my career as a portraitist. Looking them over, I realized that they were all shot with one camera - the Zenza Bronica SQ-a, a modular medium format camera system that I bought used when I realized that, as content as I might have been with my Rolleiflex TLRs, I needed something that had a) interchangeable film backs for quick reloading without switching cameras and b) a Polaroid back for testing exposures and (probably even more important) showing for client approval.

Savoy Cabbage, Parkdale, Oct. 1995

The Bronica was known as the "poor man's Hasselblad" and as a favorite of wedding photographers, and the one I acquired had seen some hard use. It worked beautifully, though, and while renting extra lenses could occasionally be a problem, I came to rely on it as I began experimenting with cross processing and refining my lighting.

I doubt if I would have felt as confident with my still life work without the Bronica's Polaroid back, or the prism I bought to make it function like a true SLR. The bellows style lens hood might have looked like overkill, but it had the great advantage of a slot for stacking filters, and I slowly built up a collection to help correct for colour shifts in cross-processing. Most of all, fully accessorized with bellows and prism, it looked like a serious piece of gear, which went a long way with with impressing dubious clients.

Jane Bunnett, Parkdale, 1996

Melissa Burns, Parkdale, 1996

It lived most of its life on a tripod, locked off and plugged into my Profoto strobe kit and a shutter release cable. I would never have considered the cost of the optional motor drive, as the quick wind grip was all I needed to advance film quickly when a shoot picked up speed. It was the machine at the heart of my studio system.

While I occasionally rented lenses - mostly the 50mm/3.5 in Vistek's rental inventory - I rarely needed more than the 80m/2.8 that came with the package I originally bought. It was no Zeiss Planar, but it was still an underrated chunk of glass, and I never had any complaint with the results, either when shooting album covers for clients like my friend Jane Bunnett (the shot above is an outtake from the session we did for her Cuban Piano Masters CD) or when I finally perfected my high key lighting with my pal Melissa as my model.

I probably haven't run a roll of film through my Bronica since the turn of the millennium. The case it's lived in since then is a time capsule now, complete with unexposed film, batteries and a box of Polaroid pack film. It was the epitome of a really useful piece of gear, but I doubt if I'll ever use it again, since there's almost nothing it does that my new Fuji XT-2 can't do as well. I'm a sentimental idiot, though, who has a hard time parting with gear that's served me well, so it will probably sit in its case, fondly remembered but unused, for the forseeable future.

 

Greg Dulli

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

CONTROL IS A WORD PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHERS USE A LOT. We spend years trying to learn how to achieve control over all the variables that can enter into a portrait shoot - technical ones such as lighting, but also personal ones that start with the subject and radiate outward to their setting and, in the case of celebrity portraiture, the often arbitrary demands of handlers and publicists and even an entourage.

The key, of course, is to grab as much control as you can and then, almost by intuition, realize when you have to let it go.

I've shared some of the results of my 1998 shoot with Greg Dulli before, but it's only as I've worked my way through the decade plus of work that preceded it that I've seen how I tried to exercise control over portrait sittings. The shoot with Dulli was a NOW cover, and I must have had some time to really plan, because I was able to not only prepare a backdrop but run my idea for the shoot past Dulli and his management - a rare (for me) example of not only pre-visualization but (reluctant) collaboration.

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

I became a big fan of Dulli's group, The Afghan Whigs, years earlier, around the time of their Gentlemen record. I was still recovering from a bad breakup and cycling my way through a series of sporadic and brief, mostly pointless relationships that slowly transformed me from maudlin and heartbroken to something on the verge of callous. Dulli became famous - notorious, even - for writing about bad relationships and unhappy, self-loathing men, embodying his characters in songs like "This Is My Confession," "What Jail Is Like" and "Debonair."

I listened to their records over and over.

I knew he liked movies, almost obsessively, and was trying to kickstart a career in Hollywood on and off. I wanted to do something graphic and literary, so I told his record company that I was going to cover a black backdrop with a series of phrases, repeated over and over - things like "I have an honest face," "I will be a good boy" and "The only woman I have ever loved is my mother." They sent the list along to Dulli's people, who got back to me and said that Greg was fine with it - as long as it was in Italian.

Luckily most of my best friends from high school were Italian, so I asked one of them to translate for me, and got to work writing the results in my best cursive on a roll of black seamless. When Dulli arrived for the shoot, I proudly pointed out that I had fulfilled my end of the bargain and indicated the backdrop hanging at the end of the studio. He turned to his handler from Sony, then laughed a bit ruefully.

"Italian?" he said. "Shit, I don't remember asking that at all."

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

Dulli sat down and gave the sort of performance I always hope to get from someone with at least a bit of a public persona. He snarled and leered, sulked and brooded. I kept him in front of the backdrop - All that work! Why waste it? - but changed film and tweaked lighting setups, moving from straight to cross-processed slide film and finished with black and white. I had the luxury of a subject who had to at least feign cooperation with the promise of a cover story, and the rare circumstance of a sitting I could design and stage manage far more than my customary five minutes (or less) in a hotel room.

This was exactly the sort of studio portraiture I had spent over a decade trying to do, but it came my way rarely and, looking back at my account books from the time, was getting even rarer. I've written recently that my memories of the last half of the '90s are often full of creative frustration, but the results of jobs like this prove that I might have felt stymied but, when circumstances were in my favour, I could still rise to the occasion.

I hope I enjoyed it. There wouldn't be many opportunities like this again for many, many years.

Dulli and the Whigs were touring the 1965 record at the time, and would break up not long afterward. Dulli already had another band, The Twilight Singers, waiting in the wings, and later in the '00s would perform with Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan as The Gutter Twins. I've liked almost everything he's done, right up to the new records by a reformed Whigs. He's kept at it despite the frustrations - he never really got that Hollywood thing going - and I can't help but admire his long access to whatever inspires him creatively. It offers hope to those of us relying on a second (or third) wind.