Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung, Toronto, Sept. 2000

THIS PHOTO SHOOT WAS BOTH THE END AND THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING. At the time I didn't have a clue that it would be significant, and when the results were published I considered it both a disappointment and a vindication. I'm posting it here as a watershed of sorts - a dividing line that very nearly cuts my career in two parts. Considering their significance, I wish these shots were a lot better, but to my eyes they're really nothing special.

I photographed actress Maggie Cheung at the film festival, where she was promoting Wong Kar-Wai's lush but enigmatic romance In The Mood For Love. The 2000 Toronto International Film Festival was unique for me - working with my fiancee, who was entertainment editor at the short-lived GTA Today, I'd picked a handful of films and interview subjects, in addition to a daily sidebar featuring festival personalities behind the scenes. We though it was a pretty good package, especially considering the meagre resources we had to pull it off.

Maggie Cheung, Toronto, Sept. 2000

I'd been a fan of Wong Kar-Wai since I saw a retrospective of his films a few years previous at the Cinematheque, and knew that I had to do something with In The Mood For Love when I saw it at the pre-festival press screenings. Cheung and Tony Leung play two neighbours in early '60s Hong Kong who discover their spouses are having an affair. Forced together by this infidelity, they discover an attraction to each other that, with a simmering intensity that builds for the whole film, they never actually consummate.

It's an utterly ravishing film, thanks to the cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bin, the exquisite costume design, the evocative soundtrack and especially Cheung and Leung, two fantastically attractive people. Cheung, in her high-collared tailored cheongsam dresses and piled-up hair, is a magnet for the camera in every shot, walking down the narrow nighttime streets of old Hong Kong or waiting in the shadows of one of the film's innumerable stairwells.

Maggie Cheung, Toronto, Sept. 2000

One of my shots of Cheung ended up on the cover, and thanks to her superstar status in the Chinese community it had the biggest newsstand circulation numbers of any issue of the paper so far. I felt vindicated for choosing Cheung as a feature interview, despite my disappointment at the shoot itself; either feeling rushed or intimidated, I didn't try as hard as I should have to get a really lovely portrait of Cheung.

I could blame the dim, difficult lighting in the room at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor, with its tiny windows (especially small compared to the Four Seasons Yorkville nearby) shaded by adjacent buildings. That would, however, be nothing but an excuse, as I would learn to work with the light in the Intercontinental a few years later, after the hotel superseded the Four Seasons, Sutton Place and Park Plaza to become the main film festival hotel for a decade.

I'm getting ahead of myself, however. This would, technically, be my last film festival for four years. I was assigned to shoot the film festival the following year, but it would be a disaster. For the opening weekend the paper - now a merger between GTA Today and the free daily it had been set up to compete with - lent me one of the new Nikon/Kodak DCS digital cameras, a big, clunky piece of gear that ran on proprietary software.

After shooting all weekend with the camera, I brought it back to the newsroom on Monday to have the paper's tech boffin download my images from the internal drive. He was gone for a worrying hour, and finally came back shaking his head. Everything was corrupted - the whole weekend had been a complete waste. The photo editor told me to go back to using my Canon, and that she'd set up a courier system to get my film to their darkroom every day.

That should have worked, but the next day was September 11, 2001. K and I watched the second tower fall on TV, then she headed to work early to help put out the next day's paper. I went to the press office at the Intercontinental where I was told that the festival would be on hold for the next few days. I sat in a big silent hotel banquet room with for an hour watching endless loops of the attack and its aftermath on CNN with a few dozen other journalists and festival workers. If I shot anything else at the festival in 2001, I have nothing in my files.

I wouldn't shoot another film festival for three years, and as far as I can tell I only did one other portrait shoot between 2000 and 2004. A few months after I shot Maggie Cheung I was offered a contract job at the free daily as the interim photo editor while the regular editor went on medical leave. This turned into nearly eight years of full time newsroom work, first as photo editor, then as a critic, columnist, feature writer and photographer, all while becoming a father (twice.) It would end badly, but we'll get to that later.

Joel Schumacher

Joel Schumacher, Toronto, Sept. 2000

DIRECTOR JOEL SCHUMACHER ARRIVED AT THE FILM FESTIVAL with a new film and a reputation that, today, you might call problematic. Perhaps that's why I chose to interview him for GTA Today, the newly-launched free daily that had hired me to provide daily festival coverage. He was known as the man who had "ruined" the Tim Burton Batman franchise - though to my mind he had only taken the camp nihilism baked into Burton's films and run with it. (I wasn't a fan of the series, with or without Burton.)

He was also the man who'd made Falling Down, a film that was developing a cult following on the right side of the political spectrum - a fact that wasn't ignored, and had become another black mark against him. I wasn't an enormous fan of his films - he seemed very much a journeyman director, with all the good and bad that entails - but I admired how he was both controversial and successful.

Joel Schumacher, Toronto, Sept. 2000

I found him charming and candid, and very open about his reputation in and outside Hollywood. He was at the festival with Tigerland, a small film - made on a $10 million budget, a fraction of Schumacher's usual productions - that would end up well-reviewed while losing money at the box office. It was a film about the Vietnam War, set entirely stateside at the U.S. infantry training base in Fort Polk, Louisiana, and as a fan of the genre I ended up having a very pleasant talk with Schumacher.

I shot him in the little corner of the rooms in the old Four Seasons in Yorkville created by the duct work that ran up through the building. I'd end up relying on that spot quite a lot in a few years while doing lightning fast portrait shoots at the festival; it provided a nice soft spot of light near the hotel's big, bright windows, while giving subjects something to physically use, leaning into or out of the angled wall.

With a minimum of direction, I caught Schumacher looking mostly insouciant and occasionally pensive - the two expressions that seemed to sum him up that day. These are clean, simple portraits, meant to slot into a column or two of a tabloid newspaper page, but with very little of the style that I'd spent the previous decade striving to create.

 

Ben Kingsley

Sir Ben Kingsley, Toronto, Sept. 2000

THE NEW CENTURY SAW ME SHOOTING WHAT I THINK WAS MY 25TH FILM FESTIVAL. Fully freelance now after more than a decade, I was loathe to lose access to the event that put more celebrities in front of my camera than anything else, especially after leaving NOW magazine for eye weekly, which had far less interest in shooting movie stars or directors.

Luckily, my girlfriend - fiancée by now - had taken a job as the entertainment editor at GTA Today, a free daily launched by the Toronto Star to compete with the European-based free daily that the Star was supposed to partner with before the deal somehow went sour. This was the opening salvo in Toronto's "Free Daily War," which intensified when the Sun papers launched their own competition, FYI Toronto, at the same time.

It's all ancient history now, but the upshot is that K hired me to cover the film festival as both writer and photographer, submitting a page of content every day that I'd pursue on my own. It was the first time any kind of nepotism had actually benefited me, and when I saw a British film called Sexy Beast at the press screenings before the festival, I knew that I had to try to book something with Ben Kingsley, the movie's big star.

Sir Ben Kingsley, Toronto, Sept. 2000

Kingsley had been famous for years thanks to his title role in Gandhi - only his second film role - but I'd become a fan with the film version of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, which came out the year afterward, and is criminally unavailable on DVD, it seems. He played the heavy in Sexy Beast - Don Logan, a psychopathic, Mephistophelean London gangster intent on dragging Ray Winstone's Gal from his happy retirement on the Costa del Sol back to England for one last job.

I loved the film from its first shot - Winstone's Gal sunning his leathery hide poolside while "Peaches" by the Stranglers grinds away threateningly on the soundtrack. Pre-festival buzz for the film was intense, but I was somehow able to get an interview and shoot with Kingsley. It felt like a coup, and proof that the paper - and my fiancée - were right to trust me with the job.

Sir Ben Kingsley, Toronto, Sept. 2000

I was, frankly, intimidated by Kingsley, and further unnerved when he sat down in front of my camera with a diffidently blank expression. After shooting a roll of colour, I realized he wasn't going to give me a lot, so I fell back on my standard gambit of coming in really, really close when I loaded some black and white film into the camera.

In hindsight, Kingsley's unwillingness - or perhaps even inability - to put on a performance for my camera reminds me of why he's always put me in mind of Alec Guinness, another actor who could create and inhabit indelible characters onscreen, but admitted that he was personally a bit of a cipher, only able to access charisma when he was on the job, so to speak.

I have struggled for years to find a way to get the most out of these negatives. In hindsight, I wish I'd used a longer lens instead of what appears to be my usual 35mm on the Canon; even a medium wide lens that close up gives the face a faintly comic distortion that I'm still not sure works here, and it has taken several passes through Photoshop over the years to create just the right narrow depth of field that I'd have gotten more easily with a 50 or 85mm lens - both of which I had in my bag that day.

The truth is that I was experiencing a crisis of confidence at the time, one that would only increase with the other shoots I did at the film festival that year, and would grow steadily worse with the next few years, which were full of big changes.

Spain

Avila, June 2000

MY CAREER AS A TRAVEL WRITER AND PHOTOGRAPHER begins nearly twenty years ago, in Spain, with a very definite failure. I was very underemployed when a novelist friend told me about a travel junket he was going on, and said that he'd try to get me on the trip. He was sure I could sell the story and photos later, and I was eager to return to Spain after going there with K two years earlier.

It was a strange trip. My novelist friend managed to get Bob, another buddy of his, on the junket, and the three of us formed an unruly group all week, made a foursome by Vincent, a writer from La Presse in Montreal. A few days into the trip my cat Nato died. I got the news from my novelist friend over breakfast one hungover morning in Burgos; he had been told by his wife, a friend of K, on the phone the night before.

The effort of keeping my grief in check coloured the whole trip, and probably explains why the photos I came back with seem so elegaic and mournful. In any case, they weren't the kind of work with which I could likely sell a travel story package, and in the end I never did. This is the first time any of these photos have been published anywhere.

Santa Maria la Real, Najera, June 2000

Silos, June 2000

Spain, June 2000

Puerta Santa Maria, Burgos, June 2000

My guidebook for the trip was The Cities of Spain, a frequently splenetic travelogue published in 1925 and written by Edward Hutton, an Englishman and aesthete whose marked preference for Italy is hard to ignore in his dismissive commentary about the decrepitude of Spain and what he often regards as its second rate art and architecture. It was a strange book to use as a guide, but it was amusing to compare the backward, pre-Franco country he described with the very modern one we drove through.

Between Silos and Burgos, June 2000

I kept a detailed diary of the trip at the time, but neglected to make careful notes of what I was shooting day by day. As a result, most of my black and white shots are hard to give a precise location to, nearly two decades later. It's worth noting that while my subject matter was decidedly mournful - cloisters and sarcophagi and picturesque ruins - it wouldn't have been a drawback to hand in black and white photos for a travel story back when most newspapers only used colour for front pages.

Spain, June 2000

Carlos Serre Winery, Haro, June 2000

Spain, June 2000

The trip began in Madrid, where half of our group had lost their luggage on the flight over, and moved on to Logrono and Najera, Rioja, Burgos, Silos, Vallodolid, Salamanca, Avila and back to Madrid. The theme was wine, religion and Cervantes, in varying proportions, and by the end of the trip our little group of writers and photographers were well and truly sick of each other, and of our little (usually) drunken quartet in particular.

Old Cathedral, Salamanca, June 2000

La Vieja Bodega, Casalarreina, June 2000

Without a client or experience, I came back with very few vistas or beauty shots and a lot of gloomy photos of medieval stonework and ancient detritus. I can't imagine how hard it would have been to sell the story, even if I'd found an interested client - which I never did. The low point was probably the bus strike that left us stranded in Avila, and the train trip back to Madrid, where I came down with a 24-hour flu. I sweated through the sheets in my hotel room while the boys went out for one last piss-up on the town.

Colegio de San Gregoria, Valladolid, June 2000

With the trip over, I arranged to delay my flight back home for a couple of days so I could visit our friends John and Rosa in Barcelona. I was met by John at the train station, finally sober and healthy, and he took me on a tour of the town, where two old markets and several apartment buildings had been demolished and excavated by archaeologists. I slipped through a hole in the fencing around the Mercat de Santa Caterina to take my last, appropriately desolate photos from the trip.

Mercat de Santa Caterina, Barcelona, June 2000

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.

Still Life

Still life, Parkdale, 1998

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE WE HAD TO MOVE OUT OF MY PARKDALE STUDIO, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I set up my strobe lights to do a series of still lifes. My reasoning - or excuse - was that I wanted to try to get work shooting for the food and lifestyle magazines that seemed to be beating the trends and thriving in an otherwise struggling publishing market. (Food and lifestyle still manages to hold on to this day, for reasons I've never understood.)

I'd been collecting handmade papers and other bits and pieces for a while, finding the best stuff in the markets and herbal medicine stores in Chinatown. With Kay acting as my prop stylist, pulling things from her own wardrobe and the stamp collection she'd begun as a kid, we worked for a couple of days shooting the sort of tabletop work that I would have loved to have been assigned.

Still life, Parkdale, 1998

I obviously had a thing for dried fish. I loved the look of them on their own, but it was Kay's idea to have them pouring out of her old pearl-covered clutch purse, and to add the '30s vintage Canadian royal family stamps (that's Lilibet and Margaret and their dad, for fans of The Crown) that makes those shots look like some sort of strange letter. The shot with my grandfather's old hammer and the cloves just suggested itself as we were standing around looking for one more setup.

I had more fun doing this work than almost anything I can remember shooting in the studio. I would have happily spent the rest of my career doing weird still lifes for cooking magazines, but the fact that these twenty year old photos remain an isolated creative moment in my career is evidence how that didn't ever happen. One day, perhaps, when my knees have gone and my mobility is shot, I'll find a space to do work like this until my eyes give out.

Still life, Parkdale, 1998

Pyrex

My mother's Pyrex bowls, Parkdale, 1998

THESE PYREX BOWLS BELONGED TO MY MOTHER. They usually sit in a glass-fronted cupboard in our kitchen. We don't use them much, mostly because I'm afraid they might get damaged or broken.

I don't have many of my mother's things. There wasn't much, in the end, once we'd sold the house. There are a bunch of photos and negatives, some letters my dad wrote to her during the war, a few envelopes of paperwork, these bowls and a wooden spoon.

My mother's wooden spoon, Parkdale, 1994

It's the bowls and the spoon that remind me most of her. She wasn't the world's greatest cook, though my sister says that she was much better when she was healthier, before I was born. I mostly remember her using these for baking - the odd cake and a lot of pies, apple mostly, and rhubarb. I remember the ringing sound of her electric mixer grinding against the bottom of the bowls while she made batter.

She'd been gone for a decade when I took these out from under the sink in my Parkdale studio to photograph them as part of a still life project I did, in the final months we lived in the place. Pyrex had become fashionable and collectible, thanks mostly to Martha Stewart, and I had a simple and pleasing composition in mind, perhaps something I could put in my portfolio to scare up work at the lifestyle magazines.

My mother's Pyrex bowls, Parkdale, 1998

I shot them in clean, bright high key light, sitting on my favorite tabletop setting - three barn board planks I'd bought from an antique shop down the street and screwed together. I'd shot the spoon four years earlier on the same weathered wood; I still have it today, leaning against the basement wall, gathering dust behind the furnace.

Working with my girlfriend (now wife,) we set-dressed them simply with a big ripe lemon and some blood oranges in their wax paper wrapping. I love the way the light makes the Pyrex glass glow from within. I'll probably leave them to one of my daughters one day, but I'll probably put off deciding who gets them for as long as possible. I'd hate it if they got split up after all this time.

My mother's Pyrex bowls, Parkdale, 1998